The New York Times ran an article about Eli Broad offering a $30-million dollar bailout to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Apparently their endowment has lost 75% of it’s value, combined with the museum consistently dipping into the principle to keep the doors open, leaving less than $10-million in the bank. This made me think of two things:
1. Thanks to the magic number of $700 billion I’ve heard about 700 billion times in the past month or so, my perception of money is getting a bit skewed. When seeing the NYT story my first thought was, “wow $30-million is not that much, really”. Then I thought about it for a few seconds more and realized, actually, yes that is a lot of money. Reality check anyone?
2. Part of me wants to go down the road of complaining about banks getting $700-billion because they screwed up, while many museums are also being affected by the economic downward spiral but they don’t get any help. Boo hoo. I’m going to put on the breaks though…MOCA LA mismanaged it’s endowment and was spending too much money. Perhaps the museum hasn’t been running like a non-profit cultural institution, but instead like a major corporation. Perhaps they were spending too much money and expanding too quickly, falling into the traps of contemporary art that insists that bigger is better and more is better. Perhaps it’s time for everyone to chill out a little and take the advice of my seventh grade art teacher: it’s about quality, not quantity.
Knowing the many, many small (and yes, struggling) non-profits just in the Upper Peninsula alone, it’s hard for me to feel sorry for the large museums that are suffering now. Perhaps they need to scale back (sorry Mr. Koons, we can’t commission you to make another huge doggie balloon for the front courtyard) and focus. This could make everyone a bit more creative about what they do and how they are able to do it. I’m not wishing hardships on any museum, but I am saying that this could be a much needed wake up call, similar to the wake up call going on in the for-profit world.
