October 22, 1998 | Read Time: 12 minutes
Former university leader and businessman brings big changes to the Getty Trust
In the president’s office at the J. Paul Getty Trust here, there are no paintings by Rembrandt, Cezanne, or Van Gogh, nor are there any other artworks from the institution’s vast holdings. Instead, Barry Munitz has surrounded himself with his personal collection of decorative chess sets.
ALSO SEE:
Deal Between Getty Trust and World Bank Faces Uncertain Future Under New Leader
At a Glance: The J. Paul Getty Trust
Small and large, made of wood, stone, and precious metal, the assembled armies say a lot about the 57-year-old former university leader and corporate executive who took over the trust, one of the world’s richest art institutions, in January.
The martial figures — and the chess books that fill most of his bookshelves — reflect Mr. Munitz’s passion for strategy and problem solving. And that may come in handy as he guides the Getty through a period of rapid and sweeping change.
Since taking the helm of the Getty Trust, an operating foundation that is fueled by a $4.5-billion endowment and includes a world-renowned museum and a broad range of educational, research, and conservation programs, Mr. Munitz has embarked on a thorough review of the institution’s activities. And he is already charting a new course, seeking to expand the trust — which has a total value of roughly $7.5-billion and an operating budget of about $200-million — into new areas.
Direct and informal in an interview, Mr. Munitz muses broadly on some of the possibilities: starting a training program for arts journalists and creating a leadership academy for foundation officials and other non-profit executives.
He is also considering whether to trim or abolish some programs at the trust. In August, he announced that he would shut down the 15-year-old Getty Information Institute, which developed many cutting-edge information-technology tools for arts organizations. In the future, the institute’s projects will be scattered among various divisions of the trust. The institute was regarded as one of the few powerful voices representing non-profit cultural organizations in a digital revolution dominated by technology companies, experts say. The plan to close the institute prompted the resignation of its director, Eleanor Fink, who had run the institute since 1994.
Now, Mr. Munitz says he is considering a similar fate for the Getty Education Institute for the Arts, which operates a wide range of research, training, and advocacy programs intended to improve art education in schools across the nation. The long-time director of the education institute, Leilani Lattin Duke — one of the first employees hired by the trust, in 1981 — announced her resignation from the trust in May.
Mr. Munitz’s changes come as little surprise to those who have watched the organization closely. Many in the art world believed that the Getty Trust had become an undisciplined tangle of seven independent programs during the 17-year tenure of Mr. Munitz’s predecessor, Harold M. Williams, who became the trust’s first president in 1981.
Mr. Williams, who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Carter, is credited with the vast expansion of the trust’s investment portfolio, which grew from $1.3-billion in 1982 to $4.5-billion when he left office, in January. And he is regarded as the mastermind behind the Getty Center, the modern-day acropolis in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, which was built at a cost of at least $1.2-billion.
Today, the Getty Trust has become a victim of its own success in the historic bull market. The trust grew rapidly — and in all directions — in an effort to comply with federal tax regulations that require foundations that operate most of their own programs to spend at least 4.25 per cent of their assets on charitable efforts each year. The pressure to spend, says Mr. Munitz, meant that “there was a relative lack of focus and discipline and priority setting.”
Before he took over, the prevailing view at the Getty was, “We can do it by ourselves, and we can do anything we want to do,” says Mr. Munitz. “But my assignment from the board was to say, ‘Wrong!’”
Now, especially as the stock market has been in flux, Mr. Munitz says it is important for Getty to realize its limitations — and to come up with ways to break free of its dependence on investment revenue.
“I am not comfortable working in an environment where 99 per cent of our operating income comes from one source,” he says. Mr. Munitz’s discomfort is particularly understandable in the current uncertain stock market. This year, the value of the trust’s endowment has slipped, but Getty officials say they do not maintain a running total, so they cannot say precisely how drastic the endowment’s decline has been.
The slippage in value, if it continues, could cause major problems, many Getty insiders privately argue — especially because the institution is spending much more than it had expected to spend to run the Getty Center, a gargantuan, 700-acre hilltop complex of six buildings, with one-million square feet of interior space. Getty officials deny that the center’s costs are running significantly higher than anticipated, but they declined to provide any figures about how much they are spending to run it.
In any case, Mr. Munitz is actively looking for new ways for the trust to finance its activities. He is considering becoming more aggressive in seeking art donations from private collectors so the museum won’t have to spend so much to acquire new works. And he may well decide to seek corporate sponsorships and to collaborate on new programs with foundations that are willing to foot part of the bill.
While the opening of the Getty Center in December was trumpeted across the globe as the most important event in the institution’s short history, the organizational transformation now under way may prove to have an even greater influence on the institution as it enters the 21st century.
Many people who have worked closely with Getty over the years suggest that Mr. Munitz is well-qualified to ask the tough questions — and to make the hard choices — that are necessary to revamp the organization. Before taking charge of the trust, Mr. Munitz served as chancellor of the California State University system, a 23-campus colossus that serves more than 325,000 students and employs about 33,000 faculty and staff members. At Cal State, Mr. Munitz oversaw a budget of more than $4-billion each year, roughly equal to the entire Getty endowment.
Mr. Munitz also has experience in private industry, having served from 1982 to 1991 as vice-chair of Maxxam, the diversified investment company in Houston led by the corporate raider Charles Hurwitz. Mr. Munitz “is an independent person, and in some senses his not having a background in the arts and cultural matters is an advantage,” says Stanley N. Katz, a professor at Princeton University and former president of the American Council of Learned Societies. “He has got the intelligence and instincts to do well, and his background in business will prove to be important and helpful.”
Mr. Munitz is bringing his experience to bear not only in the consideration of diversifying Getty’s sources of revenue, but in his restructuring efforts. He says his goal in reorganizing is to make sure that the programs at the trust interact with each other instead of operating separately. For example, he says, most of the information institute’s programs will continue — but he believes that they will be more successful once they are woven into other programs.
Mr. Katz worries that if the institute’s expertise is scattered throughout the other programs at Getty, the trust will lose the critical mass necessary to be an influential force in information-technology decisions. “The total is more than the sum of the parts. They are going to lose focus, leverage, and the capacity to innovate in the field.”
Getty officials say they don’t think that will happen. But they do say they think the need for the trust to play a dominant role in the field has been eclipsed as other cultural institutions have become more technologically savvy.
“The world has changed around us,” says Jack Meyers, a senior program officer in the grant-making department of the trust, who led the internal management review that called for dismantling the information institute. “Information technology is no longer the province of specialists, the way it was in 1984.”
Ms. Fink, who resigned during the information institute’s reshuffling, says she believes that such arguments are only part of the reason the institute was shut down. She says it also was closed as a way to save money, because the cost of operating the Getty Center had soaked up so much of the Getty Trust’s resources. But Mr. Munitz adamantly denies that cost-cutting was even a consideration.
“This is not an attempt to reduce our expenditures,” says Mr. Munitz. “It is an attempt to focus, to reallocate, to shift some priorities, but not to lower the overall bottom line.”
Getty’s art-education program soon may well face the same fate as the information institute. Apart from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Education Institute for the Arts is probably the most prominent unit of the trust. Over the last 15 years or so, the education institute has been the dominant institution setting the agenda for art education in the nation’s schools. The institute has helped to train art teachers across the country, has supported curriculum development, and has pressed for national standards in art education for students and teachers alike.
The driving idea behind the education institute’s programs over the years has been an approach called “discipline-based art education,” which is intended to be more comprehensive than traditional art classes. Rather than simply encouraging children to make art as a creative or recreational activity, discipline-based art education attempts to explain the broader significance of art through art criticism, art history, and the study of aesthetics.
Now, after the trust has championed the cause for more than a decade, discipline-based art education is accepted as the standard in many public-school systems, says Michael Day, professor of art at Brigham Young University and president of the National Art Education Association.
Such widespread acceptance of the idea is precisely why Mr. Munitz is raising questions about the education institute’s future. “Are we the sole supporters,” Mr. Munitz asks, “or, in fact, has it taken root?”
He adds, pointedly: “What does it say about a given activity that if the Getty didn’t support it, it would disappear? One of the possible answers is it isn’t all that important in the first place if no one else wants to support it.”
Some experts warn that arts-education programs across the country will suffer greatly if Getty decides to end its support for national organizations that encourage discipline-based art education. “To even entertain the notion of weakening their commitment to art education nationally would be a terrible mistake,” says Carol Feinberg, director of the Alexander Julian Foundation, in New York, and an arts-education consultant. “It’s very possible that the scaffolding they have built up over the years will come crashing down.”
This summer, after Ms. Duke, who headed the education institute for 17 years, handed in her resignation, Mr. Munitz appointed Theodore R. Mitchell, a vice-chancellor at the University of California at Los Angeles, to become vice-president for education at the trust. Mr. Mitchell’s title signifies “that education occurs in a lot more places than just the education institute,” says Mr. Munitz. Already, the trust runs school-outreach programs at the museum, professional training activities at the conservation institute, visiting-scholars programs at the research institute, and many different types of educational programs supported by the grants program. But, says Mr. Munitz, “They were splintered, disconnected, balkanized, separated, not in conversation with one another.”
So far, Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Munitz have not determined whether the trust will continue to operate a separate education institute.
Mr. Munitz’s interest in education at all levels is clear. For example, he says he would like to develop programs that would improve the quality of arts journalism across the country. After doing more than 250 interviews with reporters writing about the opening of the Getty Center last year, Mr. Munitz says his conclusion was, “This is not an overwhelmingly large group of sophisticated reporters.”
Efforts to improve arts journalism might include support for internships or fellowships for young journalists and students. In addition, the trust may establish a big cash award for outstanding journalism in the visual arts, he says.
Mr. Munitz says he would like to do even more in the way of new grant making. But because the Getty Trust is organized as an operating foundation, it can spend only a very small portion of its budget on grant-making activities or face severe sanctions by the Internal Revenue Service. In general, an operating foundation must annually spend at least 4.25 per cent of its total assets or 85 per cent of its net income, whichever is less. But grants are not normally accepted as legitimate charitable expenses.
“To me, it makes no sense,” says Mr. Munitz. “If grant making could be a qualified expenditure for an operating trust, we could get much more effective leveraging of our resources on the country’s behalf.”
A straight-talking native of Brooklyn, New York, Mr. Munitz says that he finds much about philanthropy puzzling but that he is not afraid to publicly question operating procedures and government regulations that make no sense to him. “I can ask very naive questions that are on lots of people’s minds,” he says. But unlike some people, who may not want to reveal that they don’t understand why certain rules exist, as a newcomer to the foundation world Mr. Munitz says, “I am not supposed to know the answer.”
