Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Museum Funding-Fundraising

Indianapolis Museum Stirs Up A Hornet’s Nest

What the Indianapolis Art Museum did Friday has to fall into the category of major PR blunder. In a press release headlined “IMA announces new campus enhancement plan to improve visitor experience and financial sustainability,” it sneaked in the fact–in the ninth paragraph, no less–that:charles_l-_venable

To build stronger relationships with guests, ensure quality programming through customer feedback and to guarantee long-term financial sustainability, the IMA will be refining its admission pricing policy. Visitor research has shown that IMA guests do not like paying for parking and key programs like exhibitions separately. Starting in April, an adult general admission ticket of $18 will include the cost of both parking and exhibitions. ($10 for children ages 6-17; ages five and under are free).

What it did not note explicitly anywhere in the release is that currently general admission is free. From now on, only the nature park, the cafe and the museum store are free all the time.

It’s bad enough to go from $0 to $18 overnight–though the museum has been charging $5 for parking and a fee for special exhibitions: $20 on weekends and $15 during the week for adults for the current Georgia O’Keeffe show. But to couch this new fee, and hide it, as a benefit is sure to anger people. And it did. On the Indianpolis Business Journal website, comments included:

  • “Admission to the museum was free from 1941 to 2006, when it started charging $7 for nonmembers. Former CEO Maxwell Anderson dropped the fee the next year after attendance flagged and admissions rebounded dramatically.” Even at $7, they had a problem. They don’t think they will at $18? Who is doing their thinking for them?”
  • “This is shameful! I am a paying member, and would pay more to be a member in order to ensure free admission for all of the citizens of the city. The museum just decided to turn its back on at least 50% of the population for which a casual free Sunday visit just became a $56 family outing (two adults and 2 children)!! Way to grow an appreciation for the arts for our inner city and middle class children. Turning the museum into a playground for the rich is a sad state of affairs.”
  • “I wonder what great mind came up with this. Such a cynical attempt to sell memberships. So obvious. I wonder if they understand how much goodwill they wiped out in one simple misguided action. I wonder if they care. I wonder if the IMA will be yet another a abandoned building in a city that leads the league in abandoned buildings. There’s a reason why everybody who can get out does get out of Indy. The reason is this kind of thinking. Greed, cronyism, corruption and a naive belief that the people will continue to pay. Uhhh, no. Good luck IMA. You were once great. Now you’re just sad.”

Charles Venable (at right), who took the IMA director’s job in 2012, has been having many problems–with curators leaving, deep staff cuts and retrenching, and dumbed-down exhibitions, among other things. He hired the founder of the International Cat Video Festival to do “audience engagement.”  Recently, that person said in a brief interview, “I am curating anything that isn’t an object—so events, performances, film, dance, music, anything that is activating our audience…I really think that art can be anything that causes you to react, to contemplate something, or to create conversation.”

What is happening to a museum that used to be, maybe not great, but pretty darn good?

 

No Other Word For It: Fundraising Failure

The Phillips Collection crowdsourcing effort, an attempt to raise $45,000 in a month to support a website abut Jacob Lawrence, has failed miserably. When the drive ended on Dec. 10, only $2,988–a mere 7 percent of the goal–had been pledged. And that took 41 supporters, for an average contribution of about $73.

logo_color_lockedupAll of the background is here, in my previous post on the subject.

Why would this campaign fail? I can think of several possibilities, or a combination of some of them:

–Not enough visibility for the campaign. I checked the Phillips’s Facebook page and saw just three posts about the campaign. Now, I’m guessing there were emails to supporters, perhaps a little local press, maybe some Tweets? Whatever it was, it was likely not enough.

–An over-ambitious goal. Raising $45,000 in a month from the grass roots is hard and time. Raising it for a future website, which can’t/won’t be seen for months, is harder. And there was some skepticism about the full, $125,000 cost of the website–why so much?

–An artist whose name isn’t that well known in the public. Sad, but true.

–In the visual arts, crowdfunding is less than it’s cracked up to be, most of the time. Previously, we know that the Hirshhorn failed in its attempt to crowdfund an Ai Weiwei work: it raised $555 of a $35,000 goal. The Freer-Sackler tried it for its Yoga exhibition, but few of the links then in use work now. This one does work–it shows support from 616 donors, but no total donated. This article, however, says the Freer-Sackler raised $174,000 for the show, including $70,000 from Whole Foods.

Yoga has a vast following, though, and I’ll bet the Whole Foods connection helped, too.

I’m thinking that crowdfunding is a gimmick, and one that, most of the time, requires another gimmick to make it work.

That’s the new Phillips logo above, btw. I think I like it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Phillips Collection 

Rush Post: Financial Health Of the Arts Industry

Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research (NCAR), begun a few years ago, ,released a new bit of research today–“examining the financial, operating, engagement and staffing health of the U.S. nonprofit arts industry.”

I confess I find much of its work a bit unsurprising. Do we really need research that shows, as this report did, that “The receipt of an NEA or IMLS grant has a positive effect on nearly all performance outcomes” or that “Arts sectors that are heavily into digital distribution of their programs (podcasts, virtual tours, high-def broadcasts, etc.) engage far more people through virtual attendance than sectors that reply solely on live, in-person attendance—with opera and symphonies leading all other sectors in participation in digital programming”?

I’d have preferred juicier questions that those answered in the email announcing the release.

It did come to a  few more interesting conclusions:

  • New York organizations tend to have a negative bottom line – the most negative bottom line of any of the geographic market clusters.
  • Larger organizations are more likely to have a lower return on fundraising and are more likely to run a deficit.
  • There appears to be a ceiling on the amount of dollars that can be raised for each dollar spent on fundraising ($7.80).
  • There is relative consistency in return on marketing: $4.15 earned for every dollar spent on marketing.

I am crunched for time today, however, and can’t dig into the report further to find out why. Here’s a link to the press release and  link to the full report, which I will look at tomorrow or over the weekend. If there’s anything worth commenting on, I’ll be back.

Barron’s Strange Report On Art Museums

Last weekend, Barron’s–the financial weekly–published a cover story on art museums. It’s a crazy salad of a piece, full of supposedly new thoughts that are actually old, composed with a strange tone that shifts throughout the piece, exaggerating in parts, and so on. It frequently cited net assets as a sign of wealth, which includes items like land, when it should have used endowment figures. It has a few non sequiturs (notice the paragraph below on the Met). And it bore what I think is a misleading headline, Billionaire Art Museums. (see chart below)

I don’t usually like to comment negatively on other people’s articles, but this piece, read by investors–and potential donors–is too weird to ignore. Let me pull out a few things, along with some comments and questions, in bold:

  • “Take the Philadelphia Museum of Art…During the recession, the grand old dame of Philadelphia saw its endowment—which covers some 25% of its operating expenses—plunge by nearly $100 million in just one year. According to data provided by Foundation Source, the museum’s revenue fell from $146 million in 2008 to just $60 million in 2009. In response, the museum cut staff and salaries and increased admission fees. It also postponed, for a year, a special exhibition on Spanish art, and cautiously put its plans for a Frank Gehry–designed expansion on an “as paid for” basis. Today, the Philadelphia museum appears to have put its worst financial struggles behind it. Total assets are at $733 million, up 7.8% from where they were five years ago. And in July, the museum opened an exhibition of Gehry’s architectural models built for its $350 million project, signaling that its expansion plans were back on track.” There are too many apples-and-oranges comparisons in this paragraph. Total assets up just 7.8% is worrisome to me, not a sign of strength. 
  • “”…the museum [of Fine Arts, Houston] navigated its way through the financial crisis. By June 2012, its total assets, at $1.12 billion, were just 3.8% shy of where they stood in 2008. Again, not quite a resounding comeback, on its own at least, is it? 
  •  [in FY 2013] the Met’s total reported assets clock in at $3.47 billion—2.1% below where they stood in 2008. Things are rapidly improving. In September, the Met unveiled a new outdoor plaza and fountain financed with a $65 million gift from industrialist billionaire David Koch, one of its trustees. And in a move reminiscent of the far flusher days of a not-too-distant past, the museum is currently showcasing its new gift of 78 cubist paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the philanthropist Leonard A. Lauder.” Huh?
  • “Among the strongest indicators of current financial optimism is the explosion of mammoth expansion projects, itself a harbinger of plans for greater programming, bigger crowds, and ever-more-epic shows. Last December, the Cleveland Museum of Art completed an extensive $320 million renovation and a new addition that saw its space increase by some 35%.” This project has been in the works for years, and its completion signals nothing about the future. Nor, really, does the next example–MoMA’s expansion into the site of the Folk Art Museum. 
  • At MFA-Houston: “…Since 2009, admission attendance at the museum is up 30%. Last year, revenue from ticket sales, at $2.5 million, rose 56%, over 2012. Its slate of recent blockbuster shows included last year’s “Picasso: Black and White.” In the meantime, fund-raising efforts have landed two record-breaking years in a row for the museum. In 2013, it raised $16 million, up 23% from the previous year.” That number seems very small for an institution with a budget of around $85 million, doesn’t it? 

BarronsChartAll that said, the article makes two good points–some museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art–have increased the size of their boards, at least in part to raise money. That is not a bad thing. And the final paragraph is a very good one:

For all of the glory bestowed on a trustee at one of the august museums on our list, moderately wealthy benefactors would be wise to be contrarians. Their time, money, and collection are likely to be treated better, have more impact, and serve society better when put to work at a regional or local museum.

 

Does Crowdfunding Work? Not So Far

Back on Nov. 6, the Phillips Collection sent me an email about a worthy effort: it had started a crowd-funding campaign for a micro-website about Jacob Lawrence. It would feature “unpublished interviews between the artist and museum curators in 1992 and 2000, including one conducted just prior to the artist’s death.” The point, obviously, was to engage people in learning about Lawrence, particularly because the Phillips plans to present the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (one image at left) in fall, 2016, following its presence at the Museum of Modern Art next spring.

JLMigrationThe site will have high-resolution images of the 60 panels in the series–which depicts the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II–with text explaining each work. It will also present archival photographs, sound clips and videos of musical and theatrical performances, plus historical events, illustrating “the life and times of Lawrence,”  and a lot about Lawrence’s life.

But the Phillips needed $125,000 for the sight, and decided to launch a month-long, grass-roots campaign for the $45,000 it had not raised privately. It started the campaign on Nov. 10 on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo.

It’s not going well. With 15 days left, it has raised only $1,675–or 4 percent of its goal. That came from 34 funders.

Now, it may true that crowd-funders wait till the last minute, the way auction bidders do. But the Phillips has a long way to go here. What went wrong? Perhaps the name is not “popular” enough.

The Phillips has a long tradition with Lawrence:

In 1942, museum founder Duncan Phillips expressed great enthusiasm for Lawrence’s Migration Series upon seeing it at the Downtown Gallery. That year, Phillips gave Lawrence his first solo museum exhibition, and soon after purchased the odd numbered panels. The Phillips has remained deeply committed to sharing and expanding Lawrence’s legacy and achievements with broad and diverse audiences.

  • In the 1990s, the Phillips organized an eight-city national tour of the complete Migrations Series. It also led a major study of Lawrence’s life through symposia, conferences, and interdisciplinary panels.

  • In 2000, Lawrence personally selected the Phillips to organize his retrospective. The highly-acclaimed exhibition premiered at the Phillips and traveled to five other major cities.

  • In 2007–08, the Phillips launched a five-venue NEA American Masterpieces touring exhibition featuring selections from the series. The tour brought Lawrence’s masterpiece to underserved communities throughout the US and was accompanied by a major educational outreach program.

I hope it does not end up with egg on its face with this campaign.