Your faithful reporter can not follow up on the summer meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors, which I wrote about here several days ago. The agenda, we knew, included plans to talk about a new strategic plan, the economy, the need for better statistics, deaccessioning, and other things. I made a few suggestions for topics needing discussion, and so did some commenters.
Janet Landay, AAMD’s executive director, spoke with me before the meeting, and I told her
that I’d check back afterwards. Today, I tried — but she declined to talk. Her response to my email, trying to set up a good time, mentioned a “fairly detailed” press release posted on the website and included the comment that “there were no concrete results.” In a second email, specifically asking about a statistics effort, so we all can learn where museums stand more quickly, she confirmed that “we continue those discussions but there’ve been no decisions.”
Well, I asked, should I check then with Michael Conforti, AAMD’s current president, from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute? “Neither Michael nor I are going to have anything to say about the meeting beyond what’s in the press release.”
You can read the press release here. The only thing we know now that we did not know before is who spoke to the group. On the economy, a panel included Donald Marron, former head of Paine Webber and MoMA trustee, Glenn Lowry, MoMA director, and Mimi Gates, former director of the Seattle Art Museum. Johnnetta Cole, recently appointed head of the National Museum of African Art, spoke about diversity.
Museum directors have no obligation to talk to me or anyone else about internal matters, but I’m still disappointed — about their lack of openness and especially about the lack of those “concrete results.”