Lockout-Loving Museums Spiral Downward

Layoffs, staff chaos, and a public that’s losing the museum-going habit

T he fatiguing fundamentalists peddling the COVID panic continue to appall. Here in Vermont, Thanksgiving was, by order of our governor, a one-household affair. Only those who live together could talk turkey together. He then ordered our schoolteachers to enlist children as snitches. At school the Monday after Thanksgiving, children were asked whether their parents had broken the arbitrary, intrusive, and unnecessary one-household rule. If so, kicked out of school the pint-sized criminal was, put in quarantine for two weeks for inferior online learning.

I call it the Green Mountain Stasi. What would Calvin Coolidge think? What would my neighbor, Norman Rockwell, think? That nice Four Freedoms picture about Thanksgiving? Slap “Verboten” on it. Or the subtler “Stay Safe.”

Here in Vermont, we’ve had a grand total of 62 deaths “with COVID,” average age 78, almost all in nursing homes, most with advanced dementia, heart disease, or diabetes. We’ve had 4,000 cases, in a population of 630,000. That’s an infection rate of a bit more than one-half of 1 percent. Infection, that is, with a virus from which 99.5 percent survive. The vast majority of the infected, and who knows how ginned up those numbers are, live in nursing homes, assisted-living facilities, prison, or Burlington, our one city.

School’s still for inquiry here, but of the Inquisition kind. I haven’t heard anything about klieg lights or nail pulling. Praise the Lord, the school system owns no lie detectors.

And so the Chinese-coronavirus hysteria rolls on.

Museum lockouts are back. I’m calling them “lockouts” now since I’ll end this story with a report on museum unions. And “lockout” more precisely describes what museums are doing. They’re locking the public out so the staff can stay home.

The big museums in Philadelphia and Cleveland, the Smithsonian system, the National Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and many others have closed again. Museums in California have been closed since March. The major university museums at Harvard and Princeton never opened to the public. Yale’s museum opened for two weeks in October and then closed again.

MoMA and the Met in New York are still open. I don’t know how long that will last, but it seems up to the mayor, who just closed the schools again, and the governor, whose lurid incompetence led to 10,000 nursing-home deaths. I hope the museum community is fighting to keep its doors open, since the rest of high culture in the city is moribund.

Many of the new museum lockouts are government-imposed at the state or local level. Some aren’t. Colleges and universities have chosen to keep the public out. I’ve gotten notices from directors of civic museums announcing that they’re closing because of “an uptick in cases,” somewhere, in an undisclosed location.

Have there been any documented cases of COVID caught in an art museum in America? I believe no one knows of any.

A museum is a tax-exempt institution that serves the public. Barring an extraordinary emergency — think the eruption of Vesuvius — it should be open to the public. “An uptick in cases” isn’t an extraordinary emergency. It’s a cover for a museum whose leaders don’t care about the public. High-paid staff is “working from home,” though most really can’t.

All the museums in Chicago are closed again. Illinois had a strict lockout, but Robert Burns warned us about “best-laid schemes” going awry. Illinois’s Draconian restrictions on freedom over many months were the best-laid traps of power-hungry bureaucrats and neurotics and were always going to go awry. Illinois now has the biggest COVID problem in the country. All the masking, lockdowns, lockouts, and restrictions got it nowhere because we’re dealing with a virus, which will work its way through the population until it’s finished. We humans carry thousands of viruses around with us.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The Thanksgiving museum lockout will stretch into a Christmas museum lockout, and then a flu-season lockout, since flu deaths will be called COVID deaths. Dr. Fear-and-Frenzy Fauci isn’t going to stop tapping the gas pedal. That means less TV time for him and his legion of public-health mediocrities. Dr. Quack said he’s “looking forward to a nice Christmas in 2021.” Ho, ho, no! He wants the spotlight for Christmas, and without COVID, well, he’ll feel he’s gotten lumps of coal.

On January 20, with an imbecile and bungler as president here, we’ll see more lockdowns and lockouts, “until the vaccine kicks in,” we’ll be told.

The Vaccine Wars will have started by then.

Does it work, who’s forced to get it, who refuses to get it? Will a museum visitor need a vaccine certificate? Will museum staff be required to get it? Think the unthinkable, because that’s where we are. The Chinese coronavirus is now treatable, except when it’s not, and that’s the case almost exclusively with old, sick people, who, alas, like all of us, are destined to die, only sooner. Will we let a mass hysteria become paranoia and then an obsession?

So what does this mean for the future of museums? It means an ugly spiral.

Across the board, unless a museum is as rich as Croesus, like the Getty, I’m seeing 20 percent staff cuts in museums. That’s what the MFA in Boston just did as well as the Met in New York and the Museum of Art in Philadelphia. There are additional spending cuts. The first wave is the easiest, and the museum world is just finishing its first wave. Most places got big Paycheck Protection Program money from Congress to keep their staffs intact through early summer.

If the lockouts — the loss in visibility and income — continue off and on for months more, the next wave of cuts is going to be worse. Many friends at the Met, for instance, took a nice retirement package, but they were near, and in some cases long past, 65. The Met cut very junior and lots of visitor staff. Next hit will be middle- and upper-level program staff.

Museums are hoping for another wave of PPP money or some kind of government bailout. They won’t get it. The museum profession as a whole embraced the lockout culture. Too many museums bought the toxic Black Lives Matter line and got involved in politics. The art-museum directors group tried to raid their collections for cash. That’s flopped. If the arts gets new money, it needs to go to theater, music, and opera, which essentially depend on a live audience. Museums, most of which gratuitously keep people out because of “upticks,” don’t deserve a dime.

Exhibition-wise, most museums are in deferral mode. Postponements often become cancellations, though. Collaborators move on, curators leave, new, trendier ideas emerge, but the revenue squeeze, intermittent, interrupting shutdowns, and a middle-term plunge in attendance will lead to a contraction in traveling shows and then more staff cuts.

I’m curious to see how museums will do in their year-end annual appeals. Their visibility has dwindled, and most museum directors have come to love the lockout lazy lifestyle. When I was a director, I felt people wouldn’t give to a museum unless they came, and no one is coming if the museum is closed.

And, let’s face it, there are needs in the country more serious than museums that aren’t opened but are keeping lots of high-paid staff in the money with full-time salaries just for Zooming. I wouldn’t give money to a museum with a big “SHUT” sign slapped on the front door.

Of course, the good news is they can’t complain about museum endowments. The Trump stock market is in good shape. Access to new revenue from the endowment is limited, unless the trustees decide to do a deep dive and raise the portfolio draw.

Once the lockouts ended in the summer and fall, I heard that people weren’t coming in big numbers. Some of that, surely, is the coronavirus madness we’ve generated. People are afraid, and many museums haven’t done much to assuage the fear.

One of the reasons I thought museums should push hard to reopen quickly is my perception that audiences don’t reappear with the flip of a switch. A good visitorship takes years to build. People find other things to do, and “out of sight, out of mind, off the dance card” might be the operative philosophy. It will take many years to reestablish, for instance, relationships that museum educators have with local schools.

Most museums were closed for six months, roughly, from mid March well into October for the ones that care least about the public. All are doing virtual programming. Since I see museum-going as both a communal experience and a direct experience with art, I don’t find it appealing. To me, going to a museum is an event that produces frisson. Virtual programming is something I can switch off from my sofa. I wonder what virtual lectures, webinars, and virtual exhibitions are getting in terms of attendance. A lot of it seems like busy work.

I wonder also if there’s a regional, cultural dynamic at work. Last month, I visited Reynolda House, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Mint Museum, all in North Carolina. I know their leaders lobbied the governor to reopen, and they did it with verve. They wanted to reopen and made that their priority. Attendance was big, lively, and heartening.

None of these three museums is an old, rich, entitled place. They’re not self-absorbed institutions. Their priority, it seems to me, is serving the public. Museums in Texas were the first to reopen in May and June. I felt the same way there. There are big parts of the country where museums are seen, internally and externally, as a source of civic pride. It’s unnatural to them to blow the public off. The big, established, rich Northeast museums and the blue-chip university and college museums . . . I’m not sure that’s the MO.

I’ve written about lockout-loving museums with big internal staff upheaval over pay fairness, cliques, hierarchies. They all seem to go together, and they seem concentrated on the Acela Corridor and wacky San Francisco.

This leads me to a piece of news. I see that the staff of the MFA in Boston decided to unionize last week by a 133–14 vote. The MFA had just eliminated 100 positions to close a $14 million deficit caused by no admission, shop, restaurant, or events income because of the COVID hysteria.

People working at the MFA have been unhappy for years, I know. The board has become corporate. Philanthropically, Boston is a cheap place, so money at the MFA has always been tight. Boston’s a snooty, hierarchical place, too. Lots of the arts energy in that part of New England has moved to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. It has a brand-new building and is showing off a collection that’s as good as the MFA’s.

The union vote is a nuanced symptom of COVID Crazy. The MFA, like almost all museums, shut the place for six months, by order of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and I wonder how well it did in stewarding a frightened, isolated staff. “I find this redistribution of power meaningful,” one of the newly unionized said. Another found “fairness, dignity, and respect” important as well as “a just, diverse workplace.”

It seems, well, discordant that the United Auto Workers and the museum staff partner in this, but the UAW jumped into cultural work years ago. The museum didn’t fight the union effort overall but is contesting the union participation of 40 employees who, it says, are policy-makers, or management, not labor.

It’s a broad-based union drawing from 30 departments and almost all types of workers, from curators to visitor-services people to facilities managers, which is why it will fail as an enterprise. The interests and roles are too various.

Many of the union leaders are young, and “redistribution of power” is a generational issue. They assume that senior people should care about what they’re thinking and embrace their ideas, which they think are morally superior. That’s not the MFA Way. And what power do they want distributed their way? Say in what exhibitions the museum mounts? Editing labels? Prioritizing donor requests? The bottom-line money isn’t going to change.

I read the MFA union group’s Facebook page. It’s a very Boston lefty group. I think they’ll be unhappy. Some of their issues, such as diversity, are amorphous. They probably don’t recognize how much power management has where labor is unionized. I would think that the board and director will work assiduously and surreptitiously to get the union voted out, which will take time and energy from everyone.

In an arts organization, I don’t think a union is workable, except for unions for guards, administrative assistants, and building-maintenance people. Elsewhere, labor isn’t fungible. Everyone develops a quirky niche in, say, a curatorial office. I assume this exists in the fundraising office. There are lots of private deals made that aren’t possible where there’s a union. I have worked for four directors and was a director at two places. The museum director’s always more generous and more approachable than lots of the staff thinks. With a union, the director’s relationships will be by the book, mediated by a shop steward.

They have a right to organize, and clearly there were issues at the MFA about fairness and transparency, as well as fear for jobs, and these issues grew into a push for a union. That’s a failure of leadership. People on top weren’t paying attention. Still, the COVID lockdown and predictable money crunch drove the union campaign.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art staff voted to unionize in August, again, after a big budget cut, layoffs, and a lockdown and, like the MFA, by an overwhelming vote. In the year before, two high-profile in-house sexual-harassment scandals enraged the staff. The place is also doing a massive renovation and addition. These projects are always disruptive. So, even before the COVID mass neurosis, the PMA was in a turgid moment.

I like the director. He is, like me, from the Old World of museum hierarchy and autocracy, a world, I know, that’s antediluvian. I’ve followed staff unhappiness and, eventually, fury at the PMA. I think he was shocked and befuddled by the mass uprising, but he’s a great director.

Since the wave of furloughs last week, after the PMA’s latest lockdown, the newly unionized are crying “why can’t the trustees just find the money” to keep people working and “why can’t they just grab some money from the renovation?”

Take it up with your shop steward. Management doesn’t need to listen to individuals anymore.