Museums Given New Guidelines for the Art of Dealing With Business

The country’s largest museum group, admonishing its members to draw strict boundaries around the deals they strike with corporate donors, has called for museums to maintain control over their exhibitions and to disclose to the public the arrangements they make with contributors.

The advice from the American Association of Museums, an organization in Washington with 3,100 member museums, zoos, aquariums, and other cultural sites nationwide, comes amid criticism of what some perceive as increasingly cozy relationships between arts organizations and their corporate sponsors.

In recent years, for example, questions have been raised about the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on Tiffany silver and jewelry, which received backing from Tiffany & Company itself, and the Guggenheim Museum’s exhibit of the fashions of Giorgio Armani offered not long after Armani pledged a reported $15-million to the institution.

The new guidelines are intended as a companion to the museum association’s long-established ethics code, and are the third in what is planned to be a continuing series of documents offering institutions further guidance on ethical issues. The association appointed a committee to explore corporate sponsorship one year ago, shortly after the group issued guidelines on the rules museums ought to adhere to when exhibiting borrowed objects.

How to handle borrowed objects became a hot topic in 1999, when controversy swirled around the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s exhibition of works from the private collection of the advertising executive Charles Saatchi. Mr. Saatchi was one of the exhibition’s biggest financial backers. He also stood to benefit from it because the increased exposure to his collection was likely to raise its value.

Edward H. Able Jr., chief executive officer of the American Association of Museums, says the newest guidelines were not a result of any particular situation.

“There was concern over the growing complexity in the whole area of corporate support — new arrangements, new innovations, new expectations from businesses,” he says. “Our board felt it was time to offer guidance to our members, guidance that would also be helpful for corporations because it would give them an idea of the issues we are dealing with.”

In the past, when Fortune 500 companies routinely awarded grants to help museums put on blockbuster art shows, few questioned the public-relations benefits the companies reaped and the exhibits that museums were able to mount with the help of corporate dollars. But fewer arrangements appear as tidy as before, Mr. Able says, especially as corporate-sponsorship deals are more typically handled through a company’s marketing division than its corporate-giving program. And as competition for corporate dollars increases — particularly as the demand for money to meet capital needs and consumer demands rises — museums face tough decisions about whether to accept money with strings attached.

Written Policies

According to the new guidelines, institutions that pursue corporate sponsorships ought to avoid not only conflicts of interest but also the potential for, or appearance of, such conflicts. They should also adopt a written policy about corporate support.

In crafting the policy, the guidelines say, museums ought to consider, among other issues, whether they will refuse money from any particular company or type of business, “taking into consideration,” the document says, “the characteristics, values, and attitudes” of their audience and mission. Cultural groups should also consider whether they will enter into agreements with a business that restricts the institutions from receiving support or using the products or services of a competing company. And they should not make doing business with vendors contingent upon contributions from those vendors.

Museums, the guidelines say, ought to craft clear rules about the use of their names and logos by corporate sponsors, and about how the museums will acknowledge a company’s support, such as through the use and placement of signs of specified sizes.

Museums should document all business relationships, whether with standard forms, letters, or contracts, the guidelines say. And the documents ought to include provisions for canceling the agreements if, for instance, there are changes in the ownership of a business or changes in its products and services that are not consistent with the museum’s mission, standards, values, and reputation.

“Museums need to carefully consider who they are co-branding with, to what company or to what kind of company they are attaching their name,” Mr. Able says. “Maintaining integrity and the public trust is the goal.”

Mixed Reviews

Museum officials say that the guidelines may help institutions examine their practices and make more consistent business decisions.

Lynne Gumpert, director of New York University’s Grey Art Gallery, says she welcomes the suggestions because they set a standard for an industry that has been grappling with ethical questions. And, she says, her gallery is likely to work on a written corporate-sponsorship policy based on the guidelines.

But having such a policy will not necessarily keep institutions out of trouble, she says. Two years ago, the Grey Art Gallery was criticized for its exhibit chronicling 100 years of the products and advertisements of a Japanese cosmetics company that had donated $500,000 to the gallery’s endowment.

“We could point to a document that says everything we stated back then — we kept complete control of the exhibit, there was no conflict of interest with our mission, there was no individual or business that benefited at the expense of our mission, that we were straightforward and upfront about the funding — and still be criticized by the public or the media,” Ms. Gumpert says.

Other museum officials say that the association’s suggestions may go too far.

David C. Levy, president of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, calls unrealistic, for example, the guidelines’ pronouncement that a museum’s relationship with its vendors ought not be contingent upon contributions.

“If you have a situation where every bank in the region supports you except one,” he says, “and that bank comes in and says, ‘I want to manage your portfolio,’ you’re going to say, ‘Hey, you’re the only bank in the region not supporting us. Why should we do business with you when you haven’t shown good faith in us?’”

Mr. Levy says that he favors having a corporate-sponsorship policy, but, he says, “you have to understand the reality: Museums are going to do business with businesses, and we can’t be too much holier-than-thou.”

The guidelines are available on the Internet at http://www.aam-us.org/business_support.htm.