Pinky and YOUR Brain

Today I did something a tad out of the ordinary; I was interviewed by two cats. Not just any two cats, mind you, I was interviewed by Pinky and Kim, the cartoon cats from the Pinky Show. Haven't heard of the Pinky Show? It's a website that "gently pokes your brain with a stick," focusing on "information & ideas that have been misrepresented, suppressed, ignored, or otherwise excluded from mainstream discussion." These ideas include thoughts on museums, as seen in this video.

So what did Pinky and Kim interview me about? Why the future of museums, of course! And they didn't ask easy questions, either. No, the questions posed by this animated duo were astute and thought-provoking, probing issues such as the democratization of museums, where museums are headed and whether we are on the right track.

I enjoyed my little chat with Pinky and Kim--and you can, too! Their booth is open to all #aam10 participants over in the Center for the Future of Museums area in the Expo Hall. So stop by and say hello, gaze into the future and share what you see with these charming little kitties--and the rest of the museum field!

Voices of the Future Interview

Last week at the AAM conference in Philadelphia, our host, the American Association of Museums, offered all sorts of new and experimental ways to engage. One was to record a Voices of the Future interview. Anyone who was interested was welcome to speak for a couple of minutes on their visions of the future for museums. All of the interviews are now available up on YouTube. Mine is embedded here.

A Sobering Look at the Real Numbers

Mark Vallen over at Art for a Change wrote a very eloquent yet sobering post earlier this month putting the economic crisis and the President's spending plan in perspective: $50 million for national arts spending in the stimulus package and "$11 billion a month for the next year and a half despite the planned draw down of U.S. forces in Iraq."

Vallen also begins a list of museums that are laying off staff or closing their doors, similar to the list I began, but his is more detailed and mentions a couple I have not, such as the Walters Art Museum which "laid-off seven of its 150 employees, imposed a salary and hiring freeze, and cancelled [sic] a major exhibition of works by French painter Jean-Leon Gerome - an exhibit that would have been a collaborative project with the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and the Getty in Los Angeles."

When you look at the budget cuts for just the 8 institutions Vallen mentions, it becomes painfully obvious that $50 million just won't go very far. Closures will be inevitable. Guess Elizabeth Merritt of the Center for the Future of Museums is right; since it isn't a question of if but when, how many and who, maybe we need to start figuring out how to orchestrate this strategically so that the overall value of arts organizations as a whole is not diminished for the public.

Assumptions about Museums

Over at the Center for the Future of Museums blog, long-held assumptions about what museums are and do are being raised and questioned including:

-- Everything currently in the collections will stay in the collections
-- Everything that fits the collections plan will go into the collections
-- Growth is good, necessary and inevitable
-- Museums as organizations tied to a particular place
-- Museums will always be tax-exempt non-profit organizations

It's a pretty thorough post in terms of laying out what the assumptions are that we need to rethink, but what it doesn't offer is any discussion of what questioning those assumptions will mean in real life to museums and those who work in them.

For example, what will happen to our current collections skills and practices if museums move away from having permanent collections in the traditional sense? What will happen to museum funding if museums move away from the idea of incessant growth? Funders tend to want to pay for increases, be it in participation in programming or number of programming, funders verify the success of what they pay for by numbers that go up. And what will happen to all the museums that are currently accredited if the criteria for accreditation suddenly and radically changes as the entire concept of what a museum is alters?

I'm certainly not against scenario exercises or questioning assumptions, but I'd love to hear some more in-depth thoughts on how the scenario for museums will change as we question these assumptions.