In tough times, SAM’s calculated gamble
By Bob Hicks
The Wall Street cowboys keep whoopin’ it up with other people’s money, the Dow dips and rises like a desperate trout on a line, the economists crunch numbers and announce happily that the recession’s over.
And in the real world, people brace for the worst. Jobs disappear. People take pay cuts and thank their lucky stars they didn’t get pink-slipped. Workers go on unpaid furloughs but keep the same old workloads. Basic benefits get deep-sixed. People simply drop out of the job market.
The state of Oregon trembles at the prospect of a half-billion-dollar shortage — a budget hole that will mean extraordinary cuts that are bound to include deep whacks in state cultural spending. This year’s crisis could make last year’s $1.8 million raid on the Oregon Cultural Trust seem like a mild practical joke. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Doors will shut.
Up north, they’re starting to swing already. In a bold and risky move, the Seattle Art Museum has announced that it will shut down most of its operations for two weeks early next year in a bid to cut costs enough to balance the budget. Janet I. Tu has the story in the Seattle Times. The cuts will also include a seven percent reduction in staffing and hefty salary cuts for top administrators.
“We are taking steps to remedy a tough situation,” said museum director Derrick Cartwright, who plans to take at least a fifteen percent salary cut. “I hope it will not impact the public.”
It will, of course. People will show up during those two weeks and the doors will be locked. Some people will be confused or disturbed or angry. Others will shrug their shoulders and possibly never show up again.
SAM and other major regional museums hold special roles in their communities. Even more than a symphony or opera or ballet or theater company, all of which routinely take breaks between performances, an art museum is looked on as a bulwark of reliability and stability. It’s expected to be open, except on Mondays. Only shutting down or curtailing a public library or a public school system — realities that more and more communities face — has a greater potential impact on a city’s sense of its cultural self.
On the other hand: When times are lean, what can you do but take extraordinary steps? SAM’s move is a calculated gamble. It’s more than budget-balancing, it’s shock therapy. Will potential donors see the move as tough, hard-headed pragmatism, or will they see an organization in trouble and tiptoe away? Obviously SAM is counting on the former: People will see an organization willing to make tough but necessary decisions and will want to put their money on the group that willingly faces reality. SAM could end up a “winner” in the increasingly difficult nonprofit funding race — but at what cost?
What do you think? Is this a smart move? How will it turn out? What can other cultural organizations learn from it, and is Seattle’s situation a harbinger of things to come in Portland? Let’s get the ideas rolling. Comments, please.
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PHOTO: The “Art Ladder”, the main staircase of the original Robert Venturi portion of the Seattle Art Museum. The visible statues are Chinese funerary statues: two rams and a civilian guardian. May 5, 2007. Photo by Joe Mabel/Wikimedia Commons.
May 29th, 2010 at 8:51 am
If SAM goes ahead with this potentially foolhardy plan, what they need to do, it seems to me, is do some extremely aggressive marketing–radio public service announcements, television ditto (they’re a nonprofit after all), tourist websites, their OWN website, to make sure a minimum number of people show up in those two weeks to find the museum closed. Meanwhile, the New York Public Library is facing a 37 million dollar cut, which will mean that the NYPL for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, my home away from home these days, will only be open FOUR days a week and the hours will be limited at that, which is true for all libraries in the system in an across the board budget reduction. As for the raid on the Oregon Cultural Trust last year, which outraged me so much I was tempted not to vote for my excellent state rep’s re-election (Ben Cannon, who promised me on my own front porch when he ran the first time that he would work to increase state funding for the arts), donations I’m told actually increased.
I think what arts organizations need to do is emphasize their ARTISTIC strengths, not their management and budgetary skills, which presumably are in the service of the art in the first place. The marketing tail wags the aesthetic dog far too much in our extremely business-oriented society. Take a look at what business has done for us lately, and run for the nearest performance of Oedipus Rex, or Antigone, to get some catharsis.
May 29th, 2010 at 10:23 am
Presumably the decision to shut down pretty much everything for two weeks rather than spreading the pain out with a thousand little cuts is that, in terms of cost-saving, it’s more effective. No salaries those two weeks. No costs (or only minimal maintenance costs) of running the buildings. The reason a lot of governmental bureaucratic offices tinkered with shutting down on Fridays rather than shortening hours through the week is that the savings for a full-day shutdown are more dramatic. Most governments backed away from that when it became clear that not being open at all on Fridays was a much more real hardship for the public than the alternative — and, after all, the bureaucracy is there to serve the public need. Does this consideration — the needs of the public — carry over to the nonprofit world?
May 29th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
The Seattle Art Museum is following in the path of the Seattle Public Libraries, who have used this kind of universal closure strategy in the past. I think it was Deborah Jacobs (former city librarian who developed and bird-dogged a fabulous public campaign for library bonds to renovate branches and replace an ageing main library) when she was faced with significant cuts. It got an incredible amount of attention in our city (as bookish as yours) and generated both donations and sympathy. They’ve had to do this twice since (the last time they shut down the website as well — big attention in our online world). I can’t say that it’s kept them from facing even more Draconian cuts — there’s no real control group in life, but it has kept their difficulties in the public eye, and that’s no small thing.
City departments are currently all implementing furloughs, but are allowed to organize them individually. Some have chosen to spread them out over time and not make any public comment about loss of service, which I feel is a mistake. Yes, the economy is in a bad way, yes we need to cut back to avoid total disaster, but it’s foolish to try and hide the truth. As a museum member, I will be twitchy while they’re closed, but better to be upfront about it than just draw a curtain in front of empty galleries and hope that no one notices.
Sorry for the lengthy comment, but I thought you might be interested in the backstory.
sandi kurtz
Seattle, WA
May 29th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
Sandi, thanks for the Seattle backstory — terrific to have. It also suggests that specific communities tend to handle crises in ways they’ve handled them before: once more, into the familiar brink. So what might make sense for one community might seem unthinkable for another. I absolutely agree; transparency is essential. If you are a public institution or a nonprofit or even a private organization that gets any public money (say, a company that has a government contract for some sort of service) the public has an absolute right to know what you’re doing and how you’re spending your money.
How a large cultural institution handles financial crisis does make a difference, and maybe the choice you make in responding to crisis is less important than the skill with which you carry your decision through. I don’t live in one particular tent or another on the shut-the-doors or bleed-the-patient-slowly methods. But it’s important, no matter which route you take, to be aware of both its advantages and its disadvantages. (And, yes, to be straightforward with the public.) One danger to the shut-the-doors approach is that the public can see it as either blackmail or crying wolf, when in fact it might well not be either one. I think of the risk Oregon Ballet Theatre took last spring in its very public campaign to raise three-quarters of a million dollars in a few weeks to keep the company from folding. The campaign worked, and a year later — after an acrimonious internal meltdown — things look cautiously optimistic. But can you go to that well more than once? And what is the long-term effect on your reputation, not just with the public but also with major donors?
My feeling is that schools, major museums, libraries are pillars of any civilized community and shouldn’t have to face such decisions in the first place. (Of course, there have been many examples of mismanaged institutions that fell into trouble by behaving rashly or carelessly or with foolish optimism; that’s a different subject.) But the distance between what should be and what is can be enormous, and reality dictates that managers of public-interest institutions deal with the world that exists. Realpolitik rules the cultural world, too. Maybe SAM made the best decision it could make under the circumstances. Let’s hope it’s also alert to any collateral damage that comes as a consequence.