Big as they are, crowds at New York’s marquee art museums have been bigger.
For example, the Museum of Modern Art, the city’s largest private museum, last celebrated record attendance back in 2009–10. Now it’s in a position to surpass those 3.22 million visitors—by a whisker. For the 12 months ending on June 30, “if projections are met, it is possible we could reach 3.24 million,’’ Kim Mitchell, a MoMA spokesman, said in an e-mail last week. As of late May, MoMA recorded 2.9 million attendees, with such exhibits as “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary’’ and a retrospective of the German painter and photographer Sigmar Polke. June should be suspenseful.
Attendance is a measure of vitality and key source of revenue. MoMA’s admission fees brought in $28.5 million in 2012-13—17 percent of what it collected in operating revenue, donations, and investment income. Attendance also affects membership, retail sales, and restaurant sales. Records are generally driven by so-called blockbuster shows and tourism, museum directors and consultants say.
What should be made of the fact, then, that New York tourism growth has slowed? The number of visitors to the city rose a total of 15 percent over the five years ending in 2013, down from 25 percent growth in the preceding five years, according to NYC & Co., the city’s tourism organization. “Tourism is going up each year so I don’t categorize that as slowing,” Chris Heywood, an NYC & Co. spokesman, said in an e-mail. The number of international visitors is growing “exponentially” and they tend to stay longer and spend more than their domestic counterparts, he said.
Nonetheless, record numbers at other museums also have been in short supply lately. The Guggenheim’s attendance crested in 2009, with 1.3 million. Admissions this year lag 2013 by 3 percent, spokesman Betsy Ennis said. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s busiest season in the museum’s 141 years was 2011–12, with 6.28 million visitors. It’s on track for a second consecutive decline, according to statistics released by Met spokesman Elyse Topalian. The Whitney’s peak was 2009–10, with 372,000. (Spokesman Charlie Tatum declined to release numbers for 2013–14. Like MoMA, the Met and Whitney’s fiscal year ends on June 30.)
Museums nationwide apparently are having a tougher time drawing crowds. About a fifth of adults surveyed by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 visited a museum or art gallery, down from a quarter a decade earlier. “We don’t see anything that suggests a falloff,’’ said Thomas Campbell, the Met’s director and chief executive officer, in a telephone interview. “Where you have a challenge is museums in cities that have less tourist traffic.’’
Exhibit at Austin Contemporary (Yawn).
The above can’t be good news for Austin. Austin should just come clean, fess up and abandon any hopes of ever building a museum of fine art. They’ve tried for 30 years. The demographic the city courted is just not the ‘pay-for-culture’ type(s). The Board members are the same board member that have sunk not one ship but many ships, consecutively. Now, that’s a feat by any stretch of the imagination and knocks onto Einstein’s Theory about: ‘performing the same experiment over and over again, hoping for different results — is the first sign of insanity.’ The last museum that was proposed, was a $40M facility. The rub was — no one on the board did the maths. The operating budget would have gone from $1M to $9M. If they had trouble operating the museum at the $1M level — $9M would have been a real cold bowl of chili. It would have been infeasible then and I don’t think it’s any more feasible now. Unless, the board members want to write checks — but that’s pretty rare. They’d rather have their name on the museum, but have you pay for it. Clever, eh? In that case, they should disgorge the funds that were donated to build any of the museum versions that were never built. They can’t? Why? Because the funds were shanghaied to the operating budget. Call me old fashioned, but if you raise funds for museum(s) that are never built — isn’t that, by definition, a Ponzi scheme? If the funds aren’t used for the purpose in which they were specified/donated and applied somewhere where they were not sanctioned… That gets a little weird on many different levels.
I think they should come up with a ‘pop-up’ museum. It could run on donations of as little as $1.50 p.a. and be every bit as thought evoking as the spoons (above). Now that’s cutting edge, Austin. And cost effective, easy to curate and easy to insure.
Next?