Today's NYT Arts & Leisure section has an article apropos of the
current discussion "museums are . . . ."
 
It describes the current openings for a museum director at MOMA,
the LA County Museum of Arts and the Boston Fine Arts Museum.  It
suggests that the question of who runs art museums "gets to the
very heart of the question of what museums should be," a question
which is largely ignored thereafter.  It mentions the struggle
between desires for professional managers or traditional
specialists.  It pictures day to day life as contentious staffs,
financial pressures, public scrutiny that comes with "the public
funds most museums say they need," and trustees unwilling to give
the director much of a free hand.  One person suggests that Wall
Street is more of a meritocracy than nfp's; that the search
process encourages bureaucracy and compromise and qualities of
character and personality over intelligence and knowledge.
 
The article says that directors who have mastered the balancing
act among trustees, donors, curators, the press and public, are
unwilling to move and try it again elsewhere.  Running large
museums is "less a matter of supervising artistic matters than
managing diverse and competing constituencies".  Another reason
for the reluctance to move is the increasing stature of regional
museums, making the directorship of a major national museum no
longer as attractive, especially given the political and economic
stresses of those institutions.
 
Trustee/directors come in for their share of criticism, from
"they are like classy beggars with golden cups" to the newly rich
who started to come on board with the expansion of the 70s and
contributed to building as much for aggrandizement as in any
museum's interest.  In addition these newer trustees see the
museum as a business and not as a delicate mixture of interests
and needs, intellectual and esthetic (the article might have
mentioned many more interests here).  The museum's interests are
sometimes lost in the business of business.  And a Board's
loyalty to itself and directors is often short-lived or fickle.
 
The NYT goes back to the 70s as the beginning of museums changing
their roles -- blockbuster exhibits, tourism, the search for
wider audiences, frenzied growth and money with strings attached
-- government, private and corporate.  It suggests, and I think
rightly so, that museums had not thought all this out and were
unprepared for what has now happened -- the drying up of funds,
and the being stuck with unrealistic overhead, and high social
and public expectations.
 
A portion of the article talks about the training void in the
museum area, particularly administration.  It mentions the Getty
program, which it says is too early to evaluate.  It suggests
that large museums perhaps cannot be run by one person, citing
the Met, the Chicago Art Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of
Art which for years have had dual leadership, a director who
takes care of collections and exhibitions, and a person who
handles administration and finance.
 
The article concludes that the key issue is curator v.
administrators, with curators being thought of more as a reminder
to the world that we are talking museums, not corporations.  It
also suggests that curators as a phenotype like objects and may
not be good administrators.
 
The article is interesting, but it really begs lots of questions,
and finishes with the old general kind of concluding quote: "The
secret of a good leader is delegating authority.  what is most
important is that the director be a cultivated person -- a person
who speaks with great authority about the 20th century and its
culture."
 
Martha A. MIlls
Chicago, IL