The American Museum Is In Crisis

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Most art world squabbles never make it past the echoes of white-walled galleries, but a recent series of scandals and protests have spilled into the mainstream, plunging some of the world’s greatest museums into a crisis that hasn’t been seen since the furor of the 1980s culture wars.

Back then it was a group of senators attempting to defund the National Endowment for the Arts. This time, it’s private philanthropy that’s in the crosshairs. And it’s not politicians leading the charge but the artists themselves.

The latest head to roll is Warren Kanders, who stepped down from the board of the Whitney Museum of American Art on July 25 after a monthslong campaign against him. The reason: Kanders is chairman and chief executive officer of Safariland LLC, a manufacturer of tear gas that was purportedly used against migrants at the U.S.-Mexican border.

As a response, the group Forensic Architecture partnered with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras to make a video critical of Kanders’s businesses that went on view in the museum’s Whitney Biennial (through Sept. 22). Another group called Decolonize This Place unfurled banners on the museum’s facade. Four artists requested that their work be removed from the museum because they refused “further complicity with Kanders and his technologies of violence.” About 100 Whitney staff members signed an open letter calling for Kanders to quit. In his resignation letter, Kanders cited “the targeted campaign of attacks against me and my company.”

At the same time, photographer Nan Goldin has led an assault on donations from the Sackler family, whose name is on the walls of institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Louvre in Paris, and the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Mass. The family’s fortune is partially derived from the opioid OxyContin, and after a series of demonstrations this year, the Guggenheim and the Met in New York as well as the Tate in London announced they would no longer accept donations from the family. (The Louvre has since removed the Sacklers’ name.)

The increased scrutiny on the source of museum trustees’ wealth, augmented by the heightened activism in response, comes at a time when arts institutions are struggling to stay solvent at all. The American Folk Art Museum had to vacate its flagship space in New York in 2011; in 2015 the Museum of Biblical Art in New York closed altogether; earlier this year the Newseum in Washington, D.C., announced the sale of its building to Johns Hopkins University.

American cultural institutions, starved of public support, need to fundraise. But an aging donor base, changes in the tax code that inhibit charitable giving, and a younger generation that prioritizes environmental and political causes over the arts have forced museums to fight for donations. This isn’t about capital campaigns or new buildings—­it’s about ­keeping the lights on.

Admission fees represent about 16% of the Met’s total $297 million revenue, according to its most recent annual report. Funds generated by philanthropy (both from the endowment and gifts) represented more than 50%. At the Whitney, admissions represented 11% of its almost $90 million total revenue last year—there, too, contributions and grants made up about 50%. “The business of a museum is to serve the public, and those programs cost more to deliver than they earn,” says Amy Kaufman, a museum consultant whose clients include the Studio Museum in Harlem and Storm King Art Center in Cornwall, N.Y. “As long as we choose not to [publicly] fund the majority of our cultural organizations, we’ll still be investing huge sums into fundraising year after year.”

Only now, fundraisers must reconcile the current “cancel” culture with the fact that massive wealth is inevitably controversial, which means it’s almost impossible to predict which trustee might become the next flashpoint. “Just think, three years ago, would Mr. Kanders have even been challenged?” says Diana Duke Duncan, a Washington, D.C.-based museum management consultant who’s worked with the Smithsonian Institution, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation. “That’s how rapidly things have changed.”

Since their inception, most of America’s museums have relied on patrons, many of whom made their money in ways that some might find unsavory. The Art Institute of Chicago was spearheaded by Charles Hutchinson, whose Midwestern meatpacking facilities predated those described by Upton Sinclair when he wrote The Jungle, his exposé on the industry. Before steel baron Henry Clay Frick founded his museum in New York, he achieved notoriety for firing 3,800 striking steelworkers, then hiring Pinkertons, a private police force, who shot into the crowd. There might be blameless American fortunes, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at a register of the country’s founding museum trustees.

And yet for more than a century, these very museums have often been champions of a decidedly critical avant-garde. Diego Rivera famously inserted Marxist ­imagery in his fresco “homage” to Ford Motor Co. at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the 1930s: Forty years later artist Hans Haacke installed a piece at New York’s Museum of Modern Art that asked, “Would the fact that Governor Rockefeller has not denounced President Nixon’s Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in November?”—when Rockefeller was on MoMA’s board.

In 2011 artist Andrea Fraser wrote an influential text that stated “many of our patrons are actively working to preserve the political and financial system that will keep their wealth, and inequality, growing for decades to come.” The takeaway, she continued, is that “what has been good for the art world has been disastrous for the rest of the world.” Five years later Fraser was given a solo show at the Whitney.

Museums argue they cannot afford to be too choosy about whose gifts they will accept, given the paucity of major givers across the board. “Historically, this country made a decision, politically and economically, that cultural institutions, hospitals, and universities would be primarily supported by private philanthropy,” says Daniel Weiss, president and chief executive officer of the Met. “We’ve taken the view that the people who support us should be honorable people doing upstanding things. But we don’t subject them to scrutiny like, ‘Did they make their money in areas that some of us might find politically objectionable?’ ” he continues. “If the money is being put to good use, and serves the museum’s best interest, and if the donor made those funds legally, we’re satisfied.”

This month, New York magazine published a list ranking the city’s “most toxic museum boards” and put the Met at the top, mostly because of its trustee emeritus David Koch, an aggressive backer of right-wing efforts. Almost every major museum in the city made the list: MoMA for Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock Inc. (a large shareholder in two companies that contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement); the American Museum of Natural History for Rebekah Mercer, investor in Cambridge Analytica.

A solution, says Duncan, is for museums to preempt criticism by diversifying boards in advance. “Change the makeup and points of view on the board so that there’s some self-checking going on,” she says. “If you become too reliant on one point of view, that’s where you get in trouble.”

Weiss says the Met is open to change. “It may well be that in the coming years there will be pressure to do things differently, and we’ll be open to that discussion. But for the moment, we feel comfortable that what we’re doing is sensible, ethical, and strategic.”

But as long as museums rely on private funds, Duncan says, there isn’t much they can do—and the protests will keep coming. “It’s impossible to replace a major philanthropic component of your operating budget with someone who has no [negative] exposure at all.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net, James Gaddy

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