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Museums Financial Crisis Struggling to Survive
The Museum of Contemporary Art
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John Haber
John is an arts writer and textbook editor living in New York City. A native New Yorker, he studied physics at Princeton and started writing about art in 1994. His own website now has articles on more than 700 artists and critics, from the early Renaissance to contemporary art. His interests include art and science, art and politics, old and new media, and the future of art. haberarts.com
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John Haber
October 12, 2009
At first glance, only that could explain how two very different museums came under fire. One month everyone is celebrating auction prices or grumbling about museum expansions-or was it the other way around? New Yorkers get to make fun of the Museum of Arts and Design in Columbus circle, while still learning to cope with the clumsy boxes and back stairs of the new New Museum downtown. Out west at LACMA, an ever so popular museum architect, Renzo Piano, finishes off an expansion. And, boom, the new layout centers on Broad Contemporary, a wealthy donor’s collection of contemporary art. Then all it takes is a crash, and two other museums are scrambling to survive.
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The Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Academy surely have little else in common. They occupy opposite coasts and opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary art. MOCA originates or shares talked-about exhibitions-including in the last three years alone Louise Bourgeois, MURAKAMI, Marlene Dumas, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Tuttle. The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts has last exhibited George Tooker, the enigmatic twentieth-century realist, and Ralph Blakelock, the nineteenth-century visionary. MOCA has long struggled with the limits of its two downtown LA locations. The National Academy’s Fifth Avenue brownstone, the 1913 Huntington mansion, could stand for its roots in academic training and its birth in 1825.
Now MOCA is desperate not to expand but to survive. All of a sudden, everyone seems to agree that that it has mismanaged finances with lavish spending on exhibitions. In a restructuring, “leaders in the field of museum management and finance” will step in, while its director, Jeremy Strick, is on his way out. The National Academy has sold two Hudson River School landscapes for $13.5 million, has put two more works up for sale, and has at one point floated the idea of selling the building. Two members of its advisory board have resigned in protest, writing that “your proposal strikes at the very heart of the Academy’s mission.” The Association of Art Museum Directors has asked its members to cease all loans or collaborations.
