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