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Behind the Grandeur, Turmoil at the British Museum
July 23, 2002
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, July 22 - From the outside, the British Museum
looks the same as ever. An average 400,000 visitors come
and go each month, drawn by special new exhibitions -
currently, the big-ticket show is a celebration of the life
of the Queen of Sheba - and by perennial favorites like the
Elgin Marbles and the collections of Egyptian antiquities.
Norman Foster's soaring $145 million Great Court, completed
in 2000, provides a gleaming modern centerpiece to a
doughty institution nearing its 250th birthday.
But beneath its familiar exterior, the museum, Britain's
most visited tourist attraction, is in turmoil. Even after
several years of steep cuts, its budget deficit, growing
steadily, is projected to reach almost $8 million in the
next 18 months.
A planned $118 million study center, once a cornerstone of
the museum's long-term strategy to engage the public more
directly, has been abandoned. After spending $17.4 million
on a building to house the center, museum officials
concluded that it would be too costly to run. At any given
time the museum keeps more than a dozen galleries closed to
the public, another way of cutting costs.
Meanwhile morale there is at rock bottom. Already reeling
from two previous rounds of job cuts in the past three
years, the 1,050-member staff recently staged a one-day
strike to protest another series of cuts that would slash
some 150 jobs, about 14 percent of the work force. The
unprecedented action shut down the museum for the day.
"We're in shock," said a supervisor in the conservation
department, which has been told it will lose more than a
quarter of its staff. The supervisor, who said he feared
dismissal if he allowed his name to be used, said the cuts
would have a devastating effect on the department's ability
to maintain the museum's collection of about seven million
objects.
"It's not just that we're trying to save our jobs - it goes
much further than that," he said. "We really didn't believe
the management would be so crass as to punish the
collection in this way."
The turmoil comes at a time of general uncertainty, while
the museum waits for the government to announce how much
money it can expect in the future. Its director, Robert
Anderson, retired last month. Next month his replacement,
Neil MacGregor, widely praised for his tenure as director
of the National Gallery, is to take over. Meanwhile the
museum's accounting officer, Christopher Jones, has delayed
his own planned retirement so he can preside over the
cutbacks.
While acknowledging the gravity of the forthcoming cuts,
Mr. Jones denied that they would damage either the
collection or the museum itself.
"The fact of the matter is that the museum has a 5 million
pound deficit, and it has to deal with that," he said. "I
do share the concern of everybody that this is difficult.
But I believe that we will be able to get through this and
continue to offer a very high quality of service to our
users. We are not threatening the long-term care and
stability of the collection."
Not so, said Gareth Williams, a curator in the
early-medieval coin department and the spokesman for the
museum's unionized work force. Museum executives, he said,
were saying one thing in public and another in private.
"The management's press releases have said, `Oh, well,
we'll carry on as usual,' but in meetings with staff
they've admitted that the museum's program will have to be
cut," Mr. Williams said.
What is clear is that a complicated mix of factors -
internal mismanagement, government underfinancing and a
degree of bad luck - is to blame for the museum's troubles.
Which factor is most responsible, though, is a matter of
perspective.
The museum's managers say the problems are caused almost
entirely by the government's failure to increase its annual
grant adequately. This year the museum, which has never
charged admission, is receiving a $57.6 million subsidy,
but says the subsidy's value has declined in real terms by
30 percent (the equivalent of some $15.8 million) in the
last decade. It also earns $7.9 million to $9.5 million
annually from sources like corporate sponsorship and sales
of food and merchandise.
Meanwhile the government points out that the museum's
subsidy has been increasing every year (in 2000 it got
about $50 million) and says the museum simply has to do a
better job of managing the money it receives.
The museum's disgruntled employees, embroiled in unhappy
negotiations over which jobs will be cut, place most of the
blame on a management they say has behaved foolishly,
failing to plan properly for the future, and displaying an
arrogance that has alienated its government patrons.
"It's a case of where you position the mirrors," said David
Barrie, director of the National Art Collections Fund, a
charity that helps museums and galleries buy works of art.
In deciding who is more at fault, the museum or the
government, "the truth almost certainly lies somewhere in
between," he said.
Tim Schadla-Hall, who lectures in museum management at
University College London, said that while financing was
clearly a problem, the museum had been particularly lax in
following basic rules of financial management.
"There is no doubt at all that the national museums are, to
a greater or lesser degree, underfunded," he said. "But
currently, the British Museum is the only museum that is
going through these massive cuts in its staffing."
He added, "The way the budget was handled was a bit awry,
to say the least."
The museum's troubles, along with its deficits and the
resulting cutbacks, date back at least a decade. In 1996 a
devastating investigation into its operations concluded
that it had not followed even basic principles of financial
accounting. As a result of the report, the museum began to
reorganize its management structure, creating a new post of
managing director to oversee finances. (That post has since
been scrapped. Under Mr. MacGregor, yet another new
position, director of resources, will be filled by Dawn
Austwick, the former projects director at the Tate Modern.)
At the same time the museum went ahead with its plans for
the Great Court, using money from the national lottery. The
Great Court, built as a huge piazza around the old Reading
Room near the entrance to the museum, has shops, a
cafeteria-style restaurant and an open space for people to
eat and congregate. It was meant to be a center of
activity, particularly in the evenings. But after it
opened, the evening crowds failed to materialize, and the
museum realized that it had apparently failed to account
for the additional expense of actually running the Great
Court.
"The ruthless view is that there has been mismanagement,"
Mr. Barrie said. "A really well-managed institution doesn't
make mistakes like that."
He continued: "I think it's pretty clear that there have
been mistakes made, and that there was excessive optimism
about the impact of the Great Court. In common with so many
of the big lottery-funded projects, people suffered rather
from tunnel vision."
The museum also maintains that it was penalized last year
when the government ended admissions fees at the national
museums, like the Victoria and Albert, that had been
charging them. Such museums benefited from increased
government money to make up the shortfall; the British
Museum received no such increase.
"The most disappointing thing is that we, who had been in
the vanguard of free admission, had no share of the funding
that the government used to compensate the museums and
galleries that were charging admission," Mr. Jones said.
The planned job cuts are to come from almost all parts of
the museum staff, from security guards to curators,
scientists to photographers, secretaries to janitors. But
in assessing the possible repercussions, much of the
attention has focused on the museum's conservation
department, already overworked and understaffed.
Under the plans most conservation work will be part of
specific projects (a special exhibit, a loan or the like)
rather than part of routine maintenance, conservators say.
Much of it will be contracted, and the fear is that the
museum's collection will inevitably suffer.
"We've got a lot of old objects, and their condition does
not improve with age," said Mr. Williams, the employees'
spokesman.
In an unusual intervention, the United Kingdom Institute
for Conservation has sent two sharply worded letters to the
museum protesting the planned cuts in both the conservation
and science departments. "The British Museum's
international reputation is being put at serious risk, as
is its status as a major attraction in London," wrote
Christopher Woods, the group's chairman.
"Currently, much of the activity in the conservation
department has already been diverted to short-term
exhibition projects, limiting conservation work to
preparing items for display," he wrote. "This is de facto
an admission that essential core work, such as surveying
the condition of the museum's vast collections and planning
longer-term collection programs, is already being neglected
in favor of short-term projects."
Many conservators, highly specialized workers who say they
generally earn less than their counterparts elsewhere in
Britain but who love the British Museum for the richness of
its collection, say they are making contingency plans for
new jobs. Some are afraid they will be dismissed; others
say they can't bear to work at a place where they feel so
undervalued.
"Conservation is at the root of the entire care of the
collection, and because we have such a large collection,
it's vital to have the staff there who can deal with it,"
said one conservator, whose annual salary was about $30,000
after five years on the job and who recently left the
museum.
She said years of cutting back were already taking their
toll. "You can walk into the storage area of most
departments and see that some of the objects are in bad
condition," she said. "A lot of objects, even some that are
quite famous, are in need of repair."
The hope is that Mr. MacGregor, the new director, will have
a better relationship with his government sponsors than the
previous administration did.
"The government has to rise above pettiness and any sense
of annoyance and irritation and acknowledge the need to
mount a rescue mission," said Mr. Barrie of the National
Art Collections Fund. "There is a real danger that the
British Museum could be in a real downward spiral, and no
matter what the problems have been in the past, no matter
what mistakes have been made, this is one of Britain's
great flagship institutions and one of the great museums in
the world."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/arts/design/23MUSE.html?ex=1028439689&ei=1&en=d6e286cf3093a574
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