Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

Why No One Gives To The Corcoran

The art world has been in such a tizzy about the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and a few other things, that we’ve forgotten about the other crazy museum world situation: The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. That was the June topic of the month.

But the Washington Post is keeping up the pressure, sort of, so that trustees do not realize their nutso goal of moving out of the District of Columbia, which has a big tourist business, and into the suburbs of the city, which do not. As I wrote when the news forst broke, the Corcoran has an abysmal track record at raising money. The Post now finds out that’s because it never asks — ok, rarely asks. A few choice quotes from an article published last week.

“I haven’t gotten a phone call from anyone at the Corcoran in five years,” said Tony Podesta, a lobbyist who, with his wife, Heather, is a leading art collector. He estimates that the couple has donated 150 works to the Corcoran over the years. “We still occasionally give them works of art, although it’s a little bit nerve-racking not to know what the future holds.”

And:

Years ago, we went to the Corcoran Ball,” the gallery’s key annual fundraiser, said Wayne Reynolds, former chairman of Ford’s Theatre and husband of millionaire philanthropist Catherine Reynolds. “I’ve never been asked back that I know of. I haven’t really been approached [for a contribution].

And:

One arts patron with millions to dispose of said, “I haven’t been asked to give.” And, when the patron’s organization has rented the Corcoran for elegant gatherings, unlike at other venues that take the opportunity to market themselves, “I’ve never met anybody from the Corcoran. Nobody is there to tell me how great they are. I don’t think they’re really in fundraising mode.”

We knew this board was bad, and we knew the fundraising staff was lame, but quotes like this indicate that the Corcoran probably needs a house-cleaning first at the board level and then among the staff.

As for LA-MOCA, Paul Schimmel posted a plea on his Facebook page this morning: “oh my -give it a rest ! It’s summer- give the board a chance to think about the future as a group.”

I’m not sure I agree with giving it a rest, but I do wish the board would think.

Las Vegas Does Spend on Culture — Just Not Art Museums

The photo was pretty astonishing, and so was the pricetag: $470 million. As I caught up on newspapers I’d missed while I was away last week, I came upon an article in last Sunday’s New York Times headlined Las Vegas Becomes As Much Liszt as Liberace, illustrated by a gorgeous interior photograph of the city’s new performing arts center.

I’ve written here several times about the lack of an art museum in Las Vegas, a city of 1.8 million people and plenty of tourists. The Las Vegas Art Museum closed for lack of interest in early 2009; a proposed contemporary art museum was abandoned even while the designated sculpture park sat empty; plenty of money was going instead to two museums about the Mob in Vegas; and the Southern Nevada Museum was getting just a handful of visitors a day — ok, two to three handfuls.  (See also here.)

So the idea of a center for classical music in this city that lacked one caught my attention.

After my posts on the museum situation in Las Vegas, commenters had often written in to make excuses, some valid. Last June, following the post about the Southern Nevada Museum, one commenter noted that Las Vegas residents are often transients, aiming to move in a few years and unwilling therefore to invest in cultural activities in the community. Another said visitors to Las Vegas are not interested in art. And another wrote:

It’s hard to get public support for the arts in Nevada. NV is a state with little public funding of ANYTHING, even when the economy is good….

How to square that with the Times article, which included these passages:

When the Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened in Las Vegas in March, Jennifer Hudson was on the program and Neil Patrick Harris was the master of ceremonies. But it was Joshua Bell, the classical violinist, who drew the most applause from the homegrown audience, cheering what seemed a moment of arrival for a city whose cultural association is more likely to be Liberace than Liszt.

…For more than 25 years, Las Vegas has laid claim to being the entertainment capital of the nation. But it has presented a very specific kind of entertainment — elaborate, mass-market, big-ticket showstoppers like Cirque du Soleil, Elton John, Celine Dion and Siegfried & Roy. And it has been aimed at a very specific audience: tourists who come to the Strip, as opposed to the people who live here.

Las Vegas had the unwelcome distinction of being the largest city in the nation without a major performing arts center.

Sounds familiar. So how did this supposed cultural wasteland get a $470 million performing arts center?

…A delegation of Las Vegas civic leaders toured concert halls around the world — La Scala in Milan, the Opera House in Budapest, Carnegie Hall in New York — in search of inspiration as they conceived what was in effect their dream hall….

The financing of the project suggests the civic hunger: $150 million was donated from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a philanthropic organization in Nevada whose president is Fred W. Smith, a retired newspaper executive and for whom the center is named. Fifty-seven families and individuals wrote checks of at least $1 million. Another $150 million is to be raised through a tax on airport car rentals, approved by the State Legislature….

The Smith Center looks beautiful — check out the slide show run by the Los Angeles Times last March, as well as the photos here.

So why can the performing arts raise money but not the visual arts? I suspect one reason is the edifice complex: donors will give to build a building, especially if some hall, some rehearsal space, some staircase, is named for them. But why the rental tax for this and not for art? Where is the hunger for great visual art?

Of course it remains to be seen if the likes of Joshua Bell and Yo-Yo Ma continue to sell out, or whether the Smith, like some other performing arts venues, is forced to go pop. I’m rooting for classical. Perhaps a successful track record will convince civic leaders that a city as big as Las Vegas must also elevate its visual art offerings.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Las Vegas Weekly (top) and Las Vegas Sun (bottom)

 

 

 

Wow! That Was Fast, Worcester

I had no idea yesterday, when I posted about the campaign by the Worcester Art Museum to open its Salisbury Street doors, that the goal was so close to being met.

But just now, I received an email from the museum that the $60,000 goal was not only attained but exceeded. Here’s what the museum wrote:

With the Salisbury doors having been closed for the past several years (other than on weekends and for special events), the museum initiated a grassroots campaign to raise the $60,000 necessary to re-open the entrance to the public on a full-time basis for at least the next two years. In fact, the Museum exceeded this goal raising a total of $94,113 with a total of 321 gifts ranging from less than $25-$500. [Boldface mine.]

This shows several things.

  • Directors can galvanize giving, even in small amounts, by finding and defining a cause. It’s a lot easier to do that when people know exactly where their money is going and agree with the goal.
  • Direct appeals by the director, getting upclose and personal, succeed.
  • Worcester director Matthias Waschek knows how to create excitement. Today, the museum staged a ceremonial reopening of the doors in presence of officials and community leaders “including: Senator Harriette Chandler; Malcolm Rogers – Director, Museum of Fine Arts Boston;  Anita Walker – Executive Director, Massachusetts Cultural Coalition;   Lisa Simmons – Director of PR, MA Office of Travel and Tourism; Councilor Konnie Lukes, and Erin Williams, Cultural Development Officer, City of Worcester.” Pretty good turnout.
  • The museum knows how to pay it back: Waschek announced “that admission to the museum will be free to the public through the end of August.”  It’s usually $14.
  • AND: “To celebrate the announcement, the museum will host a free summer kick-off celebration on Saturday, June 23 from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with live entertainment, food and art activities from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.”

Other museums: there’s a lesson here, more than one, actually.

Coverage in the Boston Globe is here, and in the Worcester Telegram, it’s here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Worcester Telegram

 

Giving USA Shows Where The Money Is — And Is Going

Despite the crazy, seesawing stock market, philanthopic giving is growing for the second consecutive year, according to the 2011 Giving USA report. Last year, an estimated 117 million U.S. households, 12 million corporations, 99,000 estates and 76,000 foundations gave money to charities, its annual study found — a total of $298.42 billion. That’s up 4% versus 2010, when the total was $286.91, but still shy of the record $309.7 billion given away in 2007.

The total fell to $290.9 billion in 2008 and again to $278.6 billion in 2009. Now, the rate of increase is slow, but at least it’s growing.

International affairs got the biggest boost and is the fastest-growing philanthropic sector, but funding of arts/culture/humanitites also increased last year, by an estimated 4.1% to an estimated total of $13.12 billion, which represents 4% of all charitable donations.

Giving Institute chief  Thomas W. Mesaros suggested that the appropriate reaction to these numbers was “a subdued sigh of relief.” But Patrick M. Rooney, the executive director of the study’s co-sponsor, the Center on Philanthropy,  noted that “In the past two years charitable giving has experienced its second slowest recovery following any recession since 1971.”

Not so good. Since individual giving as a percentage of disposable personal income remained at 1.9 percent in 2011, the same as in 2009 and 2010, we need personal income to grow, which isn’t really happening.

There are a few additional, relevant numbers for arts groups: Individuals comprise the largest portion of giving by far: it rose 3.9 percent in 2011 and represents 73 percent of total giving — $217.79 billion. Plus, the press release said, “When you add together what is contributed to philanthropy through American households, bequests and family foundations, that piece of the
total $298.42 billion estimated giving “pie” for 2011 comes to 88 percent.”

By contrast, giving by foundations represented 14 percent of total giving.

So why museums let foundations push them to do things they don’t want to do — which so many admit privately — continues to be beyond me.

 

 

 

 

 

“Tear Open Those Doors” In Worcester

One of the most ridiculous tropes I hear from museum people all the time revolves around museum architecture, mainly old-style Beaux Arts buildings; any old building, actually. They say some variation of “young people find them intimidating.”

Please. Young people as group are bold and take all sorts of risks older people won’t take — why would they find beautiful buildings intimidating? Such lazy thinking has led to many a poor “solution,” such as building new entrances on old museums or closing the old entrances when a new building presents an opporunity to do so. But we won’t name names.

Rather, this post is about the attempts by a museum director, Matthias Waschek (at left). who recently took over as director of the Worcester Art Museum, to reopen the lovely building’s front doors, which open onto it “beautiful Renaissance Court, a trademark of our Museum.”

Those doors, known as the Salisbury Street entrance, weren’t closed because they were intimidating, it’s true. They were closed (except on weekends and for special events) to save money. But Waschek says that they provide the museum with a “WOW factor.” The home page of the museum’s website  features a plea, including a video, by him asking members to “join forces with me and open the doors!” Online he says:

The $60,000 needed to open the doors would be very difficult for one, two, or even ten of us to raise – but this can be easily done if each member gives just $25. This is less than the cost of a dinner out, or two movie tickets on a Friday night.

May I count on you? I would love to add you to the list of supporters for this special initiative.

Although the museum’s finances haven’t substantially improved, he says in the video, showing the Renaissance court inside, he thinks it’s doable for the community. Fantastic: I would do one more thing — have one of those thermometer devices showing contributions toward the goal, so that all can see. After getting “an overwhelming response” from members, according to the Worcester Scene, Waschek has taken the campaign to the broader public.  

Waschek has a background in modern and contemporary art; he has a PhD in French surrealism and he ran the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis before moving to Massachusetts. But when I spoke with him in January for an article about acquisitions endowments, he was an enthusiastic evangelist for his new museum, all of it. Attendance there is just 45,000 a year, despite a terrific collection, and he knows he must do something — opening the front doors is a symbolic and meaningful initiative, especially if he galvanizes support throught this campaign. Good for him.

Now back to that false intimidation excuse — framing something incorrectly leads to the wrong solution. Waschek is showing what a real problem is — that non-visitors think museums are boring. That’s why he mentions the WOW factor. That can start at the door, even of an old building, whose architecture usually has nothing to do with it.  

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum