Art, space, but no benefactors? U.S. museums look inward for their own bailouts

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As the art world waited breathlessly for word on whether the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles would survive or go bust, a white knight, the billionaire art collector Eli Broad, rode to the rescue with a $30 million bailout plan. Some people cheered; others sneered. Few thought to point out that more venerable and vulnerable institutions across the U.S. are also struggling, but with no bailouts in sight.

Major art museums in Detroit, Newark and Brooklyn are prime examples. Forged a century ago or more from idealism and dollars, they are American classics, monuments to Yankee can-do. As latecomers to the culture game, American museums had to buy art fast and big, and they did. But times and fortunes - we all know the story - changed. Depression, recession and politics brought powerful cities to their knees. Populations shifted.

Through all of this the old museums held on. Some were content to be dinosaurs, artifacts, and that worked for a while. But for most, passivity is no longer an option. Savings disintegrate; benefactors die or look elsewhere; people forget that museums are there and what they are for. Reality issues an order: do or die.

Several veteran museums are doing by undoing: loosening up the rigid values and temple-of-art models that shaped them, and replacing these with a new “people’s museum” model, unsacred in atmosphere, fluid in values, with complicated answers to the question of what museums are.

The results of this thinking range from great to work-in-progress gauche to soul-selling bad. The goal in most cases is the same: to get visitors through the door. People bring museums to life. Lively museums feel young and hip, which brings rewards. At least that’s the idea. Time will tell. For now, as these older museums give it a whirl, they are setting examples that younger or better cushioned institutions should study. If they don’t, and the economy continues its descent, they’ll be out there too.

For the older, under- privileged, under- loved museums, this is the silver lining of hard times: these institutions have the art, the real thing. They have the space; if not much. With luck they have scholarly expertise and curatorial imagination, which they should value like gold. Now is the time, if ever there was one, to look within and bring forth what’s there. People will come. And bigger, richer, less adventurous museums will follow.

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Photos courtesy of Monica Almeida / The New York Times, Fabrizio Costantini / The New York Times, Detroit Institute of Arts, Monroe Creative Partners, and Chip East/Reuters

Original Source: NY Times