I am so glad someone has finally raised the overselling issue. I was deputy
director of Baltimore City Life 1976--1983, and planned both "Rowhouse" and
Museum Row. (I seem to recall my projections for attendance being around
the 60,000 mark, but I could be wrong.) During that whole time the then
mayor, William  Donald Schaefer, was encouraging museums in Baltimore
because he wanted "attractions". The problem was that there were already
too many museums for a branch office town to support. BCL got itself in the
position of hoping that an inflated gate would bail them out, even as the
city "privatized"/dumped the museums. It did not help that BCL, as city
support dropped, did not itself  shed responsibility for sites that only
added to staff levels and other overhead costs,  without delivering income
or attendance, such as the H.L. Mencken House. But that's neither here nor
there. Any museum I know that depends on attendance that it alone will
attract (as opposed to being in a location that will deliver indiscriminate
bodies, dead or alive) seems to come to grief.
Look at the bodies. The Valentine (recovering nicely, we hope), Western
Pennsylvania, Cincinnati, among others, plus a a whole group of places
where low attendance complicates other problems. All these places were
superb operations tarnished by their inability to deliver attendance
sufficient to pay the bills.
That said, museums should not be in the business of promising high
attendance,to break even. They are high overhead propositions and always
elitist, in the sense they must educate as well as entertain. To go after
high attendance is to enter a costly race with other "attractions" which
can't be won--and in losing, that is, failing to reach over-optimistic
attendance levels, we create the illusion that we have failed. In the
process excellent museum directors keep getting bumped, mostly because they
are vicitims of circumstances. Someone said to me at AAM, what other field
allows itself to kill off its best and brightest?
Barry Dressel, Turks and Caicos National Museum, Grand Turk, Turks and
Caicos, British West Indies
----------
> From: Helen Glazer <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Overselling Museums
> Date: 07 July 1997 22:01
>
> Matthew White <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >>While preparing a reply to John Strand I reread the _Baltimore_
article
> in Museum News while I kept up on the development of this thread and as
> my mental processes trudged along it occurred to me what it was that
> made
> that article so disturbing.  It was that it depicted the Baltimore as a
> city with those same rose-colored glasses and overly optimistic
> visitation/revenue forecasts the rest of you attribute to individual
> museums...<snip>
>
> Matthew, I'm glad you said it, and you've said it well--I hope you send
> the complete text of
> your comments to "Museum News" because they need to hear it there, too.
> I've been following the stories of the Baltimore City Life Museums and
> other planned museums in the Baltimore Sun, too, not to mention the
> city's fiscal woes, and my response to that "Museum News" piece was that
> there were no outright lies, but some disturbing omissions.  There are
> some exciting things happening at Baltimore museums (and alternative
> spaces, too), but whose interest does it serve to ignore the dark side
> of the picture?  Around the time that the article came out, Baltimore's
> Walters Art Gallery had taken the unusual step of stationing people
> inside the entrance handing out fliers urging citizens to lobby their
> city council representatives to help save cultural funding, which the
> mayor had threatened to drastically cut.  The author couldn't have known
> that at press time, but the city's financial problems are not a new
> story.
>
> I have read with interest the perceptive comments of others on this
> topic about how museums get into these predicaments.  I started thinking
> about how this thread raises many questions.  One is about
> growth--Museums and museum
> directors make their reputations on growth--more museums, major
> acquisitions, new wings, etc.  Does this need to be questioned more?
> Are these types of growth always the ultimate measure of success?  The
> other question, which others on the list have spoken about, is about
> marketing.  The aspect of marketing that I am thinking about is exhibit
> evaluation and visitor studies--spending more time and effort finding
> out from the visitors why they are at the museum, what they are getting
> out of the experience and what would bring them back for more, rather
> than *thinking* we know the answers to those questions.  Even a very
> modest visitor evaluation that I conducted on a project yielded some
> suprising information that defied the conventional wisdom of seasoned
> museum professionals.  This leads back to my first question--can visitor
> surveys help us to expand upon and perhaps redefine what success is--not
> just looking at the tangible aspects like new buildings and bigger
> budgets, but what people are learning and what the museum adds to their
> "quality of life"?
>
> --Helen Glazer, Exhibitions Director
> Goucher College
> Baltimore, Maryland USA
> [log in to unmask]