Museum meltdown?
Winnipeg Sun (Ulna Ilnytzky)
While few museums would dare to sell off their treasures, cost-cutting and restructuring has become the mantra for nearly all institutions, from the largest and richest such as the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles with a current endowment of $4.6 billion (from a high of $6 billion in 2008) to historic house museums such as The Stickley Museum in Morris Plains, N.J., with a half million dollar budget.
Besides raising admission fees, the Art Institute of Chicago ended upper management raises and lowered gallery temperatures; it is on tap to open a new $300 million “Modern Wing” in May, paid almost exclusively with private donations made before the economy soured. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced it will cut 250 positions by summer and close 15 museum stores across the country.
But overall, museums are humming with activity and continuing to present major exhibitions. For now, budget cuts averaging anywhere from five per cent to 15 per cent are not significantly affecting exhibitions and programs.
“The public may not see this level of cuts as significantly as the staff do themselves,” said Conforti, who is also director of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., known as The Clark.
At the Met, board chairman James Houghton has affirmed the museum’s commitment to “remain a vibrant cultural resource for the widest possible audience.” Spokesman Harold Holzer said, “there’s no thought of changing hours, closing galleries, aborting the schedule” in the wake of the budget crisis.
Institutions are dusting off more works from their permanent collections to cut costs. At any given time, most museums display only one per cent of those collections. The Brooklyn Museum, for example, just opened a major exhibition of Coptic and Pagan sculpture, drawn largely from its holdings. It is also doing more exhibitions that will travel to other museums.
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