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The curators always took the same places around the white rectangular table. Milwaukee Art Museum Director Russell Bowman sat at the end, his back to the window. Across the room, over his desk, a large painting dominated the space. To his left, on the near wall, there was usually a medium-size painting. Every few months, the paintings changed. This was a museum, after all.
It seemed like a good place to talk about art. But that rarely happened in the way one might imagine. Exhibition review meetings were not dialogues about the larger issues that occupy young artists at coffee shops or intellectuals who read The New York Review of Books.
We filled slots. We tinkered with the schedule until everyone was happy – the public, school kids, ethnic communities, donors and finally ourselves. Individual and institutional interests were not always the same, but they were close enough that we could make it work. It wasn’t a democracy, but we usually came to a consensus.
An art museum obviously needs art and art needs a place where the public can see it. Part of a curator’s job is to represent the art. We aren’t purists, just advocates for a necessary point of view. None of us wanted to have a stunning exhibition to which no one came. We wanted to keep the party going as much as anyone else in the museum.
So at times we did “soft” populist shows, just as the symphony does pops concerts, to pay for the art we thought was really important. There were trade-offs and compromises. Negotiating this cultural terrain often sparked flashes of black humor. How absurdly easy it would be to get people to the museum if we didn’t have to worry so much about ART! Come on, why not do a black velvet painting show? What about Elvis?
Sometimes the discussion would take a particular turn and curators would end up feeling like film directors after management changed the ending of their movie. What will focus groups tell us next? We worried we might wake up one day and it would no longer be funny to talk about doing a NASCAR show. After all, the Guggenheim just did a motorcycle exhibition. The truth is, we were always closer to the point of no return than we wanted be.
As curators, we lost our balance and sense of humor when we started to plan for the new Calatrava building. The stakes changed. The game changed. And the program changed.
The future became clear when we began considering glass artist Dale Chihuly. His exhibition proposal was unlike any other that we seriously considered in the 12 years I was at the museum.
Exhibition proposals usually carry some artistic pretension. Chihuly’s came from a PR firm. Exhibition proposals typically talk about how an artist has influenced other artists. Chihuly’s detailed his influence on attendance and shop revenues. His PR firm talked about the Chihuly brand. He is a trade secret in the profession. This overblown glass artist is used like steroids to beef up attendance.
We discussed this show at several meetings and always ended up in the same place. The director and members of the board wanted Chihuly. The curators did not. So we continued the conversation for months, hoping we could find some way not to leave the table defeated. That never happened.
This was the first time most of the MAM art professionals thought the art was being overwhelmed by the institution. In the context of the opening sequence of two minor shows of popular artists (Georgia O’Keeffe and Milton Avery), Chihuly could brand us as a second-rate art institution.
Jody Clowes, curator of decorative arts at the time, even pointed out that “Chihuly Over Venice” was a below-average Chihuly exhibition. By the time it arrived in Milwaukee, about a third of the contracted works had disappeared. To make up for this shortfall, the museum showed his amateurish works on paper not shown at other museums.
No one noticed in Milwaukee, but Art in America noted: “Indeed, despite the noble achievements of the Calatrava expansion, the exhibition schedule has not been as ambitious as one would expect.”
At the time, we had no idea the Calatrava building would run $20 million to $45 million over the expected cost, that the endowment would be insufficient to sustain the institution and what effect these shortfalls would have on the museum’s already fragile artistic culture. We were just as intoxicated as everyone else on the apparent success of the fundraising for the new building.
But someone must have been crunching the numbers. MAM had always been a fragile, undercapitalized institution. Given the small endowment and low earned income of the museum, expansion was very risky. MAM ended up with a building that cost 20 to 25 times more than the budget of the institution. Even if everything went according to plan, the new Milwaukee Art Museum would be house rich and cash poor.
Even in the best of times, reconciling artistic accomplishment and public tastes is a trick. Museums are contradictions. Like a well-dressed person on the way to an awards ceremony, art museums appear poised and authoritative. Museums impress us. They look like they know what they are doing.
On the inside, art museums are schizophrenic and neurotic. One day a room is a serene 18th century parlor full of paintings and furniture, only to be followed the next month by a 21st century crash pad with photographs of junkies, mounds of dirt or blinking video screens. It’s all art.
Each “art” has its own constituency of curators, collectors, donors and enthusiasts who lobby for more space and resources. Each sees his or her interests as the center of the museum. And every department – marketing, education, development, even the gift shop – has its own ideas about the direction of the institution. An art museum is a big town hall meeting of agitated partisans.
Museum walls always tell two stories. One is the history of money. The other is the story of art. Unlike literature that flourished in the trenches of World War I or the Gulag, art is a luxury product that follows wealth wherever it goes. Art is something that is supposed to be more important than money. But you can’t have one without the other. How these two narratives go together is the big drama of an art museum.
First, let’s follow the money. A museum collection is a history of our aristocratic taste. If you wanted to know the difference between Chicago and Milwaukee 100 years ago, it is right there on the walls. When our cultural elite were buying the academic artists of the time, like Eastman Johnson, Chicagoans were buying the Van Goghs and Monets you see at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Since museums have to raise money for everything they do, every program has a subtext. When MAM formed a support group to raise money from African Americans, the artistic question was put to curators: “Is there any way to put a few African-American artists in the schedule?” And later we were asked, “What about Latin-American artists?” And so on. The same goes for contemporary art, school kids, individual and corporate donors. Art museums stay in business by keeping people happy.
Sometimes art is invented that fits too perfectly into a cultural niche. In the early ’90s, there was lots of money for all kinds of institutions to broaden their audiences and include more women and people of color. So photographer Brian Lanker did the cultural math and came up with a show of very large pictures of heroic African-American women called “I Dream a World.” The demand was so great that several exhibitions were created that traveled simultaneously to scores of museums, including MAM.
No one in the field thought Brian Lanker’s photos were art. At the time, foundations were desperate to fund programs with these social coordinates. And it dramatically increased school tour revenue for museums. Museum directors put “I Dream a World” on the schedule without consulting their curators because it was just too good to pass up. “I Dream a World” was optimistic, womanly, black and cheap. It was irresistible.
The big dirty secret in the museum business is that there aren’t enough quality-conscious art customers to sustain institutions outside of international cultural centers. This has led to a new industry within art museums to increase attendance and revenue, as evidenced by this recent Wall Street Journal headline, “Museums’ New Mantra: Party On!”
Pam Kassner, MAM senior director of marketing and communications, sent out an ebullient press release alerting everyone to the story. The WSJ article began, “Last week, a record 3,500 people waited in the pouring rain to get into the Milwaukee Art Museum. Were they lining up for Picasso? No, Piazza” (Mike Piazza, the All-Star baseball player).
WSJ noted that the party culture at a museum could have an effect on programming. “Moreover, because some art is a better backdrop for hip parties… party revenue can start to play an inappropriate role in curatorial decisions.”
The article quoted worried art professionals: “There comes a point when you have to say ‘no’ to the money,” said John Simmons, director of museum studies at the University of Kansas. But Kassner gushed: “The possibilities for revenue are pretty much limitless.” By bringing Piazza instead of Picasso, the museum could charge $18,000 a day. A wedding can bring in $10,000 to $15,000.
It is much easier to get people to come to MAM for a party than for its art programming. In the late 1990s, attendance peaked at about 175,000 per year, down from a high of 350,000 in the 1970s. (Attendance in the ’90s was on the low side of art museums comparable to MAM and was one of the reasons for new building.) Over the decade I was at the museum, gains in attendance came from parties and school tours. But it never made much sense to count every visitor the same way.
For several years, I suggested that we should parse the numbers to distinguish between “voluntary” and “involuntary” visitors. Kids bused to a museum like they are on a work release program or young execs with a drink in hand and their backs to paintings at special events were significantly different than more art-conscious consumers.
Voluntary visitors are like moviegoers. They attend a particular exhibition and talk about it afterward with their friends over coffee or a meal. Voluntary visitors may have gone to museums in Chicago or New York and know a little about the artist. They buy art books, read art magazines and teach their kids about art. Voluntary visitors might read critic Roberta Smith in The New York Times and enjoy Calvin Tompkins’ long profiles of artists in The New Yorker.
They are quality-conscious comparison shoppers and keep museums honest. Most importantly, they perpetuate Milwaukee’s art culture. Artists, collectors and donors make and buy the art that eventually finds its way into the museum. And they put up most of the money for the Calatrava addition.
Though easily done, I think MAM didn’t bother to find out the percentage of its quality-conscious visitors because the number was so unbelievably low, and falling.
Curators suspected that for every art-aware visitor, another 20 or so came to the museum to go to school or a party. We joked that we could get more people in the building for a dog show (either live dogs or pictures) than the most important contemporary artist in the world. We actually did a picture show of dogs in the education gallery.
I suggested this distinction for selfish reasons. Even before the new building, the gross numbers were having an increasingly large effect on schedule planning. Obviously, educating children and using events as a revenue source for the museum are necessary and important. But it is also important what involuntary visitors see. Depending on how we weighted the numbers, there would be either more or fewer dog shows in the future. The party would be over for me when the museum stopped worrying about that community of art-conscious consumers.
So what happens when you erect a new building and double the audience? It seems reasonable that most voluntary visitors had already found their way to MAM. Who are all these new visitors? When the building opened, the staff marveled at all the people who’d never been to an art museum before. That slice of the audience that used to keep us honest became a smaller piece of the whole and fell off the radar screen.
There was a best of times for the museum. We never had a normal complement of curators, and many would come and go without leaving an imprint on the institution. But we had Dean Sobel. Who would ever have thought that a kid from Oconomowoc would crank out one great show after another with little money or resources?
When Sobel was here, the art-interested community in Milwaukee saw shows of seminal artists such as Anna and Berhard Blume, Damien Hirst, Andreas Gursky, Ross Bleckner and Felix Gonzalez-Torres before they got to museums in New York, Chicago or Los Angles. In group shows, Milwaukee audiences were introduced to now-major figures like Jeff Koons, Kiki Smith, John Currin, Rineke Dijkstra and Elizabeth Peyton.
Being ahead of the curve enriches the collection as well. I did the first museum exhibition of Andreas Gursky’s work in America. A few years later, Gursky zoomed to the top of the charts. After a large retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the prices of his work rose from $5,000 to $600,000. (The museum paid about $36,000 for its Gursky photograph.)
Most of the great works in MAM’s collection were bought ahead of the curve. It’s the only way most museums can afford them. When MAM acquired a Donald Judd sculpture in 1970, his pieces sold for just thousands of dollars. Recently, a comparable “stacked progression” sculpture by Judd sold at auction for $4.5 million.
So what happens to the delicate balance between commerce and art after a $125 million building program? In museum after museum, curatorial departments tell the same war stories. Like new stadiums, there is a big bump in attendance. There are lots of personnel changes. Directors usually “leave.” The center of the museum shifts away from the art for a time, or perhaps indefinitely. Buildings always trump art.
Meanwhile, costs of staying in business skyrocket. MAM has publicly put the maintenance budget of the Calatrava building at $1 million a year. However, a museum staff person responsible for maintenance of the building told Milwaukee Magazine that that figure does not include important deferred maintenance. An architect who worked on the project adds that it would take a few years to know the real cost of operating the new building. According to sources inside the museum, the figure is closer to $1.2 million and growing.
That figure is significantly higher than the entire budget for art programming just a few years ago. This includes everything from exhibition fees and costs for producing shows to the salaries of all of the curators and support staff, as well as the care and conservation of the artworks. That is, maintaining the new building, which is less than half of the facility, costs more than producing the product, and that does not include the debt service to the new building, which could be as high as $2 million more per year.
To help offset some of these new expenses, MAM charges an additional $6 fee for exhibitions. It is not clear yet what percentage of visitors will pay the extra fee to see a particular show. Since the new building opened, that ratio has been falling and is likely to follow the trend in other museums and level out at less than 25 percent.
How many people does it take to change a light bulb at the Milwaukee Art Museum? It takes 167 paying customers to pay for each custom-made $1,000 light bulb in the elevator of the new wing.
When you add up the new fixed costs of running the Calatrava building, the museum will have to sell more than 200,000 tickets just to maintain it. That is, if the fees for exhibitions were to pay for just the maintenance of the new building, the museum would need more than 800,000 visitors a year, about twice the most optimistic projections.
But this was not the original business plan. In 1992, Russell Bowman asked the board to approve a plan for a $40 million expansion project. The board turned him down, suggesting a $20 million project – $12 million for the building and $8 million for the endowment. In 1996, MAM launched a $35 million capital campaign that included an $8 million endowment to offset the additional expenses of running a new institution.
The rule of thumb is that an endowment should be at least five times the operating budget of the institution. The museum’s endowment before the building drive was about $15 million, a 1-to-3 budget-to-endowment ratio. Back then, I asked Bowman why the museum needed to raise a lot more money for the endowment. He replied, “So I can keep my job.”
That didn’t happen. The game changed when the museum missed that moving target and ended up with a $125 million building, tens of millions of dollars of debt and only an additional $6 million for the endowment. MAM’s $5 million budget swelled to $11 million. The budget-to-endowment ratio fell to 1-to-2.
For nonprofits, the quality of the institution is directly related to the size of the endowment. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art just announced a $300 million expansion campaign, of which $100 million is for its endowment. In the year 2000, the San Diego, Baltimore and Toledo art museums all had budgets less than MAM does today and had endowments of $73.6, $54.9 and $240 million respectively.
Russell Bowman left the museum in July. When he announced his departure at an all-staff meeting, his co-director, Christopher Goldsmith, reassured everyone that he had no intention of leaving. He said it was the only job he had ever wanted and he would be around for another six years. Goldsmith left the museum a few months later.
An art museum needs some friction from its community to balance the scales between money and art. Where there is a lot of cultural capital – a sophisticated board, artists, critics, collectors and a powerful curatorial staff – an artistic culture can overcome extreme adversity. Art museums are, finally, an expression of the entire community. We eventually get the museum we deserve.
MAM’s exhibitions and acquisitions were rubber-stamped by the members of the board, the press and the community. In other museums, board members are players in the art game. Cultured board members provide necessary checks and balances for a museum.
For every activity and art medium at MAM, there is an oversight committee of board members and volunteers. I never saw or heard from other curators of a board member questioning the rationale behind an acquisition, exhibition or curatorial hire.
Has the museum made wise acquisitions? Why, for example, did MAM spend nearly $900,000, the most ever spent on a contem-porary work, on a below-average Jasper Johns painting? A great pop-period painting by this artist would have cost about $10 million. Hollywood mogul David Geffen bought a Jasper Johns for $30 million. Getting a Johns or not was a complicated question. Every museum should have one. But which one and when do you buy it? Ten years earlier, MAM could have gotten an “A” painting for less than it paid for this “B” painting.
Why did we bring the national and inter-national art press to Milwaukee for the opening of the Calatrava addition and schedule three ordinary exhibitions in a row? Art in America saw the contrast between the ambition of the building and art program.
The long knives of the art world were out for those uppity regional museums with fancy new duds. The New York Times glibly scoffed at the artistic quality of MAM’s collection. Although the Calatrava addition impressed most reviewers, several noted the new galleries as a weakness of the building. They may have seen the galleries differently if the exhibition space had not been divided and then filled with “less than ambitious” art.
For decades, neither the press nor the board seemed to be aware that artistic budgets at MAM were smaller than museums half its size. Currently, MAM has two full-time curators, an associate curator and a department administrator. At full strength, the museum never had more than four full-time curators and one half-time curator. By comparison, the Cincinnati Art Museum, which has about the same budget as MAM, has nine full-time curator positions.
And given the dearth of curators, why hire someone to lead the artistic program who had never done an exhibition or published an article? In April 2000, Brian Ferriso replaced Chief Curator Dean Sobel, who had organized 34 exhibitions and produced a dozen publications for MAM. Ferriso has yet to “curate” an exhibition and, according to the schedule, won’t in the next three years. I am not sure art is very high on Ferriso’s agenda. In a profile in City Lifestyle magazine, where Ferriso is identified as a museum director, he spoke of himself as a new breed, declaring, “The old model was of a guy with a bow tie and a Ph.D. whose only job was deciding what to put on the walls. That person is disappearing.”
Ferriso also invented a new meaning for the term “curate.” The word is used in the art world to denote the author of an exhibition – the individual and or institution that puts the whole thing together.
A museum pays for traveling shows like a cineplex pays for films. Authorship of an exhibition doesn’t change when it travels from institution to institution, any more than the credits of a movie change from theater to theater. When a traveling exhibition comes to a museum, a staff person is sometimes credited with “coordinating” the presentation.
On the museum’s Web site, PR materials and on his résumé, Ferriso is credited as “curator” of all MAM exhibitions he coordinates. This linguistic twist is new at the museum. A few years ago, an MAM secretary coordinated the popular Gordon Parks exhibition. Jennifer Chartier, who left the museum, was not credited with “curating” anything.
Producing original exhibitions is especially important for MAM because it is wedged between two larger cultural centers, Chicago and Minneapolis, which get the blockbuster traveling exhibitions. Ferriso worked on developing a show of 19th century American landscape painting, but he never secured the loans of artworks from other museums. A similar show, “The American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820-1880,” will travel from Philadelphia to Minneapolis this fall. MAM tried to get the Diane Arbus photography show from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but that exhibition is going to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The cultural gap between Milwaukee and Chicago is so great that Ferriso met with Art Institute of Chicago curators, with the hope of bringing the shows they rejected to Milwaukee.
The local art press in Milwaukee also gave the museum a free ride. MAM often acted like the boss, dictating its ideas to the paper, specifying when and where articles would run, according to MAM and Journal Sentinel sources. Even small things, like exhibition attendance figures, were fudged, according to sources inside the museum. For the staff and the public, perceptions displaced reality. And it worked until very recently. Reporters at the Journal Sentinel soon became skeptical of fabrications coming out of the communications department. They began asking serious questions and writing stories that enraged the museum.
Over the past two decades, the Journal Sentinel never gave a major MAM exhibition a bad review. Sure, there were some dissenting views that would crop up in the alternative press. But the Journal Sentinel had an effective monopoly on local arts criticism, especially after the two papers merged.
This complete lack of engaged and responsible art criticism had a corrosive effect on the internal debates about the quality of our product. Just one critical review would have set expectations higher. When the public response failed to distinguish between the watered-down product and the real thing, artistic ambitions became beside the point.
This vacuum made it too easy to posture. When there were not enough big names in the schedule, we would drop in a print show with “Warhol” in the title. The art museum industry has a severe shortage of viable brands. Other than Warhol, there are only two other brands from the 20th century, and Matisse and Picasso are the exclusive domain of a handful of international museums.
The biggest and best art brand is anything with “impressionism” in the title. It is the Holy Grail for art museum attendance. Since there are not enough impressionist works to go around, museums package the concept so the public will think it’s seeing a great impressionism show. We talked about an “impressionist show” for years before coming up with “Impressionism Along the River,” which will open in fall 2003.
Often we did shows called “pick and hangs,” a shorthand admonishment for curators to stop fussing and just get the work up on the walls. For years, Bowman invoked the term until it was pointed out to him that “pick and hang” once referred to lynchings.
The “pick and hang” discussion was part of a natural tension between curators and directors. Management had a legitimate interest in efficiency. Curators did, too, so long as we did not produce a flawed product. But we also knew that there was a line where “pick and hang” morphs into something beneath where we wanted to go. Without anyone noticing – not the board, the press or the public – “pick and hang” became institutionalized. Once that happened, it was increasingly difficult to do anything else.
We hoped there would be someone on the board who’d know the difference between a substantial Georgia O’Keeffe show and one that puts her name on a banner. We fantasized about bad reviews in the newspaper!
New curators had to adjust to this way of doing business. At my last exhibition review meeting, Bowman suggested we just “drop in” an American map show in the decorative arts gallery. Glenn Adamson, curator at the Chipstone Foundation, was incredulous, saying, “Don’t you think we need an idea?”
Instead of coming up with an original contribution, a new way of understanding the material, Bowman told Adamson that sometimes you should put the stuff up and not worry about it. The first time, you might feel a little guilty, but then you get away with it again and again. Once internalized, “pick and hang” shaped expectations and budgets until there really was no alternative. Soon there are enough “pick and hangs” on the schedule that it becomes who you are.
It’s the classic collision between the traditional conception that art museums need to produce knowledge and the idea that curators are basically party organizers. Creating knowledge takes time, but what are all the curators doing with their art history Ph.D.s if not learning something and passing it on to the public?
An exhibition should be an occasion for new ideas. Picasso is a very different artist today than he was 30 years ago. Each generation sees art in the context of their historical moment. Some artists grow in stature while others decline, which is reflected in auction prices, publications and the art of the moment. That is why museums don’t just crate old shows up and recirculate them every 10 years or so. Art is a living body of knowledge.
Much more is at stake than the quality of a museum. In this country, it has fallen upon museums to do the basic historic and intellectual work of art because no one else does it. What is at stake is the future of our public art culture. Museums are the local sites that connect us to the world of art. Art inspires other artists the way great books inspire new writers. Museums have become the only way to perpetuate artistic ideas, knowledge and values within the larger public.
MAM’s public face does not express these values. A recent press release, titled “Good Things From MAM,” highlights the museum in the following order: membership and attendance, press coverage of the museum and the WSJ party story, followed by information about exhibitions. I doubt that New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was mentioned in the story, sent a press release calling everyone’s attention to an article saying that museums have become party places that might compromise their mission and actually put the art physically at risk.
As the art-aware public has become a smaller part of museum attendance, the art staff has also become a smaller part of MAM. As the rest of the museum staff nearly doubled, the curatorial staff shrunk.
This burst of growth changed the corporate culture as well. The management team was reconfigured. The “management council,” as it is called, did not include anyone who organized exhibitions, except for Bowman. A new layer of middle managers was added, which tipped the balance away from art to the project managers.
In the past, not only was the artistic point of view well represented at the highest level of management, curators led teams of the museum’s staff to ensure that the museum got the content right. Now the head of marketing determines the “message,” often without consulting the curator about the nature and goal of the exhibition.
Making an art museum run more like a “business” meant more lawyers and management consultants. In the summer of 2000, Ferriso brought in John Butenhoff, an outside consultant, to shape up the curatorial department. He instituted a very rigid management hierarchy unknown in the museum world. At one point, Laurie Winters, the curator of a bright spot in the schedule, “Leonardo da Vinci and the Splendor of Poland,” hired a lawyer to ward off threats of termination by Brian Ferriso for talking to the director of the museum, Russell Bowman.
The gulf between management and curators widened with a new media policy that required all curators not to talk to the art press without permission and supervision. “Unauthorized press contacts,” as they were called, were cause for termination.
This policy was ruthlessly enforced. One Saturday, Journal Sentinel art critic James Auer called. He was on deadline and needed to know the medium of an Edward Stiechen photograph they were using to illustrate an article. As inconsequential as this two-minute contact was, I dutifully reported to the head of marketing on Monday. She reported it to my manager, who formally reprimanded me.
Unlike the banking world, where communications director Kassner last worked, it is especially important that the press and curators have an unmediated collegial relationship. Any museum director should be delighted to stumble upon one of her curators lunching with New York Times critic Roberta Smith because the quality of that relationship increases the appreciation and coverage of the museum. Art requires a little more freedom of expression all the way around than the rest of corporate America.
MAM is not alone. As other art museums have grown, they’ve become more “corporate” as well. And along with that comes lots of “new” ideas. In New York, there is a small epidemic of anxiety about this transformation of museums and their cultures. Jerry Saltz, the art critic for The Village Voice, characterized this trend as the “bonehead notion that all cultural products can be extruded in standardized forms and marketed scientifically.”
It is only a matter of time before the national art press will start writing about MAM alongside other institutions that ask the question: Does the art still really matter?
Deborah Solomon concluded a critical article in The New York Times on the Guggenheim this way: “If American museums are to survive what may seem like overexpansion, they need to understand that their goals and sensibilities now run counter to those of the people they serve, who visit museums in the hope of learning something new or feeling something new. But increasingly, they are finding nobody home.”
Shortly after visiting MAM, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times: “The contemporary-art world is certainly not the only public that museums have, but it remains a significant part of its core audience, and its opinions matter.… What they [museums] need now is more intelligence and taste at the top.… Museums are clearly changing. It would be reassuring to know that they are doing so with their eyes open.”
Leonard Lauder, Whitney Museum of Art chairman, recently told The Times: “As we were moving toward the end of the ’90s, I found more and more museums focused on raising money, with less focus on art. There was a worship of new buildings but little focus on what was in those buildings.”
MAM is an extreme example of this condition – an overbuilt museum with an underpowered art program. There is a cure, however – lots of money. Perhaps another $50 million to pay off the building and bring the endowment to an appropriate level. The museum will also have to develop a fierce artistic culture to maintain its equilibrium within an institution that could get more revenue from parties than it invests in its program. The curatorial department must expand to a professional level and attract art people with passion, knowledge and experience. Middle management should be reconfigured, as it is in other museums, to empower the artistic program. The press should get into the game and stop its mind-numbing affirmations. And board members should ask lots of questions.
MAM is not just a building or a collection or a cool place on the lake to have a wedding. It is the center of artistic life in Milwaukee and Wisconsin. This is our museum. The new director, David Gordon, needs a community of artists, collectors, critics, board members and enthusiasts to make the art and the building equal partners. The Milwaukee Art Museum needs values and expectations that rise beyond filling the building with people. It needs to renew its commitment to art.
