Measuring the Success of a Museum's Vision

From the New York Times:

When it opened a new glass entrance in 2004 meant to beckon the masses, the Brooklyn Museum said it hoped to triple attendance in 10 years by concentrating on a local audience. It had stopped worrying about competing with Manhattan museums or about its image — despite its world-class collections — as a poor man’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Instead, the museum invited the neighborhood to view its McKim, Mead & White Beaux-Arts building as a community resource and openly celebrated popular culture with shows like its recent photographic history of rock ’n’ roll.

But six years in, the effort to build an audience is not working. Attendance in 2009 dropped 23 percent from the year before, to about 340,000, though other New York cultural institutions remained stable.

There's a wealth of data and opinion offered in Robin Pogrebin's article (titled "Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds)," but by the end of it, I still wasn't sure what I thought were the most important measures in determining whether a museum's vision is succeeding. Complicating the matter for me are three factors that I assume need to be considered in conjunction with attendance tallies: the economy, the shifting demographics of the area, and the percentage of populist efforts.

Of course, from the article's title, you'd think the last factor isn't so important, but not only does Pogrebin note that MoMA's recent exhibition on the work of director Tim Burton "drew 811,000 visitors, its third-largest audience ever for an exhibition," among the Brooklyn Museum's most populist recent exhibitions, “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present,” also "drew large crowds" according to the piece. [I've offered my opinion of such shows here before, so I'll press on.]

Taking every factor into account, it would seem that the title of the article should read simply "Brooklyn Museum Hasn't Lured Crowds," which leads me back to the other two factors I assume would be important to consider: the economy and the shifting demographics of the area. Those would seem to be perhaps more relevant here, no? Perhaps the answer is no for the first one. Reports far and wide suggest people are flocking to some museums like never before.

So what does determine whether a museum's vision is successful?

Experts say many factors lure visitors to museums, including location and marketing, not just the quality of an institution’s collections or the nature of its exhibitions. And Brooklyn is far from the only museum that has suffered a sudden attendance drop....

Ah yes, location and marketing. Brooklyn would seem to have a location disadvantage with New York's other major museums, but I think it's the other factor that really holds the key here if you compare museums within Manhattan. According to the annual review in The Art Newspaper (pdf file), of the top 30 museum exhibitions in the world, the top 10 that took place in New York were:

1. Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting, Museum of Modern Art
   
2. Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out, Museum of Modern Art
   
3. James Ensor, Museum of Modern Art
   
4. Ron Arad: No Discipline, Museum of Modern Art
5. Martin Kippenberger: Problem Perspective, Museum of Modern Art
6. Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave, Museum of Modern Art
7. Van Gogh and the Colours of the Night, Museum of Modern Art
   
8. Vermeer’s Masterpiece The Milkmaid, Metropolitan Museum of Art
9. Frank Lloyd Wright: from Within Outward, Guggenheim Museum
   
10. Aernout Mik, Museum of Modern Art

Eight of them were at MoMA. And this despite the fact that total attendance was higher at the Met than at MoMA, suggesting that it's the success of MoMA's marketing of specific exhibitions that's giving them the big crowds for specific shows. Moreover, looking at those MoMA shows, it's possible to conclude that populist offerings were part of their key to success (Van Gogh and Miro might fall into that category at this point), but Kippenberger, Dumas, and Mik are hard to classify that way as far as the general public is concerned (note: the Burton show will be part of next year's analysis).

As for the demographics of the area factor, here I think perhaps the Brooklyn Museum director, Arnold Lehman, is making a very bold (and possibly more provident) investment:

Mr. Lehman says he takes pride in the fact that even though the Brooklyn Museum’s audience hasn’t grown, it has become younger and more diverse. A 2008 museum survey showed that roughly half of the attendees were first-time visitors. The average age was 35, a large portion of the visitors (40 percent) came from Brooklyn, and more than 40 percent identified themselves as people of color.

Making a younger and more diverse crowd feel welcome might pay off big in the long run, in my opinion, but not everyone agrees:

“The core constituency of collectors who matter, and people who are members of an art museum, want to be taught and stretched and learn,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, a former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art who now runs the Indianapolis Museum of Art. “You may get people in the door for a motorcycle show or a ‘Star Wars’ show, but they don’t return, and there is no residual value from their visits.”

Personally, I think location is probably the number one challenge for the Brooklyn Museum and that unless they could mount blockbuster after blockbuster, there's not much else they can do to improve attendance. I say that based on my visitations to museums in other cities (where I'm too pressed for time usually to visit the out-of-the-way institutions, and so I don't...unless it's clearly a must-see show). I'm willing to bet a very high percentage of MoMA's or the Met's visitors are from out of town, that they're on insanely busy schedules, and that the trip to Brooklyn means not doing several other things they want to fit in while in New York.

Having said that, perhaps the best way to measure the Brooklyn Museum's success isn't by comparing it to other museums or even against its own ambitious attendance goals (such efforts seem so corporate to me, I can't help but think they confuse a curatorial program), but against its mission statement:

The mission of the Brooklyn Museum is to act as a bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor. Dedicated to the primacy of the visitor experience, committed to excellence in every aspect of its collections and programs, and drawing on both new and traditional tools of communication, interpretation, and presentation, the Museum aims to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.

Being dedicated to "primacy of the visitor experience" is a seriously lofty goal, in my opinion (and something MoMA can't hold a candle to Brooklyn in, given its outrageous crowds and awkward building), so long as the programming is comparable. Charlie Finch's recent tribute to Sigmar Polke suggests that perhaps that's where the Brooklyn Museum needs to refocus:

When I think of the Brooklyn Museum the way it used to be, I think of a place that nobody visited, with a strange wing of Egyptian art and huge airy vaults and skylights that were a spiritual oasis for a lone visitor on a weekday afternoon. And I think of Sigmar Polke's solo show at the museum in 1991.

[...]I remember the day I went, that I was all alone in the gallery and that Polke's work surrounded me like a twilight full of ghosts.

Low attendance isn't the worst thing in the world.