How to keep those museum visitors coming back

Any discussion of innovation in museums invariably mentions the Brooklyn Museum. From being a pioneer in maintaining populist shows such as “Star Wars”, to developing a photography show curated online by the public (see previous blog), we who work in this sector are always attentive of what they will come up with next.
So it is particularly disappointing to read in the New York Times this innovation has not transfered into visitor numbers. From 585,000 in 1998, numbers dropped to 420,000 in 2008 and 340,000 last year. And this is in an environment when the visitor numbers for most other New York cultural institutions are remaining stable.

So what is Brooklyn doing wrong, or more to the point what are the others doing right to keep the visitors coming? Over in Manhattan at the Met under its new director Thomas P. Campbell there is, according to the Financial Times, a “decidedly frisky feel”. Recent Met adverts show couples kissing in front of a Rodin sculpture, three grinning children in front of a gallery of Egyptian mummies, beside their friend wrapped in toilet paper, both with the catchline “It’s time we Met”.

This is all part of what Campbell identifies as two movements that are changing the workings of museums by: (a) shifting the focus from connoisseurship to greater socio-political contextualisation; and (b) no longer only speaking to an elite upper middle class. Both run the danger of dumbing down the museum, more often defined as “popularising”. I have no problem with either movement if it does achieve in making collections more accessible, just so long as behind it all there remains the appropriate curatorial rigour.

And if you want to see what accessibility can really mean go no further than Japan where booming attendances reflect the perception among young people that visiting museums is cool.

The four most well attended institutions in the world last year were all in Japan. The ‘National Treasure Ashura and Masterpieces from Kofuki-ji’ exhibition at the Tokyo National Museum attracted an astonishing 15,960 visitors per day. Rest assured hardly anyone could see anything but that is bye the bye - by contrast visitors to the recent NGA Masters from Paris exhibition complained they could not see anything on days when there were under a third of this number. Overall visitor attendance to national museums in Japan has risen by 200% in 10 years.

Japan’s museum sector requires a study in its own right to understand what is going on, though clearly the concept of museums as meeting places where it is cool to hang out is one of their achievements. All museums should aspire to this as a fundamental starting place to maximise repeat visitation. I noted in my previous blog that MOMA in New York has 135,000 members. On the basis that each of these members has joined because they will visit the Museum more than twice a year (thus justifying the cost of membership) visitation is already guaranteed at over 270,000.

So I think one of Brooklyn Museum’s problems is that a 2008 survey showed half of the museum’s visitors were not only non repeat visitors, they were first time visitors. When your overall visitor numbers are rising that’s not a bad result, but when they are falling as dramatically as theirs are, it’s disastrous, unless you can convince a substantial proportion to come back again.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

MOMA - Momentum and Money

I enjoyed listening to Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the New York’s Museum of Modern Art giving the inaugural Ann Lewis Contemporary Visual Arts Address at the MCA in Sydney last week.

I must admit part of the fascination was seeing the world’s highest paid museum director (a cool $1.3 million per year) in the flesh. And Glenn did not disappoint. He gave an entertaining history of MOMA from its founding in 1929 to the international colossus it now is, describing the challenges of collecting contemporary art.

A former director likened this process to that of a torpedo, always moving forward, gathering art at its front end and shedding art collected in the past that was not standing the test of time. To remain contemporary it only holds onto art that is less than 50 years old. Or that is what I thought Glenn said, though it still holds some of the greatest work of Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Mondrian etc. Not sure how that works but I can understand their reluctance to de-accession such works!

Glenn then moved onto his views on where museums are going. Nothing startlingly new I would say – museums increasingly being used as social spaces, museums no longer being able to go it alone and therefore needing to establish alliances/partnerships with other organisations, museums competing in cyberspace and the importance of building virtual visitors as well as the physical ones.

But it was when he turned to the metrics of MOMA that things got really interesting. Because MOMA is all about money – perhaps not surprisingly given its location. Glenn is building a US $900 million endowment, which currently stands at $670 million. That already generates 31% of their $120 million annual income, (bear in mind MOMA, like most US institutions apart from the Smithsonian, receive minimal government funding). 3 million visitors a year contributes a further 25% of income, followed by 15% of income from their 135,000 members.

By Australian standards these are all mind-boggling numbers, but then it is New York. I came away elated by the benchmark that MOMA sets, and invigorated by the dynamism of its director.


Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

Museums, galleries and their carbon footprints

The emissions trading scheme may have been shelved in Australia for the near term (though watch this space after the ascendancy of Julia Gillard to the PM’s position) but museums and galleries, just as businesses, need to treat a low carbon and energy efficient economy as inevitable.

And what Copenhagen did achieve, although it appeared to be a failure as a climate change summit, was a global agreement to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees. To meet this target is going to require transformational changes to the world economy, and therefore inevitably to the way museums and galleries operate. The GLAM sector is going to be in a much stronger position if it can take control of its preparedness for this rather than wait for the inevitable government dictate.

And whilst this is partly about the reactionary component, i.e. checking the resilience of museums to the effects of warmer temperatures, heavier rainfall and less predictable weather patterns, and the related risks, it is also about being proactive in reducing each organisation’s carbon footprint.

I find colleagues’ eyes begin to glaze over at this stage, as it all appears too hard. So what can we learn from the rest of the world in this regard? I checked out the UK where they are substantially ahead of Australian thinking on this issue. Museums are looking to establish their carbon footprint and then to do something about reducing it, both to save money and also to be eligible for grants that are available for those that are proactive in this area.

Carbon footprints treat an organisation’s carbon emissions in three parts:

1. Direct emissions from the organisation which, for museums relate to their own boilers and fuel used by museum vehicles
2. Indirect emissions from electricity or gas purchased by the museum
3. Indirect emissions from sources outside the museum’s control, such as staff and visitors getting to the museum, waste disposal and suppliers emissions

The first stage is to establish what these are, and the benchmark for this is the Victoria and Albert Museum, which claims to be the first museum to have calculated their footprint in 2007/08. They found that not unexpectedly 82% of their emissions arise from utilities.  However it is interesting to see the breakdown of this, namely 29% of this being for lighting compared to 63% for heating, cooling and control of relative humidity - interesting in that we tend to forget how much energy lights use and then of course how much they contribute to warming up air and thus requiring more energy for cooling. The balance of the carbon footprint at the V&A is consumed by IT (11%), touring exhibitions (5%) and staff travel (2%).

Having established a carbon footprint (and bear in mind that it helps to have sub metering so the breakdown between lights, HVAC and IT use can be identified), then the next stage is to do something about it. This should be about reducing energy use, not about using renewable energy sources or carbon offsetting.

Again check out how the V&A has achieved a 20% reduction in their carbon footprint between 2005 and 2009. They have done this through using low energy lighting on time clocks, low energy environmental controls and a combined heat and power system, known in the business as CHP.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this is how they are implementing ongoing savings as they progressively refurbish the Museum. New gallery projects now optimise the use of daylight, minimise solar gain, use intelligent ventilation and heating strategies and avoid humidification and cooling. It is a model all museums and galleries can benefit from actively considering.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

Collaboration and Convergence

The concept of a division between collecting institutions in the GLAM sector is a 19th century phenomenon. Prior to that, artefacts, paintings, books and natural history specimens were often housed in the one organisation. The British Library, for instance, was only formed out of the Britsh Museum as recently as 1973.

Given the somewhat artificial nature then of this division, it is a logical process that we are seeing on the web as collecting institutions come together to once again link up their databases. I was listening yesterday to Dr Warwick Cathro, the Assistant Director General of the National Library of Australia talk at the Australian National Maritime Museum about the collaboration between the National Library, the National Archives and the National Film and Sound Archive that has resulted in Trove. Managed by the National Library it is a highly impressive metadata search engine for Australiana. A number of the audience confirmed how the speed with which they can identify primary resources for research purposes has transformed their lives.

It confirms a global trend, articulated recently by David Curry at the Future of Museums blogspot, in which he says:

Demand for access to and leverage of primary sources and collections of all kinds drives the need for common strategies around licensing, intellectual property, copyright management, and associated revenue streams. Just as important, GLAMs will have an increasingly common agenda in addressing preservation, access, physical storage, and overall management of primary source content overall, including “born-digital” content

The large and economically powerful “commercial” content market, which is perhaps anchored overmuch in entertainment content at the moment, is a key driver (and definer) for market and community expectations. Apple iTunes, Google Books+ and similar disruptions will increasingly “invade” the GLAM domain, driving the need for common, robust strategies to deal with the velocity and vectors of change.

So I read with interest an article in the New York Times last week, on how the British Museum has begun a collaboration with Wikipedia. My children are always telling me how they are forbidden to cite Wikipedia as a reference in essays, because of the amateur nature of its content. But the BM noted recently that their Rosetta Stone page views were up to five times less than the Wikipedia page on the same iconic artefact. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em goes the phrase, and so that is exactly what they are doing, even to the extent of appointing a ‘Wikipedian in residence’, an Australian no less! Key to his role will be identifying the thousands of artefacts (from the total collection of 8 million), that might be worth having their own Wikipedia article.

It’s encouraging to see the BM doing this, as convergence, the term used to describe in this context the coming together of the museum/gallery sector with the library/archive sector, still struggles in my book to find a model that works. There is the celebrated Puke Ariki in New Plymouth, New Zealand and also attempts by Albury City Council in their new cultural centre, but are we ever going to treat a museum as a library and objects as reference material? My guess is that a new model will appear as the web develops, and we need to be open to all opportunities around it.

Art Theft

It is the ultimate nightmare for a museum director to have artworks or objects stolen on their watch. So the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris is no doubt not too happy about the theft two weeks ago of five paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Modigliani and Leger from his museum.

What makes it rather worse is that it appears the Museum’s alarm system had been broken for almost two months and there were three night time guards in the area at the time. Apparently they were “dozing” and “saw nothing” (which is what normally happens when you doze). Not that the insurers will worry, as apparently none of the works were insured, being owned by Paris City Hall, which self insures. The stolen art market is something which slips under the radar in terms of its extent, but is actually second only to the illegal drug and arms trades in value, being worth some US $6 billion annually. These five paintings are estimated to be worth some US $125 million and join the 170,000 stolen and missing pieces in the Art Loss Register.

Most of these pieces are stolen from private homes (witness the recent theft of a ₤80,000 painting by the reclusive “guerrilla” artist Banksy from the supermodel Kate Moss’ home in London). But where do these artworks end up? The view seems to be that either:
a) They are stolen by criminal gangs to use as collateral in drugs and arms deals and will eventually reappear on the market; or
b) They are specifically targeted by collectors and will disappear into private collections. As the BBC pointed out after the Museum of Modern Art thefts, if you wanted to start a modern art museum these five paintings would be high on your list of acquisitions as between them they tell the story of modern art’s emergence.

What is the likelihood of a major heist happening in a public gallery in Australia? Realistically, small for a number of reasons. Our major collecting institutions are newer, fewer and less exposed than European ones. They are almost universally in purpose built structures rather than in converted houses in cramped streets with plenty of back windows. And if a theft does take place there is the issue of how to smuggle it out of the country, a process so much easier in Europe with open borders.

But that is not to say it cannot happen, the most famous recent example being Van Mieris’ Cavalier stolen from the Art Gallery of NSW in 2007, and valued at over $1 million. Museums therefore need to be aware of the latest security technology. No one system is going to be foolproof, and the latest thinking combines CCTV surveillance with RFID tagging such as the ISIS Aspects Arts System.

While certainly more effective than dozing guards, if the thieves turn up with a gun however, such as when Munch’s The Scream was stolen from the Munch Museum in Norway, there is not much that can be done to stop them.

Museum cuts and directors’ salaries – are they related?

An article this week in the Chicago Tribune reported that the Art Institute of Chicago has laid off 65 staff, on top of the 22 it laid off last June. The director James Cuno, one of the giants of the US art scene, has cited the almost 25% cut in endowment income as the cause of such, putting the Art Institute in the same group as the mega rich Getty Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, both of which have laid off staff and cut programs in the last year.

It illustrates the very different form of funding that the US museum/gallery scene lives off, when compared to the UK and Australian situation. Endowments resulting from philanthropic giving have long been the main stay of US museum funding, a model eyed with envy from elsewhere, where there is nothing like the level of philanthropic giving to the arts. But it has a downside, namely when those endowments are linked to the stockmarket and a little matter of a GFC comes barrelling into town.

Across the Atlantic the UK museum sector which relies predominately on public sector funding has fared better so far. They of course are wondering what now happens with the new coalition government in power, but the Conservatives went to the general election proclaiming in David Cameron’s words ‘ Our culture is second to none’. Nick Clegg ( now Deputy PM) had stronger words ‘ Arts funding is a duty not an option for any government’, and even the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne got in on the act speaking at the Tate last December, when he said ’The arts play a vital role in our communities, helping to bind people together and create real social value.’ Whilst it is clear there will be cuts to their funding of as much as 20% , as no part of the UK ‘s public sector will be able to avoid such if the UK £160 billion deficit is going to have any chance of being reduced, there are also ways in which this may be ameliorated. The National Lottery was set up to fund heritage, the arts, sport and charities, and although its funds have been siphoned off to all sorts of other causes given its phenomenal success, there are signs that the government will restore it to its original purpose. There is also talk of a Museums and Heritage Bill which would give national museums greater financial independence.

But there are swings and round abouts with such matters and the result of the massive endowments that US museum directors have to manage means they also (by UK and Australian standards) can earn massive salaries. James Cuno earned US$626,000 last year up 46% from the previous one, no doubt so he didn’t get left behind his colleagues, such as Boston Museum of Fine Arts director, Malcolm Rogers on $719,000 or the Met’s Phillipe de Montebello ( since retired) on $818,000. But they are eclipsed by the star of the show, Glenn Lowry, director of New York’s MOMA, who earned $1.32 million last year ( salary $956,000, ‘retention bonus’ $191,000, ‘performance bonus’ $200,000, pension $262,000 plus rent free condo benefit valued at $336,000) , and this included a voluntary pay cut due to the recession taking his earnings down from, wait for it, $1.95 million the previous year.

So it’s not entirely surprising, returning to the Chicago Art Institute, that a blog comment on the article reads "When the director is making over $700,000 a year, and accepts a pay raise when the rest of the staff goes for years without raises, and scores of employees are losing their jobs, the whole thing seems shameful and embarrassing".

Haven’t I heard that comment from the corporate world recently?

The Olokun Head (and museum fakes)

The art world is full of fakes, some of which surprise us and are ‘discovered’ to be genuine. Perhaps the most difficult artist to authenticate is Salvador Dali, because it seems clear he himself was helping to create his own fakes. He is thought to have signed some 280,000 sheets of blank paper in his lifetime, and in fact signed his name so many times that it deteriorated to the extent that experts now have great difficult authenticating the real thing.

But fakes in the museum world are much less common (we think!). “Piltdown Man” is perhaps the most famous. Thought to be the fossilised fragments of a skull and jawbone of a previously unknown human when collected in a gravel pit in 1912 in Piltdown, Sussex, it was not until 1953 that it was exposed as a forgery, being the lower jawbone of an orang-utan deliberately combined with the skull of a modern human.

Piltdown is a classic example of academics desperate to find the missing link between apes and humans overcoming sheer common sense. The man now thought to have perpetrated the fraud was Charles Dawson, a local antiquarian collector. Checking his details in Wikipedia I was amazed to find he made an artform of such finds including such wonderfully named items as the Beauport Park Roman Statuette (a hybrid iron object), the Brighton ‘Toad in the hole’ (a toad entombed in a flint), the so called ‘Shadowy figures’ on the walls of Hastings Castle and the Bulverhythe Hammer. Tell me more, please!

On a more serious note the latest edition of the Art Newspaper ( www.theartnewspaper.com ) carries an interesting account of the Olokun Head (“Is the Olokun Head the real thing?”). The life size Olokun head was found by a German anthropologist Leo Frobenius in 1910 near Ife, Nigeria. The bronze is believed to be the head of a king, made about 1400, but at the time of discovery was considered to be too great a masterpiece to have been created by African hands, a reflection of attitudes at the time. It was seized almost immediately by the British Colonial administration on the grounds it was sacred and eventually placed in the Ife Museum.

But in 1948 when it travelled to the British Museum it was declared to be a replica. Was it always a fake therefore, or was the original copied either by Frobenius before handing it over, or before it reached the Ife Museum, with the original sold to a European North American Collector?

However now that it is on show again (“The Kingdom of Ife” currently at the British Museum and due to travel to 4 museums in the US in 2011), there are questions being raised as to whether it is actually the original after all. The BM’s conservators are undertaking X-ray fluorescence and thermo luminescence testing and microscopic analysis to determine the precise metal content, the casting technique, and the form of tools used.

A copy or the real thing? Hopefully all will soon be revealed.

Cultural rights and the future of museum visiting

It is a given that almost all museums are seeking to broaden their audiences and increase their visitation numbers. Some are more successful at this than others, but the GFC cannot disguise the fact that worldwide in broad terms those numbers just aren’t improving, and indeed may be going backwards. And it is not just our sector of the arts. US statistics from the National Arts Index show that overall attendance at museums, galleries, orchestral, dance, opera and theatre performances declined across the board by about 10% over the last ten years. And a key cause of this can be laid at the door of arts funding which in the corresponding period has dropped in relative terms by c 25%.

So I read with great interest an article in the Spring 2010 Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts on what we might be able to do about this. I must admit to being a very inactive Fellow of the RSA, but a great (tacit) supporter of all it stands for and in particular its’ thought provoking Journal. This article is by Bill Ivey from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Ivey’s basic premise is that the argument for public investment in culture is unable to compete with education, healthcare and the environment. The old arguments for the value of the arts to public policy have gone as far as they can, and culture is increasingly seen as something governments get around to funding with the money left over after everything important has been paid for.

We’ve seen this most starkly in Australia in WA where the state is riding its second mining boom, and yet the arts, having missed out on any benefit from the first, is now seeing funding cut back further.

So what does Ivey suggest we do about it? Firstly he suggests we start from the premise that artistic heritage and creative practice are at the heart of a wide range of human engagements that are critical to both happiness and the workings of democracy. And secondly we redefine our sector to encompass an arena of human activity that is just as important as healthcare and the environment, namely our 'expressive life'. This has both a past (our heritage) and a present (everything from ethnic and community traditions, and social dancing to amateur music making and arts education in and out of schools).

Expressive life is much harder to marginalize than the arts, as it engages so many components of our daily lives (and therefore our legislative and social framework). Ivey then comes up with an innovative and (I think) terrific concept of a Cultural Bill of Rights that can justify the pursuit of a vibrant expressive life as a democratic public good. It might read as follows:
1. The right to our heritage – the right to explore music, literature, drama, painting that define both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.
2. The right to the prominent presence of artists in public life – through their art and incorporation of their artistic visions in democratic debate.
3. The right to an artistic life – to the knowledge and skills to play an instrument, draw, act, dance, compose, design.
4. The right to know and explore art of the highest quality and to the lasting truths embedded in those forms of expression that have survived through the centuries
5. The right to healthy arts enterprises that can take risks and invest in innovation while serving communities and the public interest.

Will it wash with funding bodies? Certainly it would be so energizing to see public debate around the issues, as the current picture is one of minimal debate, and increasing marginalisation in forward funding for our collecting institutions. That in turn is going to do nothing to increase visitation.

Telling stories by conservation

I have long been an advocate of the power of story telling in both justifying the process of conservation and also in achieving engagement with wider audiences. Conservation per se just to extend an artwork or object’s life in perpetuity may be ethically the right thing to do, but it is rarely going to grab the attention of funding bodies or the public.

Driven by the very real concerns of reducing support for conservation training (both the Textile Conservation Centre and the V&A/Royal College of Arts in the UK closed last year), the International Institute for Conservation ran another in its’ successful series of dialogues in January 2010 entitled ‘Conservation in Crisis – communicating the value of what we do’. This has just been posted on the IIC website. I must admit to some bias on the value of these dialogues as I am Vice President of IIC, and am strongly supportive of the Institute taking a more active advocacy role.

And what comes out clearly from the dialogue is that storytelling is a significant key to engaging a wider audience, and one that conservators continue to be poor at exploiting. Whilst a range of programs providing public access to conservation, including opening up labs to guided tours and having conservation treatments carried out in public galleries, have had some success, as soon as conservators commit themselves to paper, they become dead boring to anyone but other conservators (and let it be honestly said, often to them as well). And this is generally because they focus on the treatment rather than the story behind the object that is revealed.

There is a great example of this given by one of the dialogue participants about a cross that was conserved in Venice. The conservators involved when explaining their work talked at length about the details of the treatment undertaken, yet failed to mention that what was really interesting about the cross is that for two hundred years it was carried before condemned prisoners on their procession to the scaffold, i.e. it was one of the last things such people saw on earth.

I have just attended a meeting of the International Polar Heritage Committee in Punta Arenas, Chile, and one of the speakers was bewailing the focus on the Heroic era and the explorers of the early Twentieth Century, at the expense of the conservation of the heritage of the early nineteenth century whalers and sealers in Antarctica. The simple explanation is that the story telling around the explorers has been much more successfully told than that of the whalers and sealers, and as a result the funds have flowed for conservation work for the former. Admittedly it helps having some substantial huts and their 15,000 artifacts as compared to a few difficult to discern archaeological remains on which to hang them

Blockbuster noise in Canberra

So the National Gallery’s Masterpieces from Paris on loan from the Musee D’Orsay has finally closed after a marathon all night opening and an incredible 470,000 visitors. It has eclipsed the National Gallery of Victoria’s previous Australian exhibition attendance record of 371,000 for the 1994 exhibition of, you guessed it, Masterpieces from the Musee D’Orsay. I have blogged before about how good this exhibition was, and I am glad to see what a benefit it must have been to the Gallery’s bottom line. By my calculation, given the break even point was c 250,000 visitors (according to Ron Radford in the SMH April 2nd 2010,) the extra 220,000 visitors at $25 a pop must have provided a neat $5.5m gross profit.

But it raises again the question of the benefits or otherwise of blockbusters. I always used to think that blockbusters started with the Tutankhamen Exhibition at the British Museum in 1972, but for an indepth view of how long they have been around read The ephemeral museum: Old Master paintings the rise of the art exhibition By Francis Haskell.

Haskell shows that the first real blockbuster was the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam in 1898, though certainly King Tut at the BM eclipsed all records with an incredible 1.7 million people seeing it over 9 months at an average of 7,000 a day. Other outstanding numbers have come from Monet at the Royal Academy in 1990 (658,000), and Titanic at the Florida International Museum in 1997 (830,000).

In terms of their pros and cons, check out a good summary in a paper that David Fleming ( Director of National Museums, Liverpool) gave at ICOM Seoul in 2004. Fleming identifies the pros as:
1) Lots of people come
2) Visitors get the chance to see things brought together, possibly for the first and only time
3) Blockbusters attract new visitors to the museum/gallery, who hopefully will return
4) They attract media coverage, raising the profile of the museum/gallery, and sponsorship
5) They make money ( not a given, but in the National Gallery’s case, lots of it)
6) They promote creativity and scholastic excellence amongst the museum/gallery’s staff.
And the cons as:
1) Blockbusters present a narrow range of subjects and seldom shed new light on history or art history
2) They lead to a dumbing down of the museum and its message, being developed primarily for entertainment rather than educational/cultural value
3) The necessary sponsorship can have unintended negative consequences for the museum
4) The actual experience of blockbusters is a poor one as success leads to overcrowding – this in turn means there can be no meaningful experience, and may dissuade repeat visits
5) The staff effort in mounting them distracts from their core work
6) Blockbusters create a treadmill, raising expectations amongst sponsors, media and the public which may be impossible to meet (interestingly Brian Kennedy, the previous director of the National Gallery dispensed with them , partly for this reason, having inherited a tradition of blockbusters from his predecessor Betty Churcher, fondly remembered as ‘Betty blockbuster ’)
7) Their success may persuade public funding bodies to reduce their support

I’m a blockbuster fan, I must admit, and I’m glad that the National Gallery can justifiably bask in the media and financial glory of this show. But at the same time they need to be acutely aware of the last two points.