Edifice Complex and Museums

Here's a quick museum business quiz --- answer true or false.

1) A museum can be too big.

2) A museum can be totally"self-supporting" financially.

Depending on your answers to those questions, you may or may not believe that museums (especially in the U.S.) have a serious "edifice complex."

That is, the blind belief that somehow merely constructing a GIGANTIC building, funded through a combination of hopelessly over-optimistic attendance projections and/or slightly dubious loan arrangements, will create a successful, sustainable museum.

Part of what brings this all to mind is the sad and distressing news out of Miami, concerning the Frost Museum of Science — a signature project at the heart of the new Museum Park downtown that has run out of cash before construction can be finished.  The Frost is not merely a project "too big to fail" but "too big to finish."

In an eleventh hour move, the Frost project will be finished, but at a wrenching emotional price to the museum --- the museum's namesake funders — Phillip and Patricia Frost — announced that they're going to bail out the museum with a bridge loan to keep construction going. But they also exacted very tough terms: they’ve effectively “fired" the entire current 41-person board of the science museum.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose.  Full disclosure: I consulted on the Frost project up until late 2015 and I really admire the creative team there.  I sincerely hope they can move forward and open the museum in a positive and sustainable way.

Unfortunately, Miami's Frost Museum is hardly the exception to the museum edifice complex.  Here's a short list of news story links to ponder in a similar vein:


Newseum

Museum of Jewish Heritage

Exploratorium (here and here)

MOSI (Tampa)

Science City and Prariefire  (A geographically-related pairing in my view)

Please Touch Museum (here and here)

The National Children's Museum

Chattanooga History Museum

All museums with problems that could be reasonably tied to their (overly?) large new facilities or expansion plans.


I offer these links and examples not merely as a litany of pain, or a map to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, but as a plea to museum and civic leaders:  If you think it is difficult to build a new museum, it is much, much, much, more difficult to create a thriving and sustainable cultural institution that is responsive to the communities surrounding it.

Maybe there is something ingrained in the American psyche and in the mindset of wealthy philanthropists that prevents modest, truly sustainable projects from moving forward when more grandiose alternatives always seem to be waiting in the wings.

Before completely despairing for the museum business, I'll offer the example of COSI in Columbus, Ohio as an example of an institution saddled (for a variety of political reasons) with a new building that was too large and unsustainable from the day it opened in 1999, that has managed to claw its way back (over the past 16+ years!) through, for example, a variety of community partnerships that involved sharing and leasing unused space inside COSI.  (You can read more about COSI's institutional evolution here and here.)


Like most addictions, edifice complex is probably best kicked if it's never started in the first place, but, lacking that, I hope museums will continue to be smarter (and smaller!) with their facilities and financial projections in the future --- especially given the changing demographics and expectations of cultural consumers.




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The Museum Fiscal Cliff?

The incessant drum beat about "The Fiscal Cliff" coming out of Washington coupled with news that the Dallas Museum of Art will eliminate its admission fees (as outlined in this excellent LA Times article) got me thinking again about the economic future of museums.

Museums, maybe even more than other non-profits and cultural institutions, seem happy to play the Blanche DuBois card and "depend on the kindness of strangers."  Unfortunately for museums, relying on tax-leveraged donations or corporate/philanthropic largesse, presents some fundamental challenges to a sustainable future.  Here are two large practical issues looming on the edge of a potential museum fiscal cliff:


• Demographics: The fine folks at Reach Advisors have pointed out again and again the practical demographic issues facing museums. (See this post for instance.)  Put simply, museum visitors (paying or otherwise) tend to be older and whiter than the current population at large, and the future demographic trends for the U.S. as well.

Leaving the very real concern of visitor demographics aside, why can't museums make a go of it on pure admission numbers alone?  As the AAM has reported:

There are approximately 850 million visits each year to American museums, more than the attendance for all major league sporting events and theme parks combined (471 million).

If we really have this volume of annual visitors, why are museums constantly rattling their begging cups?

 
• Marketing Gimmicks:  Museums have become great at selling the "sizzle" (marketing hype) instead of the "steak" (their core collections and activities.)  It really has become one step above professional wrestling marketing techniques in some cases.  If some museum professionals feel they need to "trick" people into visiting their institutions, are they really in the right business?

As writer Christopher Knight aptly notes in the same LA Times article mentioned above, many museums have coupled these carny come-ons to membership incentives as well:
 

Fundamentally, it means expanding the museum's membership. The usual method for that is pretty degraded: Program the museum with lightweight entertainments to appeal to audiences with no interest in art, and then offer discounted admission to new members who otherwise wouldn't dream of dropping 10 bucks -- or $40, $60 or more if the whole family comes along -- to see a beautiful 10th century Indian sandstone carving of Vishnu or a fine 1919 Cubist still life by Picasso in the permanent collection.

Hucksterism is the common term for the usual member's discount, with art regarded as P.T. Barnum's Fiji mermaid and visitors urged to step right this way to check out the egress. The gambit mostly creates churn: An attendance surge is followed by a drop, until the next high calorie/low nutrition program juices the numbers again.

So, what's the real "value proposition"for museums?  What are the museum experiences that will draw a majority of folks from the local communities?  I'd argue that that the strongest draw that museums still have (over every other type of media) is their "stories and stuff."  The opportunity to engage with amazing physical (not virtual) objects and compelling narratives in a communal, social environment is what museums should be selling if they want to avoid their own "fiscal cliff."

I applaud directors like Maxwell Anderson who are decoupling from the old-style "entitlement program" funding model most U.S. museums work under.  It's really a return to the fundamentals of the museum value proposition --- "we have amazing stuff we'd like to share with you."

What do you think?  Is your museum facing its own fiscal cliff(s)? Should museums jettison their old-school admissions and funding models?  Leave your thoughts in the "Comments" Section below!



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