Here’s a story in the Guardian about the current status of the UK’s arts building boom, funded in part by their public lottery fund a few years back. Many of the new facilities are struggling to find audiences to fill their glorious new spaces, and stumbling for income streams to keep the lights on.
It’s not a problem unique to Great Britain. In the U.S., as well, the great economic boom of the past decade led to lots of big ideas and even bigger cultural facilities. Many are doing just fine, thank you. But dozens of new facilities are still under construction, wondering where the money to run them will come from.
One striking recent example is the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, which closed its doors in September, less than two years after it entered a brand new $23-million facility (last week, a few more board members and a major donor jumped ship).
It raises a dumb question that keeps spinning in the back of my head. Is a cultural facility an asset or a liability? I don’t mean metaphorically, but actually…meaning how do you put it in the accounts? In the corporate world, facilities are booked as assets (here’s a definition)…they can be bought and sold, can be used to improve efficiency and financial stability. But in the world of nonprofit cultural organizations, the same structure may be booked as an asset, but behaves as a liability (‘a financial obligation, debt, claim, or potential loss’). It’s a future, longterm, ongoing expense commitment by an organization. It’s difficult or impossible to sell, since the facilities are designed for a very specific purpose. And the mission-driven nature of the organization often precludes the money-making choices for its use (as they should).
I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have built them. I’m just wondering if this asset/liability concept, borrowed from for-profit corporate strategy, has lost something in translation to the nonprofit world. Could it be one more example of a business metaphor that we never quite thought through?
If so, let’s project forward: If cultural facilities are really liabilities, than we’ve spent a decade in the U.S. and internationally building a massive debt stretching into the distant future. I’m guessing the Bellevue story, and the stories from the U.K., will be a common theme of the next five years. Or am I wrong?
