The New York Times has a story on the increasingly permeable boundary between nonprofit museums and for-profit galleries that represent the artists shown within them (also covered by my blog neighbor CultureGrrl). At issue is a series of recent museum exhibits, where the galleries representing the exhibited artists provided significant financial and logistical support. Asks the article:
Should nonprofit art museums accept money from commercial galleries with a clear financial stake in the artist’s career, and in some cases in the artworks on display? More generally, can the willingness of galleries to pony up subtly influence what a museum sets out to exhibit?
The artistic leadership of these exhibits claim that requests for support followed their decision to mount the show, rather than preceded it. Others point to the rising costs and diminishing resources that make such support necessary to mounting a show at all. The tension only underscores the fact that for-profit and nonprofit cultural enterprise are (and have always been) entirely interrelated, and the influence across that invisible boundary is more a matter of degree and perception than absolute separation.
According to Bruce Altshuler, director of the museum studies program at New York University, the important questions regarding such gallery/museum relationships boil down to two:
”Was the decision to mount the exhibition made because of funding from someone with an economic interest in the show? And did that funding lead to the ceding of curatorial decision making or some influence on the choice of works in the exhibition?”
Let the rationalizations begin…
Easy. It’s obviously high time we did away with the artificial and delusional distinction between for-profit and not-for-profit entities. The idea that curators specifically, and non-profit administrators generally, have no interest in personal aggrandizement, power or influence is — er — ludicrous. An organization’s non-profit status should in no way sanctify the judgments of those who work there, whether they are deciding what art to showcase or which social group deserves special help. All socio-economic power and influence flow from the same faucet.
It seems that, in this instance, the museum industry is just catching up to the nonprofit theatre industry. For years, some of the country’s top nonprofit theatres have accepted “enhancement money” from commercial producers to augment production values for projects that the producers are interested in moving from nonprofit venues to commercial theatres. It doesn’t seem to harm things — audiences get the opportunity to see larger, better financed productions (especially of musicals), the theatre gets access to more resources, the creative artists get more time to develop their properties at a marginally lower cost and in front of an audience before moving to higher profile and higher risk venues.
I think we tend to think that audiences care more than they really do about how the product onstage or in the gallery got there for them to see. They plunk down their money and they just want to see something entertaining or beautiful or inspiring or whatever…
Jeannie’s comment reminds me of a very recent discussion I had with a board member of my organization about this issue of non-profits and contending with the “interest in personal aggrandizement, power or influence” that one could argue is an aspect of human nature that laws exist to manage. The discussion was about a non-profit-in-progress musical organization with direct ties to a for-profit record label operated by the founder and president of the potential non-profit.
In the course of the discussion, I kept using the Catholic Church, and its celibate priesthood, as an analogy. And, I think that institution – and some of its recent issues are also ones that face the perhaps less-cloistered realm of non-profit arts administration. Some have been brought up on this blog.
These issues being:
1. Are non-profit arts organizations through their charitable purposes and structure “closer to God” so to speak?
2. Should the restrictions and structural requirements be loosened to create more effective work – allowing the non-profit “priesthood” to marry or engage in other currently forbidden relationships?
3. Is it even possible for a human (or an organization made up of humans) to transcend (for lack of a better word) the baser parts of human nature, such as those that continue the success of Capitalism?