Michael O’Hare on museums:

Managers know that organizations are liable to mismanage capital both ways; sometimes we undercapitalize workers because it seems more expensive than it really is to give them what they need to do their work (proper classrooms in schools and universities are a common example here), and sometimes we ignore capital goods being wasted by disuse.

In the second category, spectacularly, are most of the works of art in top-rank and even middle-level museums. Museums that show a tiny fraction of their collections (5% is common) have the rest in storage unseen and unused until… until when? In practice, until the time that a curator might write an article. Eli Broad has given the Los Angeles County Museum of Art a hatful of money to build a new building that will have his name, but has had second thoughts about a tacit promise to give his collection of 2000 works to the museum.

“We don’t want it to end up in storage, in either our basement or somebody else’s basement,” Mr. Broad said. “So I, as the collector, am saying, ‘If you’re not willing to commit to show it, why don’t we just make it available to you when you want it, as opposed to giving it to you, and then our being unhappy that it’s only up 10 percent or 20 percent of the time or not being shown at all?’”

Bravo, Mr. Broad. Now lets start doing some hard thinking about the real binding constraint on what museums should be about, namely (as my Arts and Cultural Policy students usually come to see it) “More better engagement by more people with art”. Candidates include

1. exhibition space in museums generally and in any particular city
2. works of art owned by any particular museum
3. museum admission pricing
4. interpretive and educational complements to art engagement, at the museum, in schools, and from parents
5. social conventions and expectations of art engagement
6. private ownership of original works
7. works of art displayed in museums
8. audience available time
9. audience hands-on experience as amateur artists

As Mr. Broad astutely notes, “having more stuff in the basement” (the difference between #2 and #7) never appears in this list, because it has nothing to do with the objective as stated. I point out the obvious, that “more better engagement etc.” is not precisely the same as “more status and peer reputation for museum professional staff”. These subtle, delicate, hairsbreadth distinctions are a specialty of policy academics, preen preen; of course we are happy to share, and pleased when the likes of Mr. Broad notice them on his own.

And Mark Kleiman adds:

[O'Hare] omits my personal candidate: museum opening hours. If a supermarket can figure out how to stay open 24/7, why can’t museums at least be open until midnight three nights a weekend?

Again, Mike’s analysis is right: if museums were held accountable, internally or externally, for earning a decent return (in the form of quality-adjusted viewer-hours) on their billions of dollars’ worth of invested capital (in the form of works of art), it would be obvious that they can’t afford to be closed for such a large proportion of prime viewing hours. Current hours are convenient mostly for ladies who lunch: a worthy audience, no doubt, but not the only audience.

When the phrase “museum date” re-enters the language, we’ll know museum managers are starting to think like marketers rather than custodians.