The Orange Balloon Dog

by Don Thompson

  Many museums adopt a bland interior architecture called white cube, to focus all attention on the art. The new Whitney’s architecture is dramatic, an attempt to attract visitors and impress donors with a building that is itself a destination. For every story about the Whitney’s opening show there were ten about the architecture and interior design. After opening, the Whitney ran with its “Bilbao effect,” the term coming from the Frank Gehry–designed Guggenheim in Spain, where more people visit to see the building than the art.

  Leonard Lauder (separately from his art-collection gift to the Met) contributed $131 million toward the Whitney’s new downtown location. One condition that came with the offer was that the Whitney not sell the old building but rather lease it. Lauder has given many works of art to the Whitney in the past. In 2016 the museum announced that Lauder’s name would grace the new building.

  The Guggenheim is not directly involved in the New York competition, except for blockbuster shows like Christopher Wool in 2014. The Guggenheim seeks recognition and financial support through its ongoing role with the new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the planned Guggenheim Helsinki.

  On what basis then can an institution like the Brooklyn Museum compete? Arnold Lehman became director of the BM in 1997. At that time the museum held a minor place in the New York museum world, well below the top four. The BM was known best—and, for many, known only—for its Egyptian art collection.

  The first problem Lehman faced was how to get publicity and improve attendance by reaching a broader audience. He could then focus on attracting donors. One answer was inclusiveness, at that time the mantra for many museums. That meant challenging the W’s of major museums: white, Western and (for artists shown) womanless.

  Lehman said that when he started at the BM, minorities made up a third of the US population and 40 percent of Brooklyn, but that only 17 to 20 percent of his museum audience was composed of people of colour. The median age of Brooklyn Museum attendees then was in the upper fifties. In 2015, patrons of colour represented about 45 percent of attendees (in Greater New York, 65 percent identify as non-white), and the median age of visitors dropped to thirty-five. Lehman thought that the BM at that point had achieved the most diverse museum audience in the country.

  An early step in rebranding was to make the building more welcoming. The old BM had five giant bronze doors. Guests had to tackle a long set of steps to enter off the third-floor level. The concept, Lehman said, was that you ascended to art. Lehman’s wife said it reminded her of a government building on Moscow’s ring road.87

  The BM’s doors and steps were replaced and the front facade of the building had lots of glass added. A fence around the entrance plaza was taken out so visitors could picnic on the grass. The changes were expensive, and represented money invested in rebranding rather than in art. The BM then introduced a version of free admission on the first Saturday of each month. Each “First Saturday” draws ten thousand to twelve thousand people and culminates in a two-hour dance party.

  That was the long-term repositioning. In the short term the museum got press coverage with controversial exhibits – sufficiently controversial to elicit threats from patrons to boycott and from government officials to cut off grants. One in 1999–2000 was Charles Saatchi’s Sensation. Displayed the previous year at the Royal Academy in London, it featured Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995), an image of the murderer Myra Hindley. The museum also showed Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) depicting a black Virgin. Another show included David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly (1986–87), with a scene showing a crucifix covered in ants.

  Lehman could not afford the cost of participating in blockbuster art shows with other museums; Sensation was subsidized by Saatchi. Instead, the BM held exhibitions of popular culture: Hip-Hop Nation, Star Wars: The Magic of Myth and Killer Heels. “It’s part of how we reinforce the museum’s brand,” Lehman said, “and how we hopefully continue to grow our audience and grow loyalty to the museum among our members, our donors.”88

  Lehman was seen as following the vision of former LAMOCA museum director Jeffrey Deitch, who had stated: “Museums needed young audiences and … what young audiences wanted to see is events, whether the events are fashion shows, rock concerts or exhibition openings.”89

  Lehman diversified the museum audience but could not do the same for his board. He was quoted as saying: “There is a greater degree of difficulty in diversifying the board, because the reason you serve as a board member is not only because you love the institution, but because [you have] both a leadership and a fiduciary responsibility.”90 He continued that diversity is not consistent with “give or get,” the ability to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at a minimum. Board membership in New York is in most cases a rich person’s activity. The same problem exists through the museum world. In New York the Met, MOMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney have never had a non-white chairperson or president, or as many as a quarter of its board non-white.

  The changes have not elevated the Brooklyn Museum to New York’s top four, but it is closer. The museum has increased its rank in the publicity and pecking order, and increased its donations by a factor of six—although in 2016, staff expansion and related costs produced a deficit of $3 million against an operating budget of $39 million, and the museum asked staff to accept voluntary buyouts.

  For museums not named MOMA or Metropolitan, would simply not charging admission pay off in visibility, in visitors and in attracting donors? Digital providers such as Google, Facebook and Instagram understand the value of giving their product away. This yields data about customer preferences and habits. Companies sell that information to advertisers and others. Would it be a good strategy for an art museum to do the same?

  Free admission is uncommon among Western art museums, one exception being that it is mandated by government in the UK. Ninety percent of US museums charge entry fees, most between $7 and $15. MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum charge a $25 fee, although in the latter case, in very small print beneath the price list is the word “Recommended.” The Met will accept $1 if that is what you offer. (That one tip covers the cost of this book!) The MOMA and Met logic is that their institutions offer value, that visitors should be willing to pay more of the total cost rather than have others subsidize their experience.

  In 2012, Maxwell Anderson, director of the Dallas Museum of Art, decided to test the “free” model to learn whether understanding behaviour produced more revenue than charging admission. Anderson convinced the DMA’S board of directors to offer free admission to any visitor willing to enter personal information on an iPad at the museum entrance. It was thought that visitors would later provide information on what galleries they visited, what they liked and what they hoped to see during their next visit. Special exhibitions still required a paid ticket.

  The risk for the DMA was actually quite minimal. Prior to the change, admissions and basic memberships together represented 5 percent of the DMA’S annual budget, $1.2 million of $24 million. The rest of the budget came from donors, foundations and governments. Anderson hoped that having more specific information on users, and on what the museum was achieving with each group, would persuade those contributors to step up.

  Beside each artwork was a code. Visitors who texted that code or entered it at one of the iPhone kiosks were credited with viewing that artwork, and could accumulate points to be redeemed for free parking, gift-shop discounts or free entry to ticketed exhibitions.

  DMA visitors could further indicate which art they liked by choosing between paired choices, usually between a painting and a sculpture. One pairing was The Icebergs (1861) by Frederic Edwin Church against Semiramis (1872) by William Wetmore Story. The pairings offered sharp contrasts. Voting determined the DMA’S eight most popular works, then four, then two, then the winner. Popular art remained on exhibit; early losers spent more time in storage. The DMA now knew which galleries and pictures were the most popular and which events attracted visitors from low-in
come neighbourhoods.

  The program produced three million records of how visitors use the museum. Anderson was able to show donors that they were subsidizing attendance from low-income areas. That appeal secured a $4-million anonymous donation. Admission then became free for everyone, whether or not they offered personal information.

  Anderson could map attendance by postal code, so he could identify neighbourhoods that were still under-represented, and plan on how to reach what he called “art deserts.” The DMA used its data to raise an additional $5 million a year, four times the previous revenue from paid admission and memberships. Donors were willing to support organizations that could provide metrics on the benefits being achieved.

  Exhibits featuring contemporary artists turned out to be so popular, and historical art sufficiently ignored, that the DMA considered showing contemporary art in more galleries and having “special exhibits” of historical art—rather than the opposite.

  On several occasions when I have discussed the DMA model with museum CEOS, their conclusion has been, “This is probably not for us.” I think one reason is that free admission and reliance on donations makes the CEO even more a fundraiser, less a curator. Watching visitors pay to pass through turnstiles is replaced by knocking on donor doors and mounting exhibits based on visitor voting. For Maxwell Anderson, this was acceptable. The role is not for everyone.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

  “A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”

  —Edmond de Goncourt, French art critic

  ALMOST A THIRD OF THE MAJOR SOLO EXHIBITIONS OR THEMED RETROSPECTIVES held in US museums between 2007 and 2013 featured artists represented by just five über galleries. These are Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner, Marian Goodman and Hauser & Wirth. The figures come from a 2015 study published in The Art Newspaper, which analyzed nearly six hundred solo exhibitions held by sixty-eight museums. The five galleries are large by any measure. Between them they have thirty locations in ten major cities, estimated annual sales of $2.25 billion and account for roughly 7 percent of the world contemporary art market.

  The five-gallery domination is not surprising: über galleries are thought to be both wealthy and willing to contribute to shows when gallery artists are featured. Über galleries commonly pay shipping costs, finance the catalogue and may pay for the opening reception for their artists. Dealers sometimes finance an entire show. In a well-publicized example, Gagosian, Emmanuel Perrotin and Blum & Poe each contributed a six-figure sum to a Takashi Murakami solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lost Angeles (LAMOCA) in 2007. They also offer logistical support for assembling artworks. The galleries know who owns work and can assist in securing loans.

  The figures are more dramatic for the best-known museums. Eleven of twelve solo exhibitions between 2007 and 2013 at New York’s Guggenheim featured artists represented by one of the five galleries. The figure for the same period was 45 percent for single-artist shows at the Museum of Modern Art and 40 percent for LAMOCA. Typical of the low end of the percentage spectrum is Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, where only 15 percent of the shows featured artists from the five. The percentage declines as the importance, size and audience of the museums gets smaller.

  Helen Molesworth, chief curator at LAMOCA, was quoted in the Art Newspaper article as saying that the concentration of artists is “a symptom of how culture works in general, which is towards consolidation. … What are you going to do? They have amazing groups of artists. You can’t be wilful and say, ‘I’m not going to show this person.’”91 There is also pressure to produce a profit, or at least have a large attendance for each exhibition, which makes curators less willing to risk shows with less-recognized artists. Risk is associated with choosing artists represented by less-recognized galleries.

  One interesting aside from analysis of the six hundred solo shows is that almost 75 percent featured male artists. The Art Newspaper calculated that male painters represented by the five galleries were 7.3 times as likely to be given solo shows as female painters represented by the same galleries.

  What is less well known is the degree to which über dealers finance their artists’ appearance at the Venice Biennale and other cultural events. Michael Plummer, co-founder of Artvest Partners, says, “Venice very much affirms a dealer’s taste and judgement, which is why dealers make such a significant investment of time and money … There is a great deal at stake for the dealer’s brand.”92 The Art Newspaper cited a spokeswoman for the British Council as saying that the council’s budget for the British pavilion at Venice is £250,000 ($375,000) and that dealers pay the “entire cost of the production of new work made for the exhibition” plus the cost of the opening reception.93 It’s not just Venice; with so many biennales around the world, a gallery needs deep pockets to be able to participate. That restricts the game to über galleries.

  Dealer support is not entirely altruistic. While Venice, like other biennales, is assumed to be a non-selling exhibition, in reality it is an important marketplace. No savvy visitor would ask, “How much is this work?” Rather, he or she offers a business card and says, “I would very much like to talk to you about this piece after the Biennale closes” (which may mean that evening).

  The concentration on five galleries and around three hundred international artists and estates raises concerns about the extent of dealer influence on museum curation. Robert Storr, then dean of the Yale University School of Art, said about the Art Newspaper findings: “Curators are abdicating and delegating their responsibilities … to more adventurous gallerists who, aside from the profit motive and in some respects because of it, seem in many cases to be bolder and more curious than their institutional counterparts.”94 New York artist William Powhida puts it more directly: “The curatorial message today might read: ‘The best art is the most familiar art because the market is so smart. We are redundant!’”95

  There is another anomaly in what museums show, a version of the economist’s idea of sunk costs. A donor will gift a museum a work that the museum (or donor) publicizes as having high monetary value. Sometimes the work has been purchased at auction for the purpose of donation. The museum now is under pressure to hang the art for a long period of time—even if it is not of exceptional quality—because visitors have read about its value. This has been compared to a National Football League team having a first–draft choice player who receives a huge signing bonus but soon proves to be a marginal contributor. The team is under pressure to play him no matter how well he is doing, because the general manager feels pressured to justify his investment. Everyone seems to know at least one lawyer who claims he or she would like to leave law practice but anguishes about their own sunk cost—the years and tuition of law school, and the long hours put in before achieving partner status.

  Sometimes a museum exhibit is motivated in part by the hope of future donations. In 2010, the New Museum in New York had an exhibition titled Skin Fruit, which showed work from the collection of Greek collector (and museum trustee) Dakis Joannou. He recommended that his friend Jeff Koons act as curator for the show. The New York Times referred to this arrangement as “museums renting out their reputations.”96 Museum director Lisa Phillips defended the show as a “public-private partnership.”97 It was considered a good show, although art critic Jerry Saltz wrote that Koons’ curating “tells us more about Koons than it does about contemporary art, and he says it better in his own work.”98

  Another change comes when museum curators switch roles after leaving their museum positions. Über galleries hire former curators to mount exhibitions—sometimes of an artist the curator has shown at his or her previous institution. One curator was said to have been offered $350,000 plus a percentage of sales at the show, likely more money for several months of work than he had received in his last two years of museum employment. Involvement of a well-known curator reinforces perception of the gallery as museum-like in stature. The show nud
ges new artists and estates to sign up, and positions the gallery as the place to acquire or sell work from these artists and their peers.

  A well-publicized example is that of John Elderfield, former chief curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA. Elderfield has organized two shows at Gagosian—one of Helen Frankenthaler, one of Willem de Kooning. He borrowed works from private collectors, museums, foundations, estates and other galleries. Institutions and private collectors are likely to look favourably on a request from a curator of Elderfield’s stature. Others who have organized shows for Gagosian include Peter Galassi, formerly chief photography curator at MOMA; Robert Storr, formerly senior curator at MOMA and the Met; and Anya Hindmarch, an English designer of handbags and fashion accessories, and a trustee of the Royal Academy of Arts.

  Several well-known museum people have moved to the commercial side. Paul Schimmel, former chief curator at LAMOCA, joined Los Angeles gallery Hauser & Wirth in 2013 to form Hauser Wirth & Schimmel. He said he would “focus on museum-type shows.” Eric Shiner went from director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to selling Warhols as a vice-president at Sotheby’s. Arnold Lehman, retired director of the Brooklyn Art Museum, became a senior adviser at Phillips. Philippe de Montebello, formerly director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in mid-2017 became a director of Acquavella Galleries in New York where he will focus on special exhibitions. The blurring of boundaries includes museum directors curating sections of art fairs, and collectors hiring curators to help design private museums.

  There is a powerful economic explanation for why museum curators are reluctant to show unknown but promising artists, and for why many will be surprised to read about the audacious museum experiments undertaken by Arnold Lehman at the Brooklyn Museum and Maxwell Anderson at the Dallas Museum of Art. Museum curators and directors, like everyone else, make decisions based on loss aversion. This is one of the most important emotions in economic life; we all dislike and fear a loss more than we feel the pleasure of a gain of equal size. Offered a coin toss where a head earns $100 and a tail results in a loss of $75, most people would refuse to play. The pain of possible loss exceeds the pleasure of an equal probability of larger gain. Or perhaps in 2000 on a hunch you invested in Yahoo shares when they were over $100 and the share value was $128 billion. The value plummeted after your purchase. Logic told you to sell in 2008 when Microsoft offered $48 billion to acquire Yahoo, but your shares were still underwater. Selling in the interim would have meant admitting your mistake and accepting the psychic blow of a loss—which might have hurt more than the monetary one. In 2016, most of Yahoo’s assets were sold for $4.8 billion.