How Museums Risk Losing Public Trust

Museums today are much larger physically as well as in size of staff and budgets than they were just a few decades ago — and therefore more complex and harder to manage. Size in itself is not a problem, of course, but larger buildings do need to be maintained, and larger budgets fueled by money. The resulting pressures tend to lead to policies that are driven not by mission forces but by market forces. And when market forces dominate, the public’s trust in museums will begin to erode.

To be sure, the degree of professionalism that informs all levels of museum work is as high today as I have ever known it. It is therefore a real shame that the conscientious, scholarly, and imaginative work that curators are producing today is so ill-served by their museums’ policies in so many areas — policies that have let the merchants into the “temple,” though perhaps not quite yet into the “sanctuary.”

Across the United States, museums have shifted from being repositories, primarily, to being activity centers. Over the years, museums have added professional staff members to mount more and more programs, and they have added even more administrative employees to support the effort across the board. The resulting increased costs, which are huge, can only be met by increasing attendance, which generates both admission fees and ancillary income that visitors provide by patronizing museum shops, restaurants, and parking garages.

Thus, the continuing pressure to keep the public coming in ever greater numbers translates into pressure to mount yet more exhibitions (they are the great-est attraction for visitors). Success at the gate, it would logically seem, calls for subjects of a popular nature.

Over and beyond this temptation to choose exhibition subjects primarily for their popular appeal, the trap in which museums are now caught is that to maintain financial equilibrium, the dizzying momentum in the activity level must be sustained.

Deceleration, on the other hand, would result in substantial deficits. At this point, therefore, any effort to try to reduce the overall activity level, as one would wish, would have to be matched by painful structural changes.

Museums have become so hyperactive that banners furled and unfurled on museum facades do not indicate the glow of health but rather the flush of fever. The cure, whatever it is and whenever it is administered, may prove to be a bitter pill.

Indeed, the work of art, once sovereign, has ceded primacy of place in many an administration’s attention to the public. That there should be any apposition between the two is, in itself, regrettable. The increased focus on visitors carries with it an interesting paradox, namely, that when the visitor, as opposed to the work of art, occupies center stage, he is likely to be less well served, not better served. As the museum strives to attract him and please him, he will, inevitably, be catered to. That is, to ensure that he is counted at the gate, he will not be challenged. Instead, most likely he will be greeted, through the programs that are offered, at his present level of artistic sophistication. By definition that is not a broadening or enhancing experience of the kind that we are obligated by our missions to provide.

Rather than competing with the entertainment industry for audiences, which is wrong-headed and bound to fail, we must emphasize what makes us different and special, indeed unique, and capitalize on these differences: notably, authenticity and the wonder of art. Only then can museums hope to retain and capture a public that will be loyal, not fickle like those who would flock to some razzle-dazzle event, but a public that will return time and again, confident — indeed trusting — in the institution’s determination to fulfill its promise of an enriching and uplifting experience, one that is not watered down by misplaced popularization.

The increasingly frequent flirting of art museums with spectacles of popular culture brings to mind Hamlet’s chiding the actors that their histrionics on stage, “though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve.”

If museums continue to spoon-feed the same subjects to their public, albeit in slightly different permutations, themes endlessly revisited because of their predictable popular appeal — most people, after all, favor what they already know — then the public will not learn to demand more of museums of art, their horizons having not been sufficiently expanded. And that is a direct consequence of a clear breach of yet another aspect of the public trust, which is the obligation of the museum to return the favor, so to speak, and that is, to trust its public. It goes both ways.

All institutions have central purposes that define their integrity and being. Museums exist to display authentic objects of nature and culture — yes, they must teach; and yes, they may certainly include all manner of computer graphics to aid in this worthy effort; but they must remain wed to authenticity. Theme parks are gala places of entertainment, committed to using the best displays and devices from the arsenal of virtual reality to titillate, to scare, to thrill, even to teach. I happen to love theme parks, so I do not write from a rarefied academic post in a dusty museum office. Theme parks belong to the realm of commerce, museums to the world of education.

When art museums rush to be commercial or seek to titillate their visitors, we see a lamentable failure of nerve. Our institutions — even though often founded by businessmen in league with civic officials — were not created to make money and vaunt civic identity. They were based on deeper values, values that affirm human creativity on the part of individuals and civilizations. One would expect those values to show up in our marketing, because how we market our museums tells much about how we view ourselves, and we should not expect our public to be unaffected by such attitudes. It is this area, marketing and promotion, where the public trust, our public’s confidence, can be so easily shaken.

So what are we telling our public in our relentless use of superlatives that makes us sound like town criers or ringmasters? Are we certain the public is convinced by our repeated claims that what we present is always the first, the biggest, the best, or the only of something? Credibility is not achieved by stretching credulity.

Public trust is not served by false or exaggerated claims, and we’re all a bit guilty on that score and we must be more watchful of what we take credit for.

What is the public to think, for example, when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, declares, upon the completion of two new buildings, that it is now “the sixth-largest museum in America”? The claim may be true quantitatively when it comes to square footage, but the institution’s standing as far as its collections are concerned, surely the more important gauge, has not changed that markedly. In being thus careless, museums risk sowing the seeds of doubt about all else they may declare or claim.

Also, what message are museums sending when they broadcast their own lack of faith and confidence in their primary purpose? The Victoria and Albert Museum’s ill-conceived advertising campaign of a few years ago is infamous, but worth recalling in this context. The museum, in a bid to shore up declining attendance, advertised itself as a café with “art on the side.”

It may seem petty to dwell upon semantics here, except that I believe in words and their ultimate betrayal of the user’s thoughts, or at least inclinations.

I don’t take these types of promotions literally, and they are not serious transgressions, but they do represent a certain slackness, or sloppiness, that museum officials should be careful to avoid; many people do pay attention to what we say.

The phrasing of a recent promotion by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, although stressing its many programs, strikes me as unfortunate, its slogan being: “Much more than a museum,” the “just” being implied. This is hardly a cardinal sin on the part of this great institution; it’s a little thing. But it points to something that is not quite so little.

If, in their promotions, museums convey that they are uncomfortable with the notion of being “no more” than what they are, then what can they expect the public to think?

And if in their promotions intended to entice visitors, museums feel that they must skirt the issues of art and excellence and speak of their primary role only obliquely, then what museums themselves indicate is a lack of regard, indeed a lack of trust, in their public.

To earn and keep the public’s trust, we must not sell the public short. If we keep this covenant, the mission will always retain primacy of place — to the benefit of both the institution and the public.

This article is adapted from an essay by Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, that was included in the book Whose Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust © 2004 Princeton University Press and President and Fellows of Harvard College.