Summary

Published in 2011, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social web-inspired approach to museum exhibits and partnerships and serves as a handbook for museum professionals for engaging in participatory projects. The Participatory Museum looks at how audiences participate in online platforms such as YouTube and Flickr and extends those principles to visitor participation in a museum. The first section of the book presents the theoretical framework for participatory design, and the second lays out practical tips for designing participatory exhibits and programs including types of projects, evaluation tips, and advice on how to build institutional capacity for participatory projects.

Four main ideas make up the theoretical part of the book:

Scaffolding places clear parameters through design into an exhibit that help frame the visitor experience and the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding guides visitors and keeps requests for participation from being too open-ended.

Me to We Design, a recasting of Simon’s earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through personal entry points to make connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals. Those connections take many forms.

Social technographics are a concept borrowed from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement, audience profiles are based on types of activity and include creators, spectators, critics, joiners, collectors, and inactives. Good design considers how the actions of each audience type can enhance the experience of others.

Social objects function as a conduit for participation allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Giving objects a social dimension can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative.

In the second section, one chapter each is devoted to four types of participatory projects—contributory, collaborative, co-creative, hosted—three of which come from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE). Simon added a fourth type, “hosted,” to accommodate projects that are done by outside groups within the museum. The participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants but needn’t be attempted in any particular order. She even demystifies choosing among models through a handy chart.

Analysis

At first, I was skeptical of the book’s wide applicability. Would it work well in the field regardless of museum type, location, or resources? As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions.

• The Participatory Museum is dense in practical information. Tips are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation.
• The examples are diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum
• Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it was clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

The theories underlying The Participatory Museum appear to be sound even if not originating in or having been formally tested in a museum environment at the time of publication. Simon translates what assessment does exist into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like. The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to incorporating participatory design into an institution.

Implications

Simon’s book has had an undeniable impact on the museum field, reigniting debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. In the four years since its publication there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation. And even within the field, participation and the principles laid out in the book have become the focus of conferences, institution-wide training sessions, and professional development workshops. Though participation does seem to be where the field is headed, the principles have met with some resistance from proponents of the more traditional museum experience and design and the absolute control and authority of the institution.

At the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques? The Particpatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

(For a briefer edition of this analysis, check out the abridged version.)

“This may sound messy,” Nina Simon, engineer turned experience designer, writes of participatory projects. “It may [also] sound tremendously exciting.”

Summary

Written in 2010 as a handbook for museum professionals who want to engage audiences in deeper forms of participation, The Participatory Museum presents Nina Simon’s social, web-inspired approach to exhibits and partnerships. At the time of writing, Simon was a highly sought-after experience designer whose philosophy was made popular through her blog, Museum 2.0. Part argument for participation and part toolbox, The Participatory Museum aims to inspire readers’ enthusiasm about participatory design and prepare them to launch their own successful projects.

The book itself is the product of a participatory project. Simon used an online wiki format to allow readers to submit relevant case studies and assist with writing and eventually editing. The online version of the book features linked footnotes for the examples used throughout the text.

Taking cues from social websites like YouTube, Netflix, LibraryThing, and Flickr, The Participatory Museum explores how brick-and-mortar institutions can learn from virtual participatory experiences. Simon defines a participatory cultural institution as one in which “visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content.” Participation encourages multidirectional content experiences: a museum, rather than limiting itself to sending information in the direction of visitors, can encourage those visitors to contribute information to the institution and even share among themselves. Participation also encourages more equitable relationships among all stakeholders, making objects and entire institutions more accessible.

All of this requires an adjustment in thinking about authority, the role of the visitor, and the flow of information between individual and institution. In participatory projects, museum staff members used to holding absolute authority in the interpretation of objects must cede some of that power to visitors. Simon asserts that the very process that makes participatory projects rewarding for museum audiences is often a source of apprehension for museum staff. Done right, according to Simon, “participatory projects create new value for the institution, participants, and non-participating audience members.”

Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins

Using the example of how interactivity has transformed entire organizations such as the Boston Children’s Museum, Simon imagines a future where some institutions are “wholly participatory.” The Participatory Museum advocates for the power of participatory design to fulfill idealistic mission statements about engagement, connection, and inspiring action. Nevertheless, Simon is careful to include the caveat that this new method of design isn’t meant to supplant traditional techniques but to augment them, and argues that the two can peacefully coexist.

Structure and scope

The book is organized into two sections. The first, more theoretical part lays out several participatory design principles, and the second details how four different models of participation can work in practice.

Participation in theory

For Simon, the first and perhaps most important point that undergirds all successful design is a clear connection between the institution’s mission and the benefits to be gained from a participatory project by the institution, participants, or audience. No one will be engaged – or fooled – if a museum halfheartedly invites participation because it has become trendy. To reap the rewards of participation, staff and leadership must understand how the project will advance the museum’s core purposes. This grounding in mission and clarity of benefits makes everything else possible.

The Participatory Museum identifies “two counter-intuitive design principles at the heart of successful participatory projects” that reappear throughout the book. The first is scaffolding, the guidance and constraints given to visitors to help frame the range and nature of responses generated. Scaffolding is necessary to set up a safe environment where audience members feel comfortable sharing and interacting with each other. Simon juxtaposes the completely open-ended request for participation with the thoughtfully narrow one.

Compare, for example, the open-ended dialogue program of British artist Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq,with the Human Library, an event first held for youth at the Denmark Roskilde Festival in 2000. It Is What It Is attempted to encourage visitors to ask questions of people who had served in Iraq by creating a large gallery with provocative images from the country and installing living-room-style seating. At points throughout the exhibition, soldiers, translators, and others were on hand to answer questions from visitors. Simon argues that It Is What It Is lacked “sufficient scaffolding to robustly and consistently support dialogue”: the two times she saw it at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, there were just two guests sitting on couches next to a powerful object.

The Human Library explores similar terrain: it is intended for “anybody who is ready to talk with his or her own prejudice and stereotype and wants to spend an hour of time on this experience.” Participants select a “book” from a catalogue of stereotypes, such as a black Muslim, a cop, a Goth, or a quadriplegic; once at the “checkout counter,” they encounter a person embodying their chosen stereotype for a discussion lasting anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours. The experience was more carefully crafted, and it was a success at generating the kinds of provocative discussions the designers hoped for. The framing of the event as a library eased some of the expected reluctance in confronting visitors’ own prejudices, allowing participants to choose their own book provided a personal entry point into the activity, and even restricting the time helped set people’s expectations. Simon reasons that limitations make people more likely to participate and that better-defined parameters lead to higher-quality and more relevant participation.

Good scaffolding alone doesn’t automatically result in amazing social participation. Truly social interaction, Simon says, has to start with the individual, who begins to climb a participatory ladder from a personal entry point, her second design principle. “Me-to-We” design, a recasting of her own earlier hierarchy of social participation, guides visitors through those entry points to connections with content, and ultimately to other individuals.

Not everyone will always want to engage with others socially, even if an exhibit is designed to allow it. To categorize the different styles of participation, Simon looks to statistics on American adults from Forrester Research’s 2008 “social technographics” tool, which categorizes audience profiles in social media engagement.

Forrester Research’s social technographics participation ladder.

In this framework, audience profiles are based on types of activity. Creators make up a small part of the participation pie, whereas critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives represent the majority in social platforms – and all but the last two (not just creators) count as truly participatory. Good design acknowledges the mixed composition of audiences and provides an outlet for each role to be involved, enabling the actions of each audience type to enhance the experience of others.

Simon devotes considerable attention to two other elements of design: technologies for social experiences and social objects. Each of these concepts is meant to aid in moving toward the “we” end of design. Simon asserts that mediating technologies can make people “more comfortable socializing with strangers” within the physical space of the museum. For example, Internet Arm Wrestling, an exhibit set up concurrently in several science centers around the U.S., enabled long-distance personal interactions. Visitors at one institution sat behind a metal arm and a computer screen and arm wrestled someone elsewhere at the same center or hundreds of miles away at another. The exhibit succeeded in engaging audiences in types of behavior they would not normally try within a museum or, probably, anywhere.

Simon doesn’t neglect the role of objects themselves in prompting social interaction. Simon argues that “social objects,” a concept taken from engineer and sociologist Jyri Engestrom, perform a similar role as mediating technologies, allowing visitors to “focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable.” Social objects differ from regular ones in that they tend to spark interactions among audience members who see them. Simon uses the non-museum example of her dog, who serves as a focal point for social exchanges with passersby when she is out for a walk. Harnessing social potential is as much about good design choices as good object choices, and giving objects a social dimension is an art. It can involve making design tweaks, physically altering objects, or reworking interpretive tools such as panels and labels to make objects more personal, relational, active, and provocative..

Participation in practice

Shifting to the practical considerations for participation in the second part of the book, Simon borrows three categories of participation from the Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) project of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) and supplies a fourth of her own. One chapter is dedicated to each of the participatory models:

• Contributory
• Collaborative
• Co-creative
• Hosted

Simon describes contributory projects as “casual flings between participants and institutions,” with the most common form being the comment box or feedback wall. As the name suggests, these projects solicit contributions from visitors, which can take the form of opinions, stories, or personal objects such as photographs. Of the four participatory models, contributory projects are the simplest to execute and can involve the most people. Even though these projects are relatively casual, scaffolding still helps institutions ask for and receive meaningful contributions through thoughtful questioning and modeling desired behavior. The London Science Museum incorporated visitor-donated toys into the exhibit Playing with Science, and visitors reported feeling a sense of ownership and pride in seeing their toys on display.

In collaborative projects, institutions still take the leading role in project development, but they work side by side with community members to create new exhibits, programs, and services. These projects usually require a higher level of commitment from participants than those in the contributory category. The National Building Museum in DC runs an annual program that collaborates with local youth to create an exhibit based on the photography and creative writing of community members. Participants take part in twelve classes and have the opportunity to “partially self-direct” an exhibit at the museum. To Simon, though, the exhibit is just the beginning. She asserts that the real measure of success for these projects is what happens after they end – specifically, whether participants remain involved with the institution beyond the project. Simon suggests establishing four non-overlapping roles for the management of collaborative projects: project director, community manager, instructors, and client representatives. Each of these roles balances different levels of authority and intimacy with participants, so keeping them distinct, Simon argues, is important to project success and staff sanity.

Co-creative projects may be undertaken at the initiative of outside participants. On the surface, these projects may look very similar to collaborative projects, but the key difference lies in the share of power between the institution and participants. Co-creative projects are demand-driven and “require institutional goals to take a backseat to community goals.” The special sauce that makes these projects successful is a mixture of non-specialists equipped to accomplish both community and institutional goals, and institutions genuinely desiring community input and leadership. Seattle’s Wing Luke Asian Museum uses the co-creative model exclusively in developing their exhibits. Wing Luke staff members facilitate the development of the themes, content, and form of the exhibits by a team of advisors from the community.

In hosted projects, outside participants have almost complete power. One of the most common of these is a late night social event or reception sponsored by an external organization, although some museums may turn over a set of rooms for exhibitions controlled entirely by someone else. In all of these projects, the outside partner carries out their own project within the museum’s space. Despite the near-total abdication of power in these projects, creative constraints are still useful in ensuring a degree of consistency between community-led projects and those led by professional staff.

While the participatory models range from less to more control on the part of the participants, Simon believes that they needn’t be attempted in any particular order and shouldn’t be seen as a progression. She has even demystified choosing among models through a chart that walks through assessing your commitment to community engagement, desired control over the project, preferred level of leadership, availability of staff, skills gained by participants and benefits to nonparticipants.

Toward the end of the book, Simon devotes chapters to evaluating and sustaining participation. Evaluating participatory projects can be especially tricky because it must focus not just on results for the multiple beneficiaries but also on the process itself. And even the best design can crumble with inadequate institutional support and management structures. Simon suggests a few methods to get staff comfortable with taking on more challenging participatory projects, such as encouraging them to “spend time on the front lines with visitors” or conduct audience research. She also offers several strategies for keeping momentum going with newly started participatory projects, including hiring a community manager and cultivating a participatory culture from the very top.

Analysis

After reading The Participatory Museum, museums and their staff, regardless of their size or resources or content, should be able to begin their journey to reinvigorating themselves, right? What’s good for the web must be good for the galleries? I have to admit that at first I had my doubts.

Specifically, I was skeptical that the book’s techniques would work in a museum like mine, the Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre in Laos: tiny, few staff, little money, no technology, almost no repeat visitors, and in a developing country. Forrester Research’s social technographics data draws on audiences in North America, Europe, Australia, Metro China, Japan and Korea – all relatively developed places. If any setting could test the limits of this model, it would be here. As I read, however, Simon seemed to anticipate my objections, and The Participatory Museum succeeded in allaying most of my questions about its applicability.

Many books meant as guides meander through abstractions and skimp on specifics, but The Participatory Museum is as dense in practical information as in theory. Tips (“Generally, a platform that has one-fourth to one-half of the space open provides a feeling of welcome and encourages visitors to share”) are peppered throughout the book. Simon reinforces her points with numerous case studies that illustrate both successful and unsuccessful attempts at encouraging participation. For example, in the section on collaboration, she shares her involvement with The Tech Virtual Test Zone, a 2007 project of the San Jose Tech Museum that did not turn out as expected. Simon’s own personal example of participatory failure was a poignant reminder that even seasoned designers don’t get things right all the time.

The examples are also diverse, featuring organizations from several countries, of many kinds and sizes, and at different points on the participation spectrum—some, even, from organizations similar to mine. To cite just a few cases, Simon presents an advice booth set up in the University of Washington-Seattle Student Center, a community photo-documentation project at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (VME), and a participatory book-tagging experiment in the Netherlands.

I also saw the applicability of Simon’s approach to the developing world firsthand recently, when my museum undertook a community-based participatory project similar to the VME’s. This work brought a flood of enthusiasm among community members previously untapped through traditional design methods. And a colleague in Indonesia recently quoted the book in justifying decisions she made within her museum. Between the examples in the text, and anecdotal evidence from colleagues, it’s clear that participation, as a tool, is useful in building engagement across a wide spectrum of audiences.

But can we trust the theories underlying The Participatory Museum’s recommendations for practice? While an exhaustive review of primary sources upon which the book draws is outside of the scope of this article, Simon certainly seems to have done her homework: her central typology of participatory projects (contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted) is taken from the literature on public participation in scientific research. She deftly adapts it to the somewhat different context of museums, and added the final category (hosted) herself to account for the use of a museum’s space by an outside organization, where she argues persuasively that the principles of successful participation still apply.

That said, readers should be aware that most of the theory underlying The Participatory Museum had not been formally tested in a museum environment at the time the book was published. Simon speaks forcefully about the need for more and better evaluation of participatory projects; she calls the lack of it “probably the greatest contributing factor to their slow acceptance and use in the museum field.” The Participatory Museum seemingly does a good job of enlisting what assessment does exist and translating it into practical advice, and even lays out a blueprint for what good evaluation could look like, but the evidence presented in most cases is anecdotal. (There are exceptions, such as a 2002 impact study of Glasgow’s Open Museum, which lent objects to visitors in the community.) Purely on the basis of what was known in 2010, it is hard to be sure what tradeoffs would be involved in manifesting Simon’s ultimate vision of a new, wholly participatory kind of museum, or exactly how best to do it. Even so, The Participatory Museum gives every indication of being directionally correct, and an excellent guide to starting that process at an institution.

Implications

Whether you love or hate it, the impact of Simon’s book on the museum field is undeniable. With over 250 citations in books and journal articles, and required reading status in graduate museum studies programs, The Participatory Museum is widely touted as a must-read for museum professionals. The book has inspired conferences, institution-wide discussion sessions, and professional workshops around the country, and reignited debate over how to breathe life into decaying institutions. Simon continues to experiment with these principles at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where she has been executive director since 2011.

It’s hard to know how much credit The Participatory Museum can claim for this, but there has been a shift—or at least public perception of a shift— toward more participation in the four years since its publication. The Economist recently noted that museums were almost completely unrecognizable, having changed from being places “where people look on in awe” to being places “where they learn and argue.”

But is participation for everyone? There is a tension in The Participatory Museum between Simon’s utopian vision of wholly participatory institutions and her call for balance between traditional and participatory design. Writing about her divergent experiences during a visit to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks in Wyoming in 2008, she admitted:

I am an elitist when it comes to national parks. I like my parks hard to access, sparsely populated, and minimal in services…I believe in lowering barriers to access and creating opportunities for visitors to use museums in diverse ways. On this trip, for the first time, I truly understood the position of people who disagree with me, those who feel that eating and boisterous talking in museums is not only undesirable but violating and painful.

If participatory design is not the only worthwhile kind of design, where is the proper balance? How do institutions and staff know when they’ve hit the participatory sweet spot and when they’ve gone too far?

Indeed, the principles Simon advocates in her book have met with resistance from some quarters. While many institutions have begun transforming themselves into the new kind of museum that Simon envisions, others hold to their support of quiet contemplation and traditional design and seem to believe that they can meet their missions effectively and satisfy their audiences without these design techniques. Bruce Bratton, a Santa Cruz resident, and Judith Dobrzynski, a New York Times writer, are the most recent standard-bearers of the camp that is critical not so much of The Participatory Museum as of the concept of participatory design itself. Dobrzynski believes that the participatory trend, or as she calls it, “the quest for experience,” has led to a field-wide identity crisis in which entertainment has taken over the previously quiet and contemplative environment for which museums were known. Bratton’s more personal attack took aim at Simon’s own museum, calling it a “hobby circus” and claiming that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History had devolved into a community center under her leadership.

The Participatory Museum does acknowledge these concerns about audience members who don’t want to take part themselves or feel that others’ participatory experiences are intrusive. Early on in the book, Simon argues that the segment of the audience seeking a more traditional experience should not be left out of the process of “mapping out audiences of interest and brainstorming the experiences, information, and strategies that will resonate most with them” that is foundational to audience-centric design. The research profiling participant types notes that “passive” participants outnumber creators anyway, and through strategic design they can still benefit from others’ contributions. But at the end of the day, are audiences more engaged and are institutions meeting their missions more effectively through participatory design techniques?

For all the accolades and buzz it’s received, The Participatory Museum’s usefulness ultimately rests on the answers to those questions. We will need closer study of participatory work to fully understand the implications of the broader trends the book catalogues and appears to be ushering forward. What do we gain from participatory exhibits or institutional cultures of participation? What do we lose? Are there gaps between perception and reality on this front? (For example, the book presents little evidence that participatory design can make museum audiences less white.) Finally, how can we most effectively take Simon’s advice to put the audience first in any design, given the varied desires and priorities of individual members of that audience? The good news is that the success of The Participatory Museum and the speed at which its recommendations have been adopted should provide a wealth of material for researchers to begin answering these questions with more specificity in the years ahead.

Further reading:

• Nina Simon’s blog, Museum 2.0
• Jessica Shoemaker, A review of The Participatory Museum
• Sarah Jesse, What Would the Internet Do?
• University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center, Participatory Museum workshop
• Collections Link, Participation Portal
• Archaeology, Museums, & Outreach; Moving from Me to We
• Mike Murawski, Developing Questions for Visitor Participation
• Interviews with Nina Simon about the book:
  • Huffington Post, Nina Simon and the Participatory Museum Model
  • National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Five Question Q&A
  • Smithsonian Magazine, Nina Simon, Museum Visionary
  • Information and Design, The Participatory Museum

Plaque honoring financier Stephen Schwarzman, after whom the New York Public Library’s flagship building is named. Photo by Flickr user vagueonthehow.

Young whites poring over books, memorizin’ but never learning
And I wonder how the fuck they’ll justify genocide.
“I…I was in the library, honest to God, I didn’t even know.”
—From “The Library,” by Felipe Luciano of The Original Last Poets

On March 7 of this year, my friend and I attended a screening of the film Right On!, a seminal creation of the Harlem spoken word poetry movement of the 1960s. Featuring 28 performances by a group called The Original Last Poets, Right On! is essentially a double-album-length music video that presaged MTV by over a decade. The film’s monologues-with-a-beat offer a brutally honest window into black urban life and identity in the midst of the civil rights era. According to the movie’s producer, as relayed by the marketing copy accompanying the event, it was “the first ‘totally black film’ making ‘no concession in language and symbolism to white audiences.’” It was intense, confrontational, and not quite like anything I’d seen before. I loved it.

“The Library,” quoted above, is not even close to the angriest number in Right On!’s hit parade. But watching the images of what is now the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at the New York Public Library pass by as Felipe Luciano’s fellow Last Poets mockingly intoned “The Liiiiii-bra-ree,” I couldn’t help but revel in the irony of my location: the Museum of Modern Art.

*

As it turns out, Right On!’s run at MoMA was the world premiere of a digitally restored version of the film. Lost to the public for many years, Right On! had been little more than a fading memory until the museum’s To Save and Project festival of film preservation undertook the challenge of bringing it back to life with support from donors Celeste Bartos and Paul Newman.

The work of restoring and presenting Right On! to the public is the sort of thing that institutions like MoMA routinely cite in grant applications as proof of their commitment to diversity. Yet MoMA could hardly have been a more iconic symbol of the white establishment to serve as a setting for the Poets’ time-lapsed performance. Forged from Rockefeller privilege, MoMA was founded to promote the artistry of European modernism, and the most famous works in its collection are nearly all by dead white men. It has $1 billion in net assets, pays its (white) director a seven-figure salary that places him among the best-paid nonprofit executives in New York, and charges among the highest admission fees in the country for an art museum. It was the first target of Occupy Museums. The very room where the Right On! screening took place, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1, first gained notoriety within the filmmaking community for its D. W. Griffith retrospective in 1940, which surely must have included the racist and Ku-Klux-Klan-reviving Birth of A Nation.

Remarkably, the Poets themselves made an appearance at the opening night of the run. I can only guess that it was a heart-warming spectacle of racial healing and harmony, as Luciano didn’t respond to my request to interview him. All I know is that the following night, the night I was there, I counted two black people in the audience.

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Earlier this year, Talia Gibas analyzed Holly Sidford’s manifesto “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change” for Createquity. “Fusing” has become a rallying cry for cultural equity advocates who believe that philanthropic resources are unjustly concentrated in venerable institutions with white European roots like MoMA. The study analyzed the flow of philanthropic dollars to the arts using data from the Foundation Center, and found that less than 10% of arts grant dollars went to serve marginalized communities, including African Americans.

Interestingly, the restoration of Right On!, undertaken by MoMA with the support of individual donors, not foundations, would not have registered as a project serving a marginalized community under Sidford’s methodology. And by excavating a treasure of the black cultural canon from functional oblivion with (from all appearances) the full cooperation of the creative individuals involved, one could argue that MoMA is doing the African American community a wonderful service, fulfilling its role as custodian of heritage in a truly inclusive way. But it’s also not hard to see the transfer in setting from underground movie theater in heady 1970 to establishment art museum in 2013 as a particularly insidious kind of cultural appropriation. It was a striking experience to watch Right On! from the comfort of MoMA, of all places. It was, in fact, like being in a museum, as if there were a glass wall between the movie and me allowing me to appreciate it as a cultural object while preventing me from truly entering its world. The raw, unfiltered power and emotion directed at the camera was boxed in and partially neutered by the time it reached me on the other side of the screen, sitting next to my white college friend and the many white people in the room who could have been my friends if I’d happened to come across them in a different context. As unmistakable as the film’s point of view was, it was easy, too easy, to compartmentalize it as an artifact of a different era, a time when revolution was in the air and the evils of racism were upfront and obvious.

*

I’m not sure there is anything that has claimed as high a brain-energy-expended-to-public-output-generated ratio for me as race this past year. Way back in February, some of you might recall, I inserted myself into a discussion about race and the arts that had been started by New Beans’s Clayton Lord, then Director of Audience Development for Theatre Bay Area and now VP of Local Arts Advancement for Americans for the Arts. At the time, I noted that “virtually all of the recent discussion…in this particular corner of the blogosphere [was] happening among well-meaning white liberals who just can’t help themselves from occupying public space with their opinions.” I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Roberto Bedoya, head of the Tucson Pima Arts Council in Arizona and a longtime follower of this blog, thanked me for pointing it out and challenged me and five other bloggers—pale pasties, all of us—to “share with us some of [our] good thinking and deep reflection on [our] understanding of how the White Racial Frame intersects with cultural polices and cultural practices.” Piece of cake, right?

You can read the responses from Clay, Doug, Nina, Barry, Diane, and Roberto himself at the links provided. As eager as I was to participate (I promised I would, after all), extracting words from my brain these past months was like squeezing blood from a stone. The topic of race offers a white liberal like me a frustratingly narrow range of socially acceptable rhetoric. Like any self-respecting contrarian, I have no interest in saying what’s already been said, but at the same time I felt woefully underprepared to confidently take the conversation in a new direction. It took a long time, a lot of background research, and many discussions with family, friends and social and professional acquaintances who consciously engage with issues around race before I finally felt comfortable airing my views in public.

If there’s one positive and concrete suggestion I can offer in the wake of that learning process, it’s that we do what we can to create an open environment for talking honestly about race relations in all of their kaleidoscopic, maddening, shame-inducing complexity. The dialogue that Clay and Roberto have started is a great first step in that direction, but we need to keep it going if we truly want to achieve more than symbolic progress towards a more racially just sector. And the more I learn, the more strongly I suspect that in order to keep that dialogue going in an authentic way, we are going to need to take it into some very uncomfortable, challenging territory – for white people and non-white people alike, for anti-racism advocates and white privilege apologists both.

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Several of my fellow bloggers who responded to Roberto’s prompt made valuable points about the need and opportunity to be more inclusive and welcoming in our institutions’ programming and audience engagement practices. And certain artistic works undoubtedly have the power to hold a mirror up to ourselves and question the assumptions of our environment, as Right On! was able to do for me. But I feel that this conversation is missing something crucial if we neglect to expand the frame outward, to grapple with how our country and society’s dysfunctional relationship with race informs and warps our lives more generally.

Art and arts organizations are not capable of solving racism on their own. It’s not that the arts have nothing to say about race or that diverse cultural expressions aren’t important, but in the absence of a clear and shared understanding of the underlying factors that perpetuate racism, I fear that arts-centric interventions can all too often end up being little more than a band-aid – a way to reassure ourselves that we’re doing something important and valuable when in reality we’re really having very little impact at all. I believe that the sooner we as a field start framing our efforts not around “what can we do as artists and arts administrators to promote diversity?” but rather “how does racial injustice manifest today, what are its root causes, and how can we as human beings most effectively be part of the solution?”, the sooner we’ll actually have something to be proud of.

For example, I’ve now been a part of several organizations that have struggled with the fact that their staffs are mostly white. One of the most visible commitments to diversity that an organization can make is to have strong representation of people of color among its staff, board, and leadership. Not surprisingly, then, managers typically have these considerations at back of mind when entering the hiring process, and sometimes even explicitly consider race as a factor in their decision. And yet they get frustrated when they are unable to find competitive candidates of color at a rate that would, as advocated by Robert Bush, make them “look like the people [they] serve.”

Simple statistics, however, quickly start to illuminate some of the reasons behind this frustration. Virtually every arts administration job I’ve ever seen requires a Bachelor’s degree as a minimum condition of employment. I’m willing to bet that most arts administrators don’t realize that fewer than a third of American adults over the age of 25 have one. More to the point, however, black and Hispanic adults are 40 to 60 percent less likely respectively to have graduated from college than whites. So if having a Bachelor’s truly is a requirement for doing the job well*, then “success” as it relates to representativeness actually means matching the proportion of people with college degrees, not the general population.

Of course, if you have any conscience at all, the above rationalization is unsatisfying. It openly admits and does absolutely nothing about a basic racial equity issue: access to opportunities based on educational attainment. But therein lies the rub: if we actually care that the disparity in college graduation rates is causing our application pool to be less diverse, that is if we care enough to do something about it, our daily work may not be the most appropriate forum in which to take action. What’s needed to close that gap, in all likelihood, goes way beyond the arts.

(*This is, of course, an important question to examine in its own right, but in the interests of not biting off more than I can chew with one article, I’m going to sidestep it for now.)

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The stark disparity in college graduation rates described above can be seen as one manifestation of the so-called “achievement gap” between white students and black and Hispanic students. This achievement gap is present from a very early age, though not necessarily birth. One contributing factor to the achievement gap, though undoubtedly not the whole story, is the vast differential in the quality of the schools available to white students vs. students of color, especially in urban environments.

America’s cities are highly segregated geographically, in part a vestige of real estate redlining practices and white flight following the Second Great Migration in the mid-20^th century. Even today, there is evidence that white homebuyers are willing to pay more money not to have to live in a neighborhood with lots of people of color. As a result, by some measures school systems in the United States are even more segregated today than they were when Brown vs. Board of Education was first implemented in the 1960s. Meanwhile, school systems are governed by local rules and jurisdictions and, crucially, paid for via local property taxes. Ever wonder why people move to the suburbs to send their kids to good schools? Well, that’s why. On a per-capita basis, suburbs are much wealthier than urban cores and therefore can afford schools that are less crowded and feature more amenities for their students.  People who don’t follow the education field may not realize that public school systems are struggling in large cities all across the country, not just where they live.

There is no magic bullet for fighting racial inequity; in the Atlantic Cities recently, for example, Emily Badger makes the case that establishing universal preschool is the best single thing we could do, but even the rosiest projections offered in that article make clear that such a measure would hardly erase the achievement gap. Nevertheless, as educated professionals, one action we could take that might actually make a difference is to locate ourselves in areas where our tax dollars will go to support these struggling school systems. And yet, many of my white peers are doing the exact opposite: explicitly shopping for real estate by school district, trying their best to ensure that their kid(s) will be less likely to end up in a bad situation – and, incidentally, a lot less likely to be surrounded by kids of color.

It’s awfully tough to ask someone to choose between fighting for racial equity and forgoing the best possible education for their child. I believe that sacrifice is a virtue, but I am not enough of a romantic to count on it as a large-scale strategy for social change. Perhaps the real enemy here, then, is not the racism-perpetuating behavior, but the system that sets up the incentives that encourage it. In this case, that system is the funding of public school systems based on local property taxes. If we really want to attack this part of the problem at its core, perhaps we should be advocating instead for a system that runs schools locally but funds them nationally, presumably through an expanded Department of Education. What can arts organizations do to push forward that outcome? And why is hardly anyone else talking about it?

Let’s take a step back for a minute and remember how we got here. We were wondering how a hiring manager could get her staff to better reflect the diversity of her community. Now, 900-some-odd words later, we’re talking about advocating for a giant expansion of the Department of Education, universal preschool, and in the meantime intentionally sending our kids to substandard schools. Does it make sense now why, despite all of our conversations about race and privilege, nothing ever seems to change?

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I like to think of myself as a technocrat – as I get older, I find myself becoming less and less interested in what sounds good and more and more interested in what works. On this blog and at my day job alike, I advocate for “evidence-based decision-making.” I champion logic models and theories of change as tools for taking apart complex systems. I push for a big-picture, strategic approach to everything, most of all to gigantic social clusterfucks that take lifetimes to unravel.

I don’t do these things for giggles or to increase my SEO ranking. I do them because I genuinely believe in the power of analytical thinking to help us make sense of the world. Using good research methodologies can tell us useful things like the fact that even your mom smoking crack while she’s pregnant with you doesn’t screw up your life anywhere near as much as being born into poverty, or that educating parents on how to parent better might just be a way to fix some of these problems.

In order to really be able to use research, you have to keep an open mind. You’re not going to learn anything if you’re not willing to let the research surprise you. And sometimes those surprises can be an unpleasant source of cognitive dissonance.

I think this is where I have the greatest difficulty with the “discourse” around race as I’ve most often experienced it in this country. Some months ago I wrote on this blog about the phenomenon of “mood affiliation,” a term coined by economist Tyler Cowen to refer (as I interpret it) to a tendency among participants in debates to ally themselves with a certain “side” and subordinate new facts or information to the preferred interpretation of their “team.” A more widely recognized name for this sort of thing is confirmation bias.

I feel like there’s a whole lot of mood affiliation that goes on in conversations about race. The population subgroups that are active in these conversations place a high value on coordinated action and messaging. That means that, if you consider yourself an anti-racist and would like for others to perceive you that way as well, there are very real social and even professional risks associated with taking certain positions on issues that may not be clear-cut at all. Something like stop-and-frisk may not be good policy (it’s not), but we need to be able to ask the question of whether it actually works before dismissing it on moral grounds – and, more importantly, be prepared to answer the question of what if it does? Alas, stories about race become politicized so quickly that it becomes much more difficult to take an unbiased, critical look at the situation than it is to rely on whatever position one’s identity group has rallied behind.

For that reason, what I crave the most is to see conversations about race imbued with the complexity and nuance they deserve. I’m not talking about the throw-up-our-hands-and-declare-defeat kind of acknowledgement of complexity, but the okay-let’s-get-into-the-weeds-and-figure-this-shit-out kind. In order for that to happen, critiques that question conventional wisdom about race are going to have to play a bigger role. Critiques like these:

• How important is race relative to other forms of difference? Race gets a lot of attention, but is it the most relevant lens through which to view social justice in the present-day United States? I’ve noticed that the idea of comparing injustices to each other gets a lot of pushback from anti-racists; the phrase “oppression Olympics” gets thrown about a lot. And I understand how, from an advocacy perspective, this line of thinking is counterproductive and can be used as a rhetorical device to turn underprivileged groups against each other. But from a policy perspective, asking these kinds of questions is essential. Policy always involves making tradeoffs among finite alternatives – taking one approach can often mean not taking another, so you have to choose priorities and emphases carefully. There are lots of unearned inequities among different segments of people in this life, many of which have established places in national dialogue and many of which have not. Did you know, for example, that height is significantly correlated with earning power? On the strength of a study conducted for his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell even claims that “being short is probably as much, or more, of a handicap to corporate success as being a woman or an African-American.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I do think it makes sense to try to identify and target leverage points that trigger lots of injustices at once. One of those leverage points might be socioeconomic class, given that economic security touches so many areas of life. In no small part due to the legacies of historical discrimination, race and class today are closely intertwined: white families are on average an astounding six times wealthier than black and Hispanic families. But this means that a strategy to address class inequities, which can benefit from some existing infrastructure in the form of progressive taxation, will have the benefit of addressing many (albeit not all) of the racial inequities as well.
• Can we stop talking as if there are only two sides to this story? Too many of the mainstream narratives about race in the United States are stuck in mid-twentieth-century paradigms of black vs. white. The classic archetypes of the oppressor and the oppressed make for good movies, but the racial groups that feature in conversations about race today are insanely reductive visions of reality. Hispanic/Latino makes lots of sense as a language-based subculture (superculture?), but it’s not an actual race even though we often talk about it as if it is. Arab Americans are considered Caucasian by the Census, but try talking to them about white privilege while they’re going through US Customs. Most African Americans are actually mixed race, and first-generation African immigrants often have little in common with descendents of American slaves beyond their skin color. There are Jewish Venezuelans and white Africans and black Dutch. People of color are not a monolithic group, and don’t always like each other; there is a long and ugly history, for example, of East Asian bigotry against black people. Nor do they face the same challenges: whereas the college graduation rates for African Americans and Hispanics are 20% and 14% respectively, Asians have been north of 50% since 2005. We are prone to equate gentrification with “white people taking over the neighborhood” but ignore the role that people of color play in that process.  Even within the arts, we oversimplify the racial identities of our institutions, casually applying the adjective “white” to orchestras for example, in spite of a huge influx of Korean, Chinese and Japanese instrumentalists in recent decades. The anti-racist movement is fond of pointing out that race is an artificial social construct—maybe we should all start treating it like one?
• What is the role of assimilation in defining racial power structures? White people are not a monolithic group either. In the United States alone, there used to be bitter hatred towards ethnic Germans, rampant discrimination against Jews, and immigration restrictions erected against Italians, to name a few. What we think of as “white privilege” today was WASP privilege 100 years ago. What lessons can we learn from the dramatic cultural shift that has taken place in the meantime? And how much of a role has intermarriage between white ethnic groups (see below for more) had in making that shift possible? Moreover, does talking about white people as one group – since no white ethnic group would constitute a majority on its own – serve only to solidify the sense of whiteness as the majority default? In a long piece for the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader, Heinz Foundation arts program officer Justin Laing criticizes “the normativeness of White people’s arts and culture experience that is often implied when ALANA [African, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American] work is referred to as ‘culturally specific’ or ‘ethnic arts’ or ‘folk arts,’ as though White artists’ and arts organizations’ work is less specific, ethnic, or folksy.” Laing goes on to write, “This false idea, Whiteness, is maybe the most damaging of all of the race-based fallacies because it plants deep within us the idea that White people are both separate and the standard; it’s a particularly harmful idea in our field that treats the best of White culture as classical not only for Europeans but also for the world.” To what extent does the diversity conversation in the arts perpetuate the very inequities we’re trying to dismantle?
• How is demographic change going to affect the way we think about race? The United States will be a majority-minority country within 30 years. Four states – California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii – along with the District of Columbia already hold this status. The vast splits between racial and ethnic groups in recent presidential elections remind us that in a democracy, having a baby is not just a personal decision, it’s also a political act. Of course, just increasing the numbers of brown people won’t necessarily lead to the end of white hegemony – see the early-20^th-century South or mid-20^th-century South Africa for proof of that. Perhaps more important, then, is the increasing trend toward multiracial families via adoption (especially by increasingly visible gay parents) and widespread intermarriage, both of which are and will continue to be facilitated by the growing numbers of non-white individuals in the U.S. Could this blurring of racial categories smooth over old tensions to the point that no one cares about them anymore? I wouldn’t discount the possibility, especially when you consider how much the drive towards acceptance of gay marriage has been driven by loved ones coming out as gay. The elevation of a mixed-race President may not signal a society that has moved beyond race, as some have over-optimistically claimed, but it may yet be a harbinger of America’s post-racial future.
• How committed are anti-racist white people to ending white privilege? This is an important point that I really don’t think we ever talk about. Merely recognizing that white privilege exists and feeling bad about it is not a recipe for change. Real change, all else being equal, must involve actual sacrifices on the part of those in power, with the white majority being the party in power when it comes to white privilege. Power is not necessarily a zero-sum game, but relative power is – and the privileged position in which white people find themselves in the United States is a result of the exercise of asymmetric power dynamics in the past. My questions for those who fancy that they would like to end white privilege are as follows: why don’t we ever talk about giving large swaths of land back to the Indian tribes who once occupied them, and whose value system is so rooted in the land itself? Why don’t we ever talk seriously anymore about reparations for slavery, the reverberations of which are still very much being felt today? (Such reparations would be hardly unprecedented, by the way.) Wouldn’t such things represent much more meaningful change than reminding oneself to make eye contact when one sees a person of color coming the other way?
• Would we be better off as a society if we were actually less conscious of race, not more? Even if that’s not the right or a realistic goal for the short term, is it what we should be working towards in the end? If so, how would that change how we approach conversations about race? In a 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace eight years ago, Morgan Freeman famously called Black History Month “ridiculous” and called for its dissolution. Wallace asked how we can get rid of racism otherwise, and Freeman responded, “Stop talking about it! I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man. I know you as Mike Wallace, you know me as Morgan Freeman.” I imagine that many people reading this are familiar with the concept of priming in psychology – the idea that subtle stimuli can (often unconsciously) affect our behaviors and performance. There’s even a significant literature exploring the racial dimensions of priming; for example, one study found that simply identifying their race on a pretest questionnaire cut black students’ performance on GRE questions in half. Well, what happens when we continually prime white people to believe that they’re racist, and people of color that they are victims of racism? Does that in any way exacerbate the problem?

Introducing this sort of complexity into the equation may come off as an invitation to chaos. But think about it this way: would we be satisfied with a map of the world that just had the seven continents on it and a vague notation of which direction they are relative to each other? No, we do what we need to as a society to have hyper-specific geographic markers down to a few hundred feet, all connected, continually updated, existing within an ecosystem of other information like traffic patterns and mountain heights and vote totals.

I believe that the frame for our discussion must be both that large and that fine-grained in order to make real progress. On the large end of the scale, what do we care about most? Is containing racism, rather than ending it, acceptable? And if ending it is paramount, then is equality of opportunity sufficient for ending racism, or is equality of outcomes necessary? At the micro scale, who benefits and who suffers from racial constructs, to what extent and in what ways? In each case, down to the individual level, how much of that benefit or suffering is the product of socially-constructed and mutable ideas of race and how much is tethered to immutable realities of race? And what of those inequities are solely attributable to race rather than tied up in other kinds of disadvantage/privilege?

What can I say, it turns out that understanding and dealing with race is really hard! But I truly believe that only the hard work of identifying what our true values are and articulating how we resolve dilemmas when they come into conflict with other values can help us resolve the large-scale questions. And only the hard work of mapping out all of these intimidating complexities as they play out in individual lives will enable us to make the changes to our societal rules and behaviors that will end up serving the most people the most fairly. In fact, I don’t see how anything other than hard work, strategically focused, will make any difference at all. So let’s get to work.

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(I am deeply grateful to Talia Gibas, Selena Juneau-Vogel, Daniel Reid, Hayley Roberts, F. Javier Torres, and Jason Tseng for their incisive comments on an earlier draft of this article, and to many others for their conversations and perspectives that helped expand my world these past nine months.)

Further reading:

• Andy Horwitz, Whites Only (Or, WTF is the Deal with Diversity in the Arts?)
• Maria Vlachou, The beginning and ending of a b&w week in Vienna
• Maria Vlachou, The new year
• Linda Essig, Diversity, Equality, Bus Lanes, and the Arts
• John L. Moore, III, Equity/Diversity/Change
• The Untenable Whiteness of Theater Audiences, discussion thread at MetaFilter
• Clayton Lord, Yes/And – tackling racial diversity by looking to things adjacent
• Clayton Lord, Carrying Forward, Clumsily (if you read one piece by Clay, I recommend this one)
• Jesse Rosen, Doing More About Diversity in America’s Orchestras
• Tiffany Wilhelm has put together a Google Document with lots of links to additional resources

In recent years participatory culture has subverted consumerist habits, mass media production, and even our social interactions. People who wouldn’t previously have considered themselves creative are getting opportunities to become true collaborators in producing what they consume in fields where once they could only serve as audience members. Nowhere is this more true, arguably, than in the San Francisco Bay Area, the birthplace of parklets, Twitter, and Yelp. It’s clear that the lines between producer and consumer are being blurred in arts administration and education as well. Organizations of vastly differing sizes are adjusting to our changing culture in their own ways, altering how they interact with the public and how the public interacts with them.

Viewed from the outside, the two organizations I work for could not be more dissimilar, and yet both find themselves enveloped in this trend. Adobe Books and Arts Cooperative, where I head the gallery and serve on the board of directors, is a small, community-run bookstore and art gallery open since 1989; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), meanwhile, where I work in the education department, is a large, international collecting institution of modern and contemporary art. Both are at crucial points in their history, and progressing in divergent directions in their vision for public participation and assessment of their educational goals. SFMOMA is reaching to be more experimental, more integrated into daily life, and more collaborative, while Adobe Books is realizing that it must become more like a museum in many ways (more organized, more curated, with a developed mission statement) in order to stay afloat. These organizations are evolving slowly towards each other, providing us with a unique window into how cultural institutions are balancing educational priorities with dueling needs for top-down curation and creative collaboration.

Both Adobe Books and SFMOMA are known as culture makers, information disseminators, and artistic/cultural venues in San Francisco. And both, in the past year, have left their longtime homes. SFMOMA has decided to infiltrate the city and beyond with creative programming and artist projects, “on the go” until 2016 while the museum is closed for an expansion, and Adobe Books was pushed out of its longtime home on 16^th Street due to rising rents and gentrification, recently relocating to a cozier space on 24^th Street. The similarities end there. SFMOMA has over 200 employees, and has the resources to maintain a strong presence in the city, with or without an actual building. Adobe Books, by contrast, could not survive without a store; it is known locally as “the living room of the Mission,” and providing a space for people to meet and for the public to gather is a crucial part of who we are. Though Adobe Books’s art gallery is now fiscally sponsored through Intersection for the Arts, the bookstore portion is still just that, a store, with goods to sell.

Adobe Books at its new location on 24th St. Photo by Tiffany Seinz.

The Story of the Community Bookstore

Clay Shirky argues in his book Here Comes Everybody that organizing without organizations is the modus operandi of the 21st century, writing that “unlike sharing, where the group is mainly an aggregate of participants, cooperating creates group identity.” Adobe Books, though a sole proprietorship for nearly 25 years, has seemingly always operated on a community-run, collaborative model. By stepping back from curation and allowing community members to give life to the space, former owner Andrew McKinley was able to establish Adobe Books as a safe harbor for ideas, a place for meeting and doing, and a spot of artistic intervention for many.

Adobe Books is a natural spot for self-directed learning. Despite a more tightly curated selection of books in our new, smaller spot on 24^th Street, as a mostly-used bookstore with an ever-fluctuating inventory, most customers come in with the expectation of finding something they didn’t yet know they wanted. Because the programming is mostly developed by the visiting public, free programs happen easily and often. Only just recently has the Board of Directors created an online events calendar, or a website at all for that matter. Yet, as Shirky might have predicted, this lack of organization did not deter people from coming into the space; if anything, it fueled widespread neighborhood involvement. People came to the Adobe space on 16^th Street for the books, the people, and the likely chance that something was going on: an art opening, music performance, poetry reading, etc. This scarcity of management also gave the makers and doers of the community a sense of comfortable ownership over a space where they could speak their peace, make their mark, host a party, or even take a nap.

In 2013, however, with a rapidly gentrifying Mission District and steeply rising rents throughout San Francisco, time was running out for a bookstore that operated more like a community center than a for-profit business. Transitioning into a cooperative business with a fiscally sponsored gallery seemed to be the only option for survival. With significant seed funding from a successful Indiegogo campaign, Adobe Books has financially found a new lease on life. At the same time, as a cooperative with a managing board of directors, we struggle with how much to curate the space rather than let the community dictate our programming.

The new 24^th Street incarnation of Adobe Books is a bit more reserved than before. With 14 directors full of their own artistic ideals, the pressure of fulfilling the promises of a successful crowdfunding campaign, and the gallery’s new fiscally-sponsored status, we feel the responsibility to be organized and thoughtful about our decisions. As an administrator by trade, I must admit I garner some pleasure from drawing up loan agreements, event MOUs, and vendor contracts. I like that we maintain a calendar, and that price negotiations on all book sales is no longer the norm. As I happily file reimbursement forms, I do wonder if all of this “organization” is slowly killing the community space that Adobe Books used to be.

Artists in the Adobe Books gallery often give me sideways glances when I hand them a loan agreement—the sort of formality that has never been instituted before. More and more inquiries about book readings, concerts, and other events are being directed to a single events manager, which is just as convenient for us as it is inconvenient for the person inquiring at the front desk who has to remember to scribble down the correct email address. Adobe is learning to be more top-down, and all the while asking ourselves if this structure is worth the exclusion that often comes with this sort of organizational map.

SFMOMA takes programs “on the go” with Mark di Suvero’s sculptures on Crissy Field. Photo by Dominic Santos.

A Museum On the Go

In contrast, SFMOMA is ever so slightly turning bottom-up, and learning that providing arts experiences with a listening ear can be more relevant and valuable to today’s population than white walls with a system for dispersing information about objects.

At SFMOMA, even the education department has a directive to curate its offerings for the public in a more or less top-down way. As with any museum, we have both the task of engaging the public as well as protecting a historical archive. However, SFMOMA is unusual in our commitment to becoming part of urban life for the residents and visitors of San Francisco. In the 2.5 years of its closure, the museum has committed to activating the city in exciting ways, perhaps echoing the recent rise of socially engaged art. Projects like Project Los Altos in the town of the same name and our decentralized exhibition of the 2012 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) awards insert art into everyday life. David Wilson’s SECA piece literally directs viewers to follow itineraries through San Francisco to find secret art interventions, with all journeys commencing from the closed museum doors. While some SFMOMA departments may see the temporary displacement as a hindrance, asking questions like “how will we keep membership numbers up with no museum admission?”, the education department frames it as an opportunity to do what we’ve always wanted to do, reaching out into neighborhoods, schools, and communities to participate in art projects and programs that reflect the dynamics of our city.

Rather than taking a soapbox approach to its educational programs, SFMOMA is developing two-way partnerships with schools and creating new public programs that rely heavily on audience participation. This year we are piloting several school projects that are part artist commission, part school curriculum, and part student-driven learning. These efforts are still in their infancy, but show promise in that both parties seem willing and excited to collaborate to bring contemporary art to the classroom in dynamic new ways. Our public educational programs are evolving as well. As part of our Project Los Altos exhibit, the Education Department is asking artists who participated in the exhibition to create a series of participatory art instructions to be printed in the Los Altos Town Crier, the local newspaper. Responses and documentation from those who choose to participate will be documented on the web as well as a few printed in the following week’s paper. After decades of hearing the likes of Paulo Freire and Sir Ken Robinson tell us that creativity and two-way communication between the educator and student are essential for dynamic learning, educators and education administrators are finally translating these ideals into actual teaching practices. We’re seeing the rise of Visual Thinking Strategies and other inquiry-based learning methods, evidence of the impact of participatory trends in our culture on museum education. The fact that education as a discipline has been at the vanguard of this shift means that museum educators are freer to adapt more quickly.

“You Do Have to Relinquish Some Control”

Forging new community partnerships is crucial to the health of  SFMOMA while it is without a building. Whether this comes as a welcome change or not, our 2.5-year closure may be exactly the catalyst necessary to transform SFMOMA into a leading 21^st=century institution, one thoroughly and intentionally engaged in its community. On the other hand, newly burdened by rising rent and the bureaucracy of organizing a cooperative (by-laws, articles of incorporation, etc.), Adobe Books is pushing hard to be structured while still maintaining its grassroots spirit. Both of these organizations have been molded by San Francisco’s unique, evolving culture, and transformed in recent months by both strong community support for the arts as well as by the money and change that comes with the city’s most recent tech boom.

This climate seems to have pushed San Francisco organizations to experiment with new methods of community collaboration, to search for the perfect balance between curatorial control and open source content. To stay relevant in today’s San Francisco, I suspect that more organizations will be striving for this middle ground—less “institutional” than the stuffy collecting museums of yore, yet more bureaucratic than the scrappy organizations that were once able to maintain cheap spaces in the city. As J.S. May, Chief Advancement Officer of the Portland Art Museum, recently said at the National Innovation Summit for Arts + Culture, “You do have to relinquish some control.” Just how much control to withdraw remains a pertinent and ongoing question for each individual institution – and as San Francisco’s experience demonstrates, large and small organizations have much to learn from each other across the resource divide.

Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” (1904) greets visitors at the entrance to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The famous bronze was gifted to the museum in 1922. Photo credit: Quick fix via Flickr

Recent threats placed upon the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) have thrust the topic of deaccessioning once more into the popular spotlight. The DIA and its collection are owned by the City of Detroit, which has struggled financially for decades and was recently assigned a city emergency manager by the state’s governor Rick Snyder.  In July, upon reviewing the city’s fiscal situation, the newly appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr declared Detroit bankrupt. The federal government subsequently decided against bailing out the once mighty auto capital. Facing an estimated $18 billion in debt, creditors and pensioners are now hungrily eyeing the city’s various cultural, natural and infrastructural assets for potential liquidity. Among them is the DIA’s art collection, which has a market value estimated at anywhere from $2 billion to “the low to mid-11 figures.”

Those dollar signs are juicy enough to make any Detroit creditor’s mouth water, but it is important to remember that many of the holdings were donated to the museum under legal contracts with donors that ensured they would never be sold. An attempt to do so would likely result in multiple lawsuits filed by donors and their heirs. With those works legally safeguarded, the pieces most desirable to creditors are those that were bought by the city directly. Unfortunately for the DIA, these purchases comprise an important part of its collection.

Indeed, emergency manager Orr has already hired Christie’s auction house to appraise approximately 3,500 of the Detroit-purchased pieces. Among the lot are significant works by Brueghel, Tintoretto, and Matisse with estimated values reaching as high as $150 million each. These astronomically priced paintings are the superstar outliers within the 60,000 plus item collection, and they are the works most often cited as part of any prospective—and controversial—sale. There is no precedent for so many masterpieces being sold simultaneously, and there are fears amid the collector and auction community that a sale of this magnitude would depress the art market.

“The Window” (1916) by Henri Matisse was purchased by the City of Detroit in 1922 and reportedly has a market value of $150 million.

For the moment, the artwork is not under any immediate threat of seizure. The DIA has claimed the collection is in a public trust, legally defined as “a trust created for promotion of public welfare and not the benefit of one or more individuals.” The state’s Attorney General Bill Schuette echoed this sentiment in a formal statement issued in June. Although an Attorney General’s opinion traditionally carries significant legal weight, it is a possible that a court could overturn it, and creditors may seek just such a ruling if push comes to shove.

Should a court rule in favor of the creditors, selling the artwork to pay off the city’s debt would quite literally betray the public’s trust—though perhaps not the way that has deaccessioning foes concerned. The DIA is the beneficiary of a homeowners’ tax, or millage, passed just last year by voters in three counties to ensure it stays open and accessible to local residents. In fact, in response to recent developments, Oakland County’s Art Institute Authority recently passed a resolution calling for the termination of its contribution to the millage if a sale or leasing of any artwork goes forth. The other two counties, Wayne and Macomb, could follow suit. Without the levy, the museum would face a reduction of hours and museum exhibitions, at the very least.

Since Orr mentioned the collection as a potential asset back in May, battles of opinion have been waged between cultural critics and commentators that have resulted in an art world panic over the disbursement of the collection. In lieu of retired city employees facing reductions in their pensions, one prominent art critic suggested the collection be sold as a preventative measure, only to be browbeaten into switching his opinion.

At the center of these debates is the code of ethics of the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), which states that a museum’s collection may be sold “solely for the advancement of the museum’s mission . . . to be used consistent with the established standards of the museum’s discipline, but in no event shall [proceeds] be used for anything other than acquisition or direct care of collections.” The Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) upholds a similar ethical standard. In June, the Michigan Senate voted to approve a bill stating that all art institutions must adhere to this code. The art authority bill still has to be voted on by the House of Representatives when lawmakers return from their summer break, but one wonders if writing the AAM code into law is the right course of action.

Both the bill and Oakland County’s decision to end the millage pending a sale are intended to protect the DIA’s and taxpayers’ interests. But what happens to an institution whose hands have become tied legally? How will it affect the museum’s ability to decide what is best for it in the future?

In a Createquity post this May, Tegan Kehoe suggested “making responsible efforts to keep [deaccessioned] objects in public hands” as a reasonable standard that should avoid the worst outcomes of deaccessioning. But the proposed restrictions being placed upon the DIA would forestall even this approach. Let’s say the DIA wanted to invest in the goodwill of Detroit’s citizens by prudently selling or leasing artworks to other nonprofit institutions to help the city recover. According to Elliot Bostwick of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as quoted in the New York Times, most museums only exhibit between two to four percent of their collection at one time. It’s entirely possible that among the museum’s more than 60,000 works—some of which will never be exhibited—there are items that no longer support the DIA’s vision. If executed carefully, a sale of these holdings could be seen as an act of generosity on the museum’s part and actually benefit the institution over the long term, while ensuring that the deaccessioned works remained accessible to the general populace. Yet with the art authority resolution in place and counties threatening to remove taxpayer support, the DIA could be held hostage by the very laws designed to protect its interests. (Indeed, director Graham Beal is now asserting publicly that “selling any art would be tantamount to closing the museum,” in no small part because of the millage situation.) There is an upside to allowing public institutions to police themselves via trade groups like AAM and AAMD.

From Kevyn Orr’s perspective, there are surely quicker and more efficient ways to raise funds for the bankruptcy proceedings than plundering works from the DIA. Some of those options include sale of the Coleman airport, Joe Louis Arena, Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, Belle Isle Park, parking operations, city-owned land, and the water and sewer department. Each of these assets comes with its own particular set of issues, but none seems quite as legally challenging as liquidating the DIA’s art collection. With museum advocates rallying for their cause and the press hot on Orr’s heels, any sale by the DIA, small or large, is becoming less likely by the day. Deaccessioning opponents may find reason to rejoice in that outcome, but whether it’s ultimately a good thing for the City of Detroit—or the DIA for that matter—is still a question worth asking.

Roy Hargrove, a popular jazz jammer, at work on his horn. Photo courtesy of Eddy Westveer via Flickr.

This is the second post in a series on the tragedy of the commons and what it means for the arts sector.

Four talented young musicians step on stage at a West Village jazz jam. Each faces competing pressures: helping make the band sound tight and showing off her own skills. With this information, and a little bit of formal logic, we could conclude that this situation is hopeless (as we did in the previous piece of this series). Each member of the band faces a pair of incentives that together push her to overplay–meaning simply, as in Pitfalls, playing for a longer period of time than would normally be appropriate for the given tune–and make the music worse. Jazz jams from New York to LA are plagued by this fate, but many avoid it. Some, like the one at Fat Cat in New York City, host some of the best music around.

In order to achieve their goals, arts funders often need the organizations they support to work together. Many of these on-the-ground organizations face a set of incentives similar to the jazz musicians. Yet in the real world, successful collaboration is not unusual for arts organizations or jazz artists.

Why are some shared goals realized when incentives appear to be aligned against them? Doctoral degrees, book deals, and Nobel prizes have been awarded for attempts at answering this question. People and the institutions we make up are difficult to understand. Though there does not yet appear to be a consensus on a single set of factors that generate solutions, simplified versions of the theories posited by diverse academics like Elinor Ostrom, Robert Axelrod, Robert Sugden, Antonio Demasio, George Lakoff, and Daniel Kahnemen from economics, political science, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology, and mathematics can help funders move toward a fuller toolkit of productive impact strategies.

Jazz Jams That Listeners Can Enjoy

Looking at how a jazz jam works and how the members avoid failure helps us better understand which strategies foundations should be choosing. A jazz quartet that plays well together could draw on one or a combination of the following scenarios:

Cooperative Strategies: Jazz jams can be quite draining. A series of bad experiences can scar a player for life. Only the musicians who get a lot out of playing stick around to teach jazz to the next round of youngsters. Teachers have learned through experience that they are happiest when they get to play extra time and when no one else overplays. They also learn that pretty much everyone feels the same way. Since it is unlikely that they will run into a lot of players that feel differently, they need to develop a strategy that can work for them throughout the years and keep them energized to go onto the next jam.  Over time, musicians start to develop a simple plan: 1) the first time you play with a new group, don’t overplay. 2) If your bandmates overplay, you can overplay next time as payback. 3) If they don’t overplay, reward them by going along the next time and not overplaying. Cooperation is the best possible option for the group as a whole, so this simple strategy is able to gain momentum over time and become the dominant approach. The four musicians who show up at the West Village jazz jam have all been trained well and know this strategy. If they follow it, the players and the audience will leave happy enough to return another night.

Psychological: It is not often that jazz musicians are accused of being abnormally rational. Each player’s approach to the music is organic, complex, and deeply emotional. Even in everyday life, aside from the creative and culturally cooperative setting of the jazz jam, recent research suggests that no one always acts completely rationally. Our West Village jazz musicians are no different. Each of the players has interests and goals. These incentives can be understood by analyzing the individual musicians’ situations as if they were happiness-maximizing robots. The problem is that players in this group also have brains and bodies, and those don’t always work like a computer.

As the trumpet player reaches the stage, a lot is going through her mind. 98% of it is subconscious. Her fellow musicians start to play. Before she has even picked up her instrument, she hears the chord changes and watches the guitarist strike his instrument. Her brain mirrors this; her mind’s fingers are playing all of those chords. Though she is only observing, her neurons are quietly firing, providing her a subconscious empathic connection to her bandmate. She begins to play and comes to a decision point: should she overplay or play along with everyone else? Her decision draws on a number of simple rules for mental processing. One, called framing, tells her to use the information she has, as it is presented, to make the decision. She was just telling her friend how one of the players earlier in the night was a “ball hog.” The metaphor she used equates “overplaying” and “being a ball hog” and sets the frame for her: jazz is a team sport in which each member should sacrifice for the goals of the team. Using this framing, she decides to pass the ball to her teammate.

Social Context: Jazz musicians are members of social networks outside of just the jazz jam community. The social norms jazz musicians learn outside of jazz—whether in their homes, schools, or places of work or worship—matter inside jazz. When the bass player takes the stage, he is behaving in a way he finds appropriate given his upbringing and social context. Though he feels the urge to take off his shirt—it is hot after all—he probably won’t. He has learned that in this society, when you’re at an upscale music venue, you don’t take off your clothes even if you’re overheated. The same logic applies to his decision not to overplay. His society has conditioned him to appreciate teamwork and cooperation as important virtues. He decides to limit his playing to one turn over the chord changes, because he knows doing otherwise would be seen as inappropriate in his society.

Rules: There’s a sign on the wall of our imaginary West Village jazz haunt: UNLESS YOU’RE CHARLIE PARKER, KEEP IT UNDER 2 CHORUSES! As new players arrive, the doorman makes sure to point out the sign and let them know that they’ll have to pay a fine if they break the rule. When these fresh-faced jazz jammers reach the stage, overplaying doesn’t cross their mind. They know they have to play by the rules and do their best within their time limit.

Unspoken Rules: A young alto sax player walks into a bar on Frenchmen Street hosting a jazz jam. He sits down to watch a few songs and sees that certain players are getting kicked off stage, while others are allowed to stay on stage tune after tune. He notices the difference between the two types of players: the ones who get pushed off are overplaying, and the ones who get to stay are team players. A few songs later, he gets called to the stage. When he gets the chance to overplay, he decides against it because, even though the rule is unspoken, he knows that there will be costs to overplaying.

The Rules that Set the Rules: At the beginning of every jazz jam it hosts, a club in Harlem asks every non-playing person in attendance to vote on the rules for the night. Those in attendance raise their hands and voices in support of a reasonable limit on how long solos can be. They decide that musicians who break the rules can’t play the rest of the night; they’re the customers after all. The rules as determined by the audience constrain the freedom of the musicians to play what they want, but they do so in the interest of everyone there.

A Well-Intentioned Intervention at Our Dreamed-Up Jazz Jam

As one further complication, we could add to our hypothetical jazz jam the existence of an organizer. The person responsible for bringing the whole event about could use her power to influence where the jam is held, what the rules are, and who is allowed in. She could also draw on cognitive scientific, psychological, and game theoretic evidence that using the right language and setting the right context for the jam could change the outcomes. By facilitating the jam with this awareness, she could ensure the jammers work together to the benefit of all involved.

Funding Successful Cooperation

Foundations often use grant-making as a way to structure the incentives available for achieving their goals. Often times, the goals require collaboration among organizations they are funding and other organizations with a similar purpose. Foundations can be more successful if they learn how collaboration works and integrate this knowledge into their grant-making strategies. The simplified jazz jam situations I previously laid out provide a window into how organizations and people come to cooperate.

Foundations that select organizations for funding by assessing marginal costs against marginal social benefits may incentivize organizations to work against shared goals (see The Pitfalls of Shared Goals). Providing grants on this basis carries an implicit theory: the value organizations create together is worth no more than the value they create on their own. The alternative belief, that the value organizations create through collaboration is greater than that which they provide alone, suggests a broader range of strategies.

The Collective Impact approach, as described by John Kania and Mark Kramer in an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review, is an important first step toward solutions. Kania and Kramer suggest that foundations should set a shared agenda, develop a common measurement system, work with organizations to help them fit into their highest-impact role, encourage cross-organization communication, and fund an institution to manage this process. These suggestions draw on the idea that, by changing the rules that make the rules and increasing the visibility of an organization’s failure to contribute to the shared goals, foundations can get closer to achieving their desired outcomes. Each of these suggestions is valid, but other strategies exist as well.

Foundations and other funders of the arts could turn to the varied explanations (above) of why people work together to define strategies that fit their unique needs. Take, for example, a funder seeking to increase the diversity of art making in their community. The funder may choose to fund an organization working to provide performance spaces for women and a separate organization working on offering music classes to underserved communities. Each of these organizations are important, but by emphasizing the individual impact they have on their focus, e.g., how many people became instrumentally proficient per dollar, the funder misses the opportunity to promote shared goals. Instead, the funder could attempt to reframe the work each organization does by offering combined team trainings with all of its grantees in attendance. It could set a standard that any organization which appears to not be working in concert with other organizations is barred from funding for a certain number of years. It could offer trainings on cooperative strategies, like the tit-for-tat strategy explained above, such that the organizations they fund would self-enforce cooperation. And it could even change the language it uses in the grant-making process to ensure that it helps organization leaders think of their organizations as one piece of a bigger puzzle.

In reality, many foundations do this sort of thing every day without knowing it. They consider long-term objectives and make decisions based on audacious goals rather than just near-term impact. They bring diverse coalitions together to discuss shared goals. While a short-run cost-benefit analysis may not see the value in time spent at a bar with other organizations in the community, the cooperative model we’ve been discussing makes sense of its importance.

The strategies foundations and other funders develop are particular to their mission. By understanding how collaboration works in a simple setting, funders can tweak their social impact strategies on the big stage to be more aligned with the evidence on how we reach shared goals.

For more on these topics, check out:

• “Evolution of Cooperation” by Robert Axelrod
• “Spontaneous Order” by Robert Sugden
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• “Behind the Looking-Glass” by Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer
• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
• Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources by Ostrom, Walker, and Gardner

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C. – photo by ehpien

During my time as a Createquity Writing Fellow I’ve written a lot about museums partly because I am a museum professional, and largely because, being already keyed into the museum world, I find that there is just so much to write about. Although I had been aware of Fractured Atlas’s work for a long time, I first heard about Createquity when a well-known museum blogger, Nina Simon, wrote about it on her blog Museum 2.0. Simon appreciates that Createquity provides “exposure to a broader arts world.” She’s correct in her assessment that the museum world can be an insular bubble – for all the work we do on engaging our audiences and our communities, we do most of it through a museum-specific lens.

Later in that same post, though, Simon writes, “the American ‘arts’ field is in as much of a bubble as the museum industry–perhaps even a smaller one.” She refers to the museum and arts bubbles as separate, even though many people would consider museums to be a part of the arts. In some ways they are, but in many ways they are not. I get the impression, for example, that large orchestras, small community-based dance troupes, and off-Broadway theaters speak the same language and spend time in the same bubble more than museums interact with any of them. This raises the question – what is a museum? Can we define museums as arts institutions, or do they fit better in another category?

The whole idea of museums as art institutions is based on an implicit assumption that art museums are typical of all museums. It’s true that the traditional mores of a museum atmosphere – quiet, solemn, reflective, reverent – are based in the heritage of art museums. However, museums are much more diverse than that. Of the museums that were accredited by the American Association (now Alliance) of Museums as of 2012 (which is a small sample of the museums in the US), 10% were general or multidisciplinary, and 8% were focused on natural history or anthropology. Science and technology museums, children’s museums, and many history, anthropology, and natural history museums define their goals very differently than a traditional art museum. For example, the Association of Science-Technology Centers says, “Science centers encourage the innate curiosity that resides in all of us, providing opportunities for education, awareness of social and global issues, even recreation.” Many museums are arts institutions, but the term “arts” is inadequate to describe the breadth of the museum field.

For this reason, museums are often described as cultural institutions, rather than arts institutions. This definition is useful because it is broad enough to capture many of the goals of many museums: culture can mean the body of concepts shared in a society (the sociological view), or it can mean the achievements a society has deemed to be most important (“high” culture).

Andrew Sayers, the director of the National Museum of Australia, believes museums fit better in the education category. Responding to a discussion paper on Australia’s National Cultural Policy, then in the process of being revised, Sayers wrote a piece for The Australian titled, “Redefine Museums as Educational Resources.” Sayers argues that museums’ contributions to both school education and the advancement of knowledge in society makes them distinct from arts organizations. While Sayers does see museums as a part of “cultural heritage,” a category in Australia’s National Cultural Policy, he fears viewing them solely through this lens makes them look like storage facilities. “We need to redefine museums as educational resources rather than as buildings where collections are held.” I couldn’t agree more. Holding collections will always be an important and unique function of museums, but their primary relevance to society is their capacity to educate and inspire. As Sayers says, “there is hardly a work of nonfiction or a documentary produced in this country that doesn’t make extensive use of the resources in our collecting institutions.”

Despite museums’ value as cultural and educational resources, key policymakers view museums as luxuries, a leisure activity for the wealthy. This attitude may stem from the idea that visiting museums is solely a leisure pastime for a narrow set of people who see themselves and their values reflected in the museum’s content and presentation, which has merit only in the fact that historically it has sometimes been true. However, this is increasingly inaccurate as museums strive to diversify and reflect their communities. While both the arts and museums would benefit from a reversal of this view, museums as a whole offer different benefits to society than other arts organizations do.

Indeed, the concept of museums as educational institutions challenges their association with luxury or leisure. As repositories for knowledge, expertise, and research, museums complement the educational function of universities and private centers. According to Sayers, “museums are an integral part of education across many areas of the curriculum and are immense resources for the understanding of history, society and science.” While countless studies in the last few decades have shown the educational benefits of music, dance, and visual arts, museums teach content across disciplines, and at their best can teach critical thinking skills beyond the arts.

In their 2011 article “Museums and the Future of Education,” Scott Kratz and Elizabeth Merritt provide several examples of ways museums do this, from collaboration with schools to independent learning in museum galleries. The National Building Museum has a curriculum for schools called “Bridge Basics,” which teaches students to identify problems, experiment with solutions, and evaluate results as well as math and engineering concepts. Kratz and Merritt predict museum learning will become more vital as educational models change. “The future of education may well be one characterized by self-directed, passion-based learning. In this future, museums can play a crucial role in helping learners discover their passion, providing resources and opportunities to pursue this passion and training educators in the skills of experiential learning.” They argue the current trend towards standardization in schools is rapidly becoming outmoded – the Mark Twain quote “never let schooling get in the way of your education” comes to mind – and museums are already good at promoting a broader way of teaching.

At the Waterfront Museum in Wales, by Tyron Francis on Flickr

While defining museums as educational institutions captures a lot of what a wide variety of museums do, the fact is, many adults don’t or won’t go to museums for their own education, seeing them as stuffy and school-like, child-like, or unnecessary. There are two ways museums can respond: show adults that education doesn’t have to be stuffy, or avoid branding themselves as educational.

In truth, people use museums for different things, and these uses coexist. The growing body of museum audience research suggests that people visit museums for a variety of reasons, different visitors may seek diverse experiences from the same museum, and one visitor may even seek diverse experiences in different visits to the same museum. John Falk has devoted his research to describing museum visitors by the identity they take on: from facilitators, who enjoy a museum through introducing their child or guests to it, to explorers, who are looking for whatever grabs them. In their book Life Stages of the Museum Visitor, Susie Wilkening and James Chung of Reach Advisors, Inc. discuss similarities and differences across generations in what visitors look to get out of a museum experience. The work of Falk, Wilkening, Chung, and others shows that museums can and do fill a variety of needs, and this multiplicity is a strength that allows them to better reach their audiences.

The definition that may best capture all museums is that they are inspirational institutions. Branding museums as inspirational emphasizes the joyous side of learning. While a few may consider inspiration a luxury, there is definitely an argument, one grounded in psychology, that inspiration is a part of education and other elements of personal and cognitive growth.

At the Dali Museum in Florida, by IZOD IndyCar Series on Flickr.

Alain de Botton, a radio host and columnist for the BBC, suggests museums have the potential to be more inspiring if they move away from canonical standards (in art, for example) and instead challenge people to think and feel more. He suggests that if museums do this, they have the potential to be our culture’s greatest inspirational institutions, filling the role churches have had in the past. I think de Botton is on to something, but he takes a narrow view and considers the most static, old-fashioned museums to be representative of them all. It isn’t canonical standards themselves that are the problem, it’s pushing them top-down on visitors instead of using them as a starting point for discussion. Museums are all inspirational in character and intent, even if not all of them reach their full potential to inspire. There are already plenty of visitors (Falk calls them “rechargers”) who find themselves awestruck by an object in a very traditional museum, and may seek out museums for this experience. In the last few decades, as the museum field has grown more serious about independent learning, deep audience engagement, and participation, museums have been able to bring that inspirational experience to more of their visitors.

A wide variety of museums share the ability to inspire visitors by the process of discovery, as exhibits demonstrate what a wide world it is or how deep a concept can go. To use some personal examples, my first exposure to cultures very different from my own was when I became fascinated by a seventh century statue of the Chinese Buddhist figure Guan-Yin in a university art museum. As an adult, I fell in love with the Mathematica exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science, which explores a variety of topics in math. An equally diverse group of museums moves visitors to be inspired by human achievements, whether an accomplishment of art or craftsmanship, ingenuity, or the triumph of the spirit in the face of adversity. I felt similarly struck by what my fellow humans can do when surrounded by Monet paintings at the Musee de L’Orangerie and when drawn through the story of the founding of the Red Cross at a museum devoted to its history. Last but not least, museums on any subject can inspire visitors to question their assumptions and examine what’s in front of them from many points of view. I had that experience myself as a young child playing at different careers at a children’s museum, and any time I learn more about prehistoric ocean life I think long and hard about my place in the universe. This common ability to inspire, more than art, culture or even education, defines what a museum is.

Visible Storage, Sculpture. Photo by Jenny Spadafora

One of eleven extant copies of the Bay Psalm Book, among the first books printed in British North America, will soon be up for sale. Experts estimate it will go for $10 to $20 million. Did a private book collector die or decide to prune their collection? No, this particular volume is being sold by the Old South Church, a congregation in Boston. Opponents of the decision have expressed concerns that the book would be sold to a private collector. This despite the fact that the Old South Church owns two copies of the book and is only selling one.

Controversies like the one over the sale of the Bay Psalm Book have become increasingly common since the mid-twentieth century. Many museums and other institutions that hold cultural objects no longer believe they must hold such objects in the public trust in perpetuity. Much of the museum community has agreed on best practices for deciding whether to give up an object, yet those practices, and specific museums’ adherence to them, are still hotly contested.

On one extreme, some critics feel deaccessioning, which refers to when an institution formally decides an item is no longer a part of its collection, is fundamentally in conflict with the idea that museum objects should be held in the public trust. On the other, a minority of museums consider deaccessioning to be a part of regular housekeeping, discarding items not only to correct past errors, but even taking in new items with the attitude that they may well be deaccessioned in a generation. Representatives of major institutions have voiced both ideas in the past decade. The more moderate pro-deaccessioning camp (most vocally Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer specializing in fine art) argues deaccessioning can be done without restrictions when it’s to save a museum from the threat of closing or other great danger.

The largest camp is made up of those who feel deaccessioning can be a part of healthy museum operations but only when following guidelines regarding who makes the decisions and how. The American Alliance of Museums advises, but does not require, that proceeds from deaccessions be used for future accession purchases only. The Association of Art Museum Directors considers this a hard and fast rule, and publicly and harshly censured the National Academy Museum, an institution that receives all of its collection by donation rather than purchase, for breaking it in 2008.

National Academy Museum by vitarlenology on Flickr

The casual museum-goer is unlikely to pay attention to whether each decision a museum makes is appropriate. However, many people inside and outside of the museum community share a belief that that museum objects should be accessible to the public, because museum objects are public objects, and museums are their caretakers. The values that underlie the interest in keeping museum objects public inform most discussions of deaccessioning, yet are rarely used as a metric to determine whether deaccessioning is appropriate. I propose a simple rule: the public should sit up and take notice when an institution is unwilling to take the steps necessary to ensure, or at least prioritize, keeping an object in public hands.

Whose Objects?

The word “deaccessioning” is not a household term. From the outrage over a large-scale deaccessioning project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972 to the outcry over Brandeis University’s plan to close the Rose Art Museum in early 2009, deaccessioning can seem like a non-issue until it becomes a huge issue. In the former, a New York Times article and other responses sparked concern that museum executives and curators were discarding art according to their own standards rather than relying on the wisdom of generations. In the latter, students who had never been to the Rose Art museum realized what they might be losing, and spread protest signs with the Rose logo and “ATM Inside” across campus. Alumni and donors argued that closing the art museum went against the university’s public service mission. I was a student at Brandeis at the time myself, and it was clear that the threat of losing this art, especially to private collectors, was inspiring high emotion.

These emotional discussions reveal two widely held values. First is the belief that certain cultural objects should be accessible to everyone. Second, museum property is public property; a museum is responsible for the longevity of artifacts but they belong to everyone. These values undergird oft-voiced concerns about the practice of deaccessioning, and each can be addressed by placing objects in other public-serving institutions’ care. If a museum deaccessions without respecting these values, it calls into question whether serving the public is truly the museum’s highest priority.

Cultural Property Should be Accessible to Everyone

A common defense of deaccessioning is that objects are not significantly more accessible in museums than they are in private hands. Most of a museum’s items just sit in storage gathering dust, the argument goes, and why does it matter if something unseen is sold? Elliot Bostwick Davis of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts told the New York Times that most American museums show between two and four percent of their collection at a time. The British Museum shows only one percent of its collection, while smaller museums in Britain frequently exhibit 5-10%. Moreover, not all museums are truly accessible to the whole public, because they fail to make accommodations for visitors with physical or financial limitations.

Visible Storage, Sculpture by jspad on Flickr

The logic that deaccessioning can be done freely because things aren’t accessible anyway is flimsy. Few private collectors are going to open up their homes to anyone and everyone who wants a close look at their stuff, but something that is unseen in a museum today may be on display tomorrow. For one thing, most museums rotate even their “permanent” exhibits. For another, methods of making more of the collection available have been slowly gaining popularity for decades. “Visible storage” is a system where objects that are not part of curated displays are stored in cases in rooms that are open to the public. Museums that have visible or “open” storage often have 15, 50, even 80 percent of their collection on display at one time.

Responsible transfers from one museum to another can improve accessibility by taking an item out of storage and putting them back on view to the public. It’s meaningfully different than when a museum sells to a private collector, and proponents of uninhibited deaccessioning are often incorrect when they argue that the items sold by one museum would not be of interest to another museum. For example, the director of the Irvine Museum in California told the LA Times she was “stunned” when another museum sold several important Impressionist works in secret to a private collector. The Irvine was one of several museums that said they would have been interested in the paintings had they been offered the chance to buy them. In this case, a transfer or inter-museum sale would have given the public another opportunity to enjoy these works.

Responsible transfers can also improve physical accessibility: if your historic house museum owns a collection of nineteenth-century leg braces, but can only display them in a room that’s up two narrow flights of stairs, perhaps they could be given to an institution with elevators so that twenty-first century museum visitors who wear leg braces themselves can see them. In the article “Guilt-Free Deaccessioning” (published in A Deaccession Reader, edited by Steven Weil, 1997), Steven H. Miller gives several examples of large general museums donating to small specialized or regional museums, an arrangement that improved the opportunities for the public to view those items.

People believe museum objects should stay accessible to everyone. Because this value is so widely held, it is important for any institution that holds cultural objects to make authentic accessibility a priority and to consider accessibility when planning for deaccessioning and disposal. Deaccessioning can be a great tool to improve accessibility, but if this value isn’t being taken into account at all, that is cause for concern.

Museum Property is Public Property

The loudest voices calling for cultural objects to stay in public hands are firm in their belief in museums’ responsibility to be a public repository for objects. In response to a 2005 Soethby’s sale of 42 impressionist paintings recently deaccessioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, culture journalist Lee Rosenbaum wrote, “These sales are the latest sign that we can no longer depend on our cultural institutions to protect and preserve the public patrimony.”

Los Angeles County Museum of Art by eclipse_etc on Flickr

Rosenbaum, who blogs as CultureGrrl at ArtsJournal, argues for very stringent decision-making processes on the part of museums who might choose to deaccession. In the same opinion piece, she calls for government action “when museums cross too many lines.” She also writes, “Museums’ permanent collections belong to all of us. The public has, in most instances, paid for these works through the tax deductions given to private donors.” The idea that museum property is public because of tax deductions to donors is used frequently in American deaccessioning debates. It’s also a stretch, since the value of an item donated is generally much greater than the tax revenue forgone through deductions. However, even Rosenbaum does not condemn all deaccessioning, and in the same piece she advocates trades or transfers of objects to other museums rather than putting these objects up for sale.

It’s important to note that museums (and some libraries) are generally the best custodians of cultural objects from the standpoint of preservation. Museum staff and contractors have the specialized knowledge to care for a precious work of art or historical artifact over the long term. Museums benefit from economies of scale in that the investment they make in regulating their environment protects many objects. While private collectors have an incentive to keep their possessions in good condition for their own enjoyment and for resale value, they don’t necessarily have a reason or the means to ensure the object will be in good condition beyond their lifetime. Museums’ role in preserving the lifespan of cultural objects is one very good reason certain objects should stay in museums, but that does not mean objects can never change hands within the museum community.

In fact, one of the reasons many institutions deaccession objects is that they feel burdened by gifts of the past that take resources away from their mission in the present. Many museums, especially older ones, accepted any and all donations of objects in the first years they were open, and later, after developing a clearer mission and a collecting policy, find themselves with objects that just aren’t a good fit. Institutions such as churches and schools can be in the same predicament. The expenses associated with proper object care provide a strong incentive for museums to limit the size of their collection.

Donn Zaretsky takes issue with the idea that anything should be permanently considered public or museum-worthy. On The Art Law Blog, he argues that museums should be free to deaccession whenever it makes sense for them, without having to consider unspoken donor intent. He feels that the public benefits of deaccessioning, such as saving a museum from closure, are too often ignored. This side of the argument is why selling items to the highest bidder is a cause for concern, but not proof that the decision is being mishandled. Institutions strive never to be in the dire situations Zaretsky references. However, those that try to sell their deaccessioned objects for the highest possible price, ostensibly to care for the needs of the institution and prevent getting into dire straits, are making a values decision to seek money to serve their mission rather than address their public-serving mission directly. It’s a delicate balance.

Even if a gift was legally unrestricted and the donor has long since passed, though, some observers still place moral responsibilities on museums. Many opponents of the Bay Psalm Book’s sale point to the fact that the book was given to the church as a gift. One told WBUR that to sell donated objects “is to break faith with these donors from the past.” In his article “Selling Items from Museum Collections,” another selection from A Deaccession Reader, Steven H. Miller writes, “The giving and receiving of an item, or the money to purchase it, is an act of faith in and by a museum. When accepting such offers a museum is establishing a relationship which it should be bound to honor.” However, considering that gifts can be a burden as well, if institutions are proxies for the public, one good proxy should be as good as another.

How Can Cultural Objects Stay as Accessible as Possible?

Cultural institutions wishing to avoid letting their deaccessioned objects fall into private hands have many options. The American Alliance of Museums runs an online forum, the Collections Exchange Center,where its member museums can list objects they want to sell, trade, or donate to another museum. The National Park Service runs a similar service primarily for its own sites, although it does not list objects for sale. Some museums use regional networks for the same purpose, and informal networks can also be useful, especially to non-museum institutions looking to find a new home for an object.

There is plenty of precedent for museums to sell or donate objects to other museums. Trades may be less common, but they too have been done. For example, in 1982, the Museum of Modern Art in New York reunited the four paintings in Kandinsky’s Four Seasons suite by trading paintings by Picasso and Matisse for two Kandinskys owned by the Guggenheim. For special cases in which an institution still has a use for a work of art, but finds that it can reach wider audiences elsewhere, joint ownership can present a useful alternative. Last year, Fisk University in Tennessee sold a 50 percent share in its Alfred Stieglitz art collection to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. The collection of 101 American Modernist paintings will now spend two years at the museum followed by two years at the university.

A somewhat hairier alternative is to give public institutions special privileges at an auction that’s open to all. In 1994, the New York State attorney general ordered a special set of rules for an upcoming Soethby’s auction of items deaccessioned by the New York Historical Society. Public-serving institutions watched the auction and, before it closed, were permitted to pre-empt any sales, paying the highest bid minus a discount. This option is tricky because it doesn’t guarantee a museum will be able to take the object, but it’s available for organizations seeking a compromise between profit and public.

The Big Picture

While the museum field has mostly agreed upon best practices around the decision to remove an object from a collection, controversies over big deaccessions still arise year after year, partly because many institutions take liberties with standard practices or ignore them altogether. The general public can’t – and doesn’t need to – concern themselves with every deaccession. These controversies are not always easy to follow, but the best litmus test is whether an institution makes a priority of keeping objects in public hands, reflecting the values that museum property should be accessible to all and preserved for the future because it is public property.

Undoubtedly, some institutions would be appalled at giving or trading a valuable object away, or selling it for less than market rate, as may be necessary to ensure that object’s continued public accessibility. Boards of directors and museum leaders oversee an organization’s financial sustainability, and may worry that failing to seek the best price runs counter to that obligation. However, they are also charged with upholding the mission of the organization. How many institutions have language in their mission statements about benefiting the public, serving the community, or promoting a greater appreciation of the topic the museum’s content reflects? All this can be served by making responsible efforts to keep objects in public hands.

Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium | photo by Just_Bryan

The U.S. has now entered an era of extremely expensive sports stadiums: the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY cost a cool billion dollars for example,while the new Vikings stadium in Minneapolis, MN is anticipated to be similarly priced. While reading up on the professional sports billion dollar building boom I couldn’t help but notice a number of parallels to the building boom in the arts from 1994 to 2008, as studied and documented by the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center.

But does new and big automatically lead to better for an organization and its patrons? For a large renovation or construction project to succeed, certain parameters and rationales have to be put in place from the beginning, such as a clear connection to the mission of the organization and strong, continuous leadership throughout the life of the project. Yet time and time again, it seems that these large capital campaign projects are launched without any adherence to methodologies that have previously led to success.

As Dane Stangler points out at Growthology, renovations to old stadiums or the construction of brand new stadiums often result in more costs than benefits for the communities in which they are housed. These new, large-scale projects come with promises of low real expenses  to local governments, as with the stadium in Indianapolis which officials promised could be paid for through a negligible tax hike. In fact, cities often construct generous, even risky, debt structures in order to help underwrite these structures, despite the fact that there is not a definite assurance of profit, or even repayment. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that “unrealistic revenue projections and the skyrocketing construction cost of sports stadiums, especially football behemoths, is making it increasingly hard for the facilities to generate enough cash to keep pace with expenses, namely debt service.” This can result in higher ticket prices, higher taxes, and depleted services for consumers and non-consumers alike. Stangler notes that public subsidization of stadiums often shifts costs from wealthy owners and players to visitors and tourists, who may not even be visiting the city for sports-related reasons.

In spite of the obvious negatives, legislators and franchise owners argue, perhaps rightfully so, that they need state-of-the-art space to attract talent and remain competitive. That argument sounds awfully similar to those made by nonprofit arts organizations when they decide to undertake expansion projects. New buildings, like Taubman Museum of Art’s new facility, come with enormous costs and can force already cash-strapped organizations to take on more debt and risk the sustainability of the entire organization.

During the boom years, many museums and cultural institutions wanted to take advantage of the deep pockets of their big donors and take on large infrastructure projects. According to the University of Chicago Cultural Policy Center study cited above, this led to significant “overinvestment during the building boom—especially when coupled with the number of organizations that experienced financial difficulties post-building.” Much like their for-profit counterparts, cultural institutions were overly optimistic about the positive returns their efforts would have—yet four-fifths of the projects studied ran over budget, often by significant amounts. This type of development will often alter the business plan for the expanded institution to pay for the increasing expenditures and higher operating cost.  However, the consequences for arts organizations that overextend themselves are often much more dire than for NFL teams that generate billions of dollars in revenue. When is the last time you heard of a sports franchise closing up shop because it was no longer able to sustain itself?

That said, there are examples of cultural institutions that manage an expensive physical expansion and resulting fundraising campaign in ways that not only benefited the organization by helping it to further execute its mission and better serve its constituents. One example cited by the Nonprofit Finance Fund is the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, IL. Part of the reason the Steppenwolf has been able to sustain itself in spite of a large real estate purchase is that the institution understood that the real estate itself would not be the main income generator. Instead, as the organization grew physically, it sought out diverse revenue streams, from individual contributions to corporate giving, in order to support this expansion.

At the end of the day, professional sports generate a huge amount of revenue from a variety of sources (broadcast rights, apparel sales, concessions, ticket sales, etc) and public officials are dazzled by the dollar signs–in 2012, professional sports leagues generated roughly $24.7 billion in revenue. That is with one league being on strike (the National Hockey League) and not playing games for most of a season. Many are desperate to get a piece of that fiduciary pie by whatever means necessary. By contrast, the power dynamic is flipped when it comes to cultural institutions; they have to pitch the value of investment and advertising to their funders, not the other way around. I believe this is why cultural institutions are often left “holding the bag,” scrambling to cover the cost of ambitious expansions as opposed to sports franchises, who are often able to walk away from fiscal disasters of their own making.

This is a skin-and-bones summary of my full Arts Policy Library write up.  Head that way for a much more thorough and nuanced discussion of “Fusing.”

Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy” calls for a major overhaul in arts philanthropy in the United States. It argues that arts philanthropy, as currently structured, perpetuates inequality across the arts and culture sector by disproportionately funding large institutions that focus on Western European traditions.  The report cites a number of present-day factors that make the case for change all the more pressing, including:

• The changing racial and ethnic composition of the United States and widening gap between the rich and poor
• artists breaking new ground in finding ways to apply the arts toward social justice goals
• inherent inequities in organizations’ access to private and public capital, with the largest 2% of organizations receiving 55% of all gifts, grants and contributions

The report does an excellent job of calling attention to organizations doing compelling work with arts and social change, and raises important questions about entrenched inequities in arts philanthropy. Unfortunately, it does not provide a clear vision of how funders should redistribute their resources, in large part because it conflates different segments of the arts sector (i.e. organizations pursuing social justice, small arts organizations, culturally-specific organizations, and individual artists) and fails to acknowledge varying levels of quality and impact within these categories.  This problem and others manifest in ways including:

• A misleading interpretation of income inequality among arts organizations. Without considering what large organizations’ budgets are used for, it seems premature to conclude that funding a large organization perpetuates inequity. Furthermore, although the 55%/2% statistic has often been cited by those reading the report as evidence of foundations’ lack of attention to smaller organizations, it refers not just to foundation grants but also to contributions and gifts from individuals. Essentially, all it tells us is that some organizations have larger budgets than others.
• Lack of evidence that small and mid-sized organizations can better advance social change than large ones. By virtue of their broad reach, large organizations may represent an attractive return on investment to funders seeking to reach a large audience in a short amount of time. Many large institutions represent a variety of cultures, provide free or reduced priced events, and offer targeted outreach activities.
• Lack of articulated need for funding. “Fusing” states that artists, tradition bearers, and culturally-specific organizations are already rising in number due to demographic shifts, but doesn’t specifically address what additional role private philanthropy should play in that process. Should foundations support these artists and organizations to continue doing what they’re doing or ask that they expand or shift their scope?

None of the issues undermine the assertion that inequities exist within the arts sector, but they do raise questions about the extent to which those inequities are problematic, and whether they are problematic for the same reasons that the report identifies.

Where “Fusing” does succeed is in compelling us to think more deeply about how and when the basic notion of equity informs arts funding. Private funders can, as “Fusing” suggests, seek out and learn from the higher-quality work undertaken by arts and social change organizations, and support systems for our field to become more thoughtful in exploring and documenting the impact of arts. They can also fund third-party research to study both the intended and unexpected consequences of arts programming in underserved communities. We could use a better understanding of how newer, more grassroots organizations evolve as they expand their scale and scope. These organizations may not now operate under a “classic model,” but the models they do offer seem like fertile testing grounds for better understanding not just the impact of artist-activism, but the impact of private grant support on that activism.

Shifting arts grantmaking toward a greater focus on equity is a long-term process. Managing that shift well requires our collective willingness to set ideology aside and question, examine and clarify the benefit and impact of artistic practice on all communities.