Museum of Tomorrow?

Sketching a Future for The Brooklyn Museum
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Article by Robin Pogrebin

Photos by Todd Heisler

Published: August 5, 2010

THOUGH it resides in a prime example of traditional museum architecture — a Beaux-Arts building designed in 1893 by McKim, Mead & White — there is little stale or stodgy about the Brooklyn Museum. For more than a century the museum has been one of the country’s most important cultural institutions, and for more than a decade it has also courted controversy.

And that is by design, part of a considered effort to address the challenges that it, along with many other museums, face: how to appeal to a new generation in a climate of persistent financial pressure and the ambition to grow, to do more, to expand its audience. By some measures it has succeeded. By others, including attendance goals articulated by the museum itself, it has not.
With a stagnant economy magnifying these challenges, The New York Times asked experts with various perspectives, including artists, business executives and museum directors, to take a look at a number of questions that now confront the Brooklyn Museum and others. Is attendance a good measure of museum success? How do institutions build financial support at a time when both donors and the government feel pinched? Should a museum do more to engage its local artists, who, in Brooklyn’s case, are an especially vibrant group? And how should the unorthodox approach of the last decade be assessed?

In 1999 the museum created a maelstrom by exhibiting a painting that depicted the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, prompting the mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to threaten to cut city financing. In 2002 it hosted an exhibition featuring props, models, costumes and characters from the “Star Wars” films that struck some reviewers as particularly lowbrow. And five years ago it added an unapologetically brash, modern glass entrance to the Old World exterior of its building.
More recently it gave away its celebrated costume collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and did away with traditional curatorial departments — like Egyptian art, African art and European painting — in favor of “teams” for exhibitions and collections. It included a Louis Vuitton shop in its Takashi Murakami exhibition, including handbags and other items designed by that artist. And it agreed to devote an exhibition this month to the work of whichever unknown artist beats back the challengers on Bravo’s reality show “Work of Art.”

For many, the museum’s often populist efforts have been just the kind of inventive risks necessary to stay accessible to the kind of visitors it has recently shown an ability to attract. The museum’s audience, which numbered 340,000 people a year at last count, is now significantly younger and more diverse than it had been, with an average age of 35 and members of minority groups making up 40 percent of its visitors. Others grumble, though, that the institution’s approach has undermined its stature, undersold its world-class collections and done little to increase attendance, which museum officials had once hoped would triple. Attendance, in fact, has been flat, even after the museum several years ago introduced First Saturdays — free nights that include music, dancing, food, a cash bar, gallery talks and films — which account for nearly a quarter of its visitors. 

For the complete story, featuring opinions by PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO, KAREN BROOKS HOPKINS, WILLIAM POWHIDA, ROCHELLE SLOVIN, DANIEL SIMMONS JR., ANN PHILBIN, MAXWELL L. ANDERSON, MICHAEL M. KAISER, MARTY MARKOWITZ, GRAHAM W. J. BEAL, BILL IVEY, DAVID A. ROSS, STEPHEN A. SCHWARZMAN, WENDA GU, LAURIE BECKELMAN, KIKI SMITH, PETER C. MARZIO, and RICO GATSON, see The New York Times.com