This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by [log in to unmask] Here is the full text and article. [log in to unmask] 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 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [log in to unmask] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [log in to unmask] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).