Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

A New Model Of Museum Financing

MonroeI will have more to say on the subject in a subsequent post, but for now I would just like to link to an article I have written that will be published in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal. It’s a Cultural Conversation with Dan L. Monroe, the executive director of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

In it, Monroe outlines his thinking behind the museum’s current $650 million fundraising campaign, the bulk of which will go to PEM’s endowment. He has challenged the conventional wisdom that it’s too hard to raise big money for endowments.

Ok, his thinking may not work for all museums, but my article is definitely worth a read for anyone who cares about the financial stability of museums.

More coming, but not tonight…

 

 

Will There Be Another Round of Admission Hikes?

The Art Institute of Chicago is digging deeper into our pockets: yesterday the Chicago Park District board of commissioners approved a hike in admissions and a bigger jump for non-Illinois residents. As of Feb. 1, general adult admission for instaters will rise from $16 to $18, and out-of-staters like me will pay $23, up from $18.

The Chicago Tribune quotes AIC director Douglas Druick saying:

If we didn’t have to do it, we wouldn’t do it. It was felt that this was reasonable, not too onerous and signaled our commitment to the city and to the state by putting more of the burden on out-of-state tourist visitors.Druick

It seems like only yesterday that the last increase occurred, but apparently it was 2009.

A later story in the Tribune said that the AIC currently gets 4% of its operating revenues from admissions. Averages for that figure are all squishy, if you ask me — they vary partly because the universe of museums that report each year to the Association of Art Museum Directors is not the same every year, nor are reporting practices of museums universal. But that seems low to me for a museum like the IAC, which should have a decent tourist trade (or should have. Whether they’ll come at $23 is another question.)

To me, this all means that the new modern wing is not living up to its initial promise. I am confident guessing that the 4% figure was higher before the new wing increased expenses. Did that outreach to the park bring more paying customers? Or just people who came the ramp, looked around and descended again?

I’m a realist: museums have to maximize revenues. That doesn’t always mean increasing admissions, and I do hope this doesn’t backfire.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

Lessons For Many From Fort Ticonderoga

Historical homes and other places have been losing their appeal to visitors for years. So, the other day, when I saw something positive about Fort Ticonderoga, which was in pretty dire straits a few years ago, I stopped to look. 

FortTiconderogaA quick recap: In August, 2008, the Fort was set to celebrate its 100th anniversary (for visitors) when it lost the support of its biggest donor, Forrest Mars, of candy fame, owed money,  and set out to sell some of its collections to cover the debt. As the New York Times reported at the time:

The fort had a shortfall of $2.5 million for the [new] education center. The president of the board that governs the fort, which is owned by a nonprofit organization, said in an internal memo this summer that the site would be ”essentially broke” by the end of the year. The memo proposed a half-dozen solutions, including the sale of artwork from the group’s collection.

”The fort is facing a financial crisis, which puts its very existence in question,” the president, Peter S. Paine Jr., said in the memo, which first surfaced in local newspapers last month.

Instead, the fort received a lifeline, a new executive director, and with an $85,000 grant from the Perkin Fund (a Massachusetts family foundation) hired a consultant named PGAV Destinations in July, 2011 to develop a three-phase master plan. It’s that group that recently reported that its “phase one”

created a 38% rise in both memberships and program revenue; 18% growth in both admissions revenue and annual giving; an 8% increase in field trip revenue and a 6% increase in paid attendance in 2012 over 2011.

For a little context: The Fort drew aome 75,000 visitors in 2010 — it did not say how many were paid. Nor could I find in its annual report the baselines for membership, donors, etc. So, while those markers sound good, and are going in the right direction, it’s not clear how much progress has been made. General admission is $17.50 — very steep — although residents of Ticonderoga have free access.

That is one thing PGAV changed, according to the press release: As one of its “six essential ‘Quick Wins’ (“easily implementable steps that involved little-to-no capital expenditures”), the Fort altered pricing (but gave no details). It also added special events and tours  and discontinued “superfluous free programs.” Hill said: “The quick wins not only provided immediate sources of revenue, but they also provided rich opportunities to experiment with new strategies that will inform later steps in the comprehensive plan.”

What is the lesson here for other cultural or historical venues — including art museums? (After all, Fort Ti’s Education Center is home to  The Art of War: Ticonderoga as Experienced through the Eyes of America’s Great Artists — “Fifty works from the Fort’s extensive art collection are brought together for the first time in a single exhibition, to present a visual history of Fort Ticonderoga. Fort Ticonderoga helped give birth to the Hudson River school of American art with Thomas Cole’s pivotal 1826 work, Gelyna, or a View Near Ticonderoga, the museum’s most important 19th-century masterpiece to be featured in the exhibit.”)

Sadly, sometimes such practical steps are hard to make without outside impetus from a consultant — which is often wasteful. Organizations know what to do — they just can’t do it. (See: the Corcoran.)

And also, sometimes, it takes a crisis to galvanize action. That’s also a sad comment — but human nature.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Fort Ticonderoga

 

 

Michael Govan And Affinity Groups: He’s Right to Raise Fees

Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been taking heat in the last few days about his decision to increase the membership dues for various art groups at the museum. I think he’s right to do so…though I am not sure he and the museum have put forth their entire case.

The outcry began last week, when the museum hiked yearly dues for members of 10 support councils to $1,000, plus a $250–level museum membership they must now buy. In the past, the dues for these groups, organized around art categories, like photography, decorative arts, European art, etc., were as low as $400 a year. The new fee was long overdue, Govan told the Los Angeles Times, adding: “This change will bring us more in line with other museums nationally,” he said, citing higher dues at other museums in Los Angeles, Boston and New York. “To have an affinity group that has direct access to curators and artists, even at the new number, you could call it a bargain.”

Members begged to differ. One interpreted the increase as a play to only large donors on the part of the museum, whereas Govan reportedly said at a meeting that “the changes [are] part of a larger rethinking of the role of these groups. They were instrumental in fundraising in the museum’s early years before it even had a development office. Now, he said, it was important to make the system ‘simpler’ and ‘more professional.’ ” The article continued:

The plan includes dismantling the boards of the councils, leaving only a chairperson in place to help the department curator and development staff organize events. He also described a change in what the councils would do: organizing public events instead of private parties and focusing “more on education and the sharing of enthusiasm than acquisitions.”

The next day, the LATimes reported that “Diana Gutman, chairwoman of the Art Museum Council at LACMA, says the group’s 40-member board has voted unanimously to stop volunteering at the museum next year” because of the change. And, the story said:

Founded in 1952 before LACMA even had its Wilshire campus, the Art Museum Council is LACMA’s oldest support group. Early on it acquired major paintings by Josef Albers, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian and Stuart Davis. It also commissioned an Alexander Calder mobile for the LACMA campus — called “Hello Girls” as a nod to the women on the council. One of its leading fundraisers was a yearly “Art and Architecture” tour taking visitors into collectors’ home.

Gutman ended her email by saying, “Our group is determined to stay together and to find another avenue that will allow us to continue to support emerging artists, beginning collectors and the art community at large. Our 60-year legacy of service to LACMA [can be] seen in the massive number of works we purchased that hang on the museum walls and the magnificent Calder mobile that cheerfully greets visitors.”

Govan has a PR problem on his hands, and he needs to take care of it. I think he may need to expand on his reasons — the idea of professionalizing development (Arnold Lehman at the Brooklyn Museum did something similar, you’ll recall) — may be true, but there’s a more compelling rationale, I am guessing.

My discussions with other museum directors suggests that these affinity groups — with internal parties and behind-the-scenes events, among other things — cost the museum more than they bring in. They require the time of curators. In the end, the museum ends up subsidizing them, rather than the other way around. Yet these members are better-heeled than the general public; they shouldn’t be getting the subsidy.

Govan may have to share more numbers with the public to make that case convincingly, and he may be reluctant to do it. Too bad.

 

 

 

Arts Funding: A Millage Isn’t The Answer

In August, when the Detroit Institute of Arts won support in its three surrounding counties for a tiny property tax — called a millage — to support its operations for 10 years, a lot of people hailed it as the start of a new funding model for the arts.

It wasn’t and it won’t be, imho. I thought then, and now, that the DIA/Detroit was a special case. Nearby in Ann Arbor, residents agreed with me on election day last week: they voted down a millage to fund a comprehensive public art program.

True, public art is not the same as any museum, let alone the glorious DIA. But I doubt many museums could duplicate the special circumstances the DIA found itself in — which was all part of the winning rationale among voters.

As the Michigan Daily reports with respect to Ann Arbor:

The millage was an alternative to the current public arts funding program Percent for Art, which has encountered difficulty in providing public arts projects under heavy restrictions that limit displays to permanent art installations on specified government properties….

The tax would have cost the average homeowner about $11 a month and was expected to bring in about $450,000 annually. The new model for funding included a mill tax model for funding public arts in Ann Arbor. Instead of the current system, which takes the funds from different departments in the city, the funding for projects would come directly from the residents.

In late August, the Ann Arbor City Council decided to put the millage on the November ballot, undoubtedly eyeing the success in Detroit. Ann Arbor residents had apparently complained about the percent-for-art model, enacted in 2007, which stipulates that any capital project for the city must set aside one percent of its funding for public art — much like other cities.

I can’t say I’m happy about any of this — except that it reinstates a little reality in the discussions about arts funding. Personally, I don’t think the public will support a direct tax for the arts in anything but unusual circumstances.