Books in Brief: The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics

The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics, by Karl E. Meyer (Morrow, 352 pp., $15). No matter how you look at them, American art museums—André Malraux called them America’s cathedrals—have been a major success story. Since 1950, new museum buildings and additions to older ones have amounted to something like 10.2 million square feet, the equivalent of 13.6 Louvres, and museum attendance figures have climbed with a steadiness Wall Street must envy. Yet art museums have had a bad press recently. Not only have lurid tales of mismanagement and chicanery been making the front pages, but, more importantly, many museums are in dreadful financial shape, for as their door counts rise, so do their deficits. With this in mind, the Twentieth Century Fund, which a few years ago surveyed the problems besetting the performing arts, decided to do the same for art museums, and it commissioned the well-known journalist Karl E. Meyer to do the job. The result is the present book, which took three years to complete—Meyer conducted three hundred interviews in five cities with “museum directors and trustees, curators and docents, auctioneers and art dealers, foundation executives and working artists.” It is too bad that, instead of basing his report on this extensive research, Mr. Meyer relied largely on those old standbys, newspaper clippings, so that much of his account is a rehash of the well-known shenanigans of the art world. However, the reader will also find a lively account of the inner workings of museums: how loan exhibitions are decided on and financed; how the personal likes and dislikes of trustees affect museum operations, including what works of art are acquired or “de-accessioned”; how museums get involved in foreign policy. Mr. Meyer also makes it abundantly clear that the financial bind in which so many museums find themselves is almost insoluble. Though government support on local, state, and federal levels has increased beyond the wildest dreams of its original proponents, these agencies, like private foundations and big corporate donors, prefer to sponsor splashy projects that will attract attention to their generosity rather than to help pay heating bills or guards’ wages.

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The Art Museum: Power, Money, Ethics, by Karl E. Meyer (Morrow, 352 pp., $15). No matter how you look at them, American art museums—André Malraux called them America’s cathedrals—have been a major success story. Since 1950, new museum buildings and additions to older ones have amounted to something like 10.2 million square feet, the equivalent of 13.6 Louvres, and museum attendance figures have climbed with a steadiness Wall Street must envy. Yet art museums have had a bad press recently. Not only have lurid tales of mismanagement and chicanery been making the front pages, but, more importantly, many museums are in dreadful financial shape, for as their door counts rise, so do their deficits. With this in mind, the Twentieth Century Fund, which a few years ago surveyed the problems besetting the performing arts, decided to do the same for art museums, and it commissioned the well-known journalist Karl E. Meyer to do the job. The result is the present book, which took three years to complete—Meyer conducted three hundred interviews in five cities with “museum directors and trustees, curators and docents, auctioneers and art dealers, foundation executives and working artists.” It is too bad that, instead of basing his report on this extensive research, Mr. Meyer relied largely on those old standbys, newspaper clippings, so that much of his account is a rehash of the well-known shenanigans of the art world. However, the reader will also find a lively account of the inner workings of museums: how loan exhibitions are decided on and financed; how the personal likes and dislikes of trustees affect museum operations, including what works of art are acquired or “de-accessioned”; how museums get involved in foreign policy. Mr. Meyer also makes it abundantly clear that the financial bind in which so many museums find themselves is almost insoluble. Though government support on local, state, and federal levels has increased beyond the wildest dreams of its original proponents, these agencies, like private foundations and big corporate donors, prefer to sponsor splashy projects that will attract attention to their generosity rather than to help pay heating bills or guards’ wages.