ARTINFO
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Generation Complex
By Jacquelyn Lewis
Published: February 6, 2008
If the art world wasn’t exactly shocked by the announcement of Philippe de Montebello’s impending retirement—the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s longtime director is, after all, 71—the news certainly jolted it into conversations about how much American art museums have changed since the French-born aristocrat took the helm at the Met three decades ago, who his successor might be, and what kind of challenges they’ll face.
Those conversations have opened up a wider discussion of the increasingly complex responsibilities awaiting new directors in institutions of all sizes. De Montebello might be the highest-profile art-world doyen to retire in a long time, but several other museum leaders have also recently announced plans to step down, including Trudy C. Kramer of Parrish Art Museum on New York’s Long Island, Jay Gates of Washington D.C.’s Phillips Collection, and John R. “Jack” Lane of the Dallas Museum of Art. Those departures, coupled with what some are calling an unprecedented number of vacant museum directorships (“I don’t remember the number of openings being this high since 1983 or ’84,” Mimi Gaudieri, the Association of Art Museum Directors’s executive director, told the New York Times last July) have some art-world insiders wondering if museums in the United States might be experiencing a changing of the guard.
As of December, even before de Montebello’s announcement, more than 20 museums across the country were looking for directors, according to a list published monthly by the Association of Art Museum Directors. “There are always [directorship] vacancies at museums, but generationally we are probably facing a moment where there will be increasing numbers of openings,” said Elizabeth Easton, former chair of the Brooklyn Museum’s department of European Painting and Sculpture, former president of the Association of Art Museum Curators, and cofounder and director of the newly established Center for Curatorial Leadership, which was founded in 2007 to educate curators in the managerial, fundraising, and administrative responsibilities of directing an institution.
Jack Lane, who will retire from the Dallas Museum of Art in May, started his career as a museum director at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in the early 1980s, when he was 35. “Many of my peers also got their first directorships in their early- to mid-30s, so this seems to be kind of a pattern,” he said.
And if a new generation of leaders is cycling in now, it certainly has its work cut out for it. The museum landscape has shifted dramatically over the past few decades, and it continues to change rapidly. “Obviously museums are many times the size they were 30 years ago and their budgets and visitor numbers are much larger,” Easton said. “Running a museum is a much bigger operation.”
At the Met alone, attendance has climbed from three and a half million to about five million under de Montebello’s reign. The museum’s physical space has also grown considerably, with countless additions and expansions, from the 100,000 square-foot Lila Acheson Wallace Wing in 1987 to the 57,000-square-foot Greek and Roman Galleries in 2007. The museum currently operates on an annual budget of more than $200 million, a dramatic increase even from $116.5 million in 1999, when CEO was added to de Montebello’s title. In addition, the Met has, along with other museums, dealt with scrutiny into the origins of antiquities in its collection (the museum recently returned the 2,500-year-old Euphronius Krater to Italy, part of a deal that included 20 other antiquities). Other institutions are facing the same changes and challenges on varying scales, making the present a particularly tricky time to be a museum director.
“Museum life has gotten much more complicated,” Lane summed up.
Phillip Nowlen, head of the Los Angeles–based Getty Leadership Institute, which offers educational programs for both current and future museum leaders, ticked off a list of new challenges including the changing distribution of wealth in the United States (which affects the culture and composition of museums’ boards of directors); the tendency of today’s museum visitors to bring less art knowledge; museums’ mounting financial challenges; the intricacies of repatriation; and increasing demands for transparency in museum policy and decision-making.
“Ethical issues such as repatriation, conflicts of interest, and donor behavior are multiplying,” Nowlen said. “Just last week the FBI raided a number of Southern California museums and dealers as part of an investigation of alleged looting and smuggling, and suspicious valuation of objects gifted to museums.”
Lane agreed, saying that in prior decades “there simply wasn’t as much attention paid to the inner workings of museums. Increased governmental oversight and media attention add to the complexity of the museum director’s job.”
Lane, who served as director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for 10 years, and presided over its monumental growth spurt and 1995 expansion, said people planning careers in museum leadership should be prepared for the expansion trend to continue.
Community engagement is another important consideration, Lane, Nowlen, and Easton said, as even institutions that have traditionally focused on scholarship and conservation put increased emphasis on public education, marketing, and the “visitor experience.”
“The new challenges facing museum directors include maintaining the standards of scholarship and education surrounding collections and exhibitions alongside this new idea of engaging the community,” Easton said. “Maybe the seeds were planted 30 years ago—maybe even more than 30 years ago—but now everyone sees that engagement as a very important part of the museum mission.”
The exploding art market has also engaged a whole new audience. Silvia Cubina, director of Miami-based art institution The Moore Space and one of ten 2008 fellows at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, said dealing with the market is also an important issue, especially for institutions focused on contemporary art. “Directors will continue to have to contend with the market for good or for bad,” said Cubina, who is a first-time director. “You either work with it or resist it.” She adds that this aspect of the job calls for more networking and travel than ever before.
So who is best fit to step into these roles demanding such a wieldy combination of art knowledge, managerial skills, and shrewd business sense? Some are declaring the end of an era in which leaders with primarily curatorial backgrounds were at the helm of museums, picking up business skills as they went. As NPR’s Margot Adler put it on the February 3 edition of All Things Considered, “The announcement last month that Philippe de Montebello is retiring has led to a spate of articles describing him as the last of a breed…. Times have changed, and today’s museum directors are as likely to be CEOs as they are curators.”
Still, the consensus, at least among the museum insiders ARTINFO talked with, seems to be that the most desirable leaders are people who are passionate about and well-schooled in art first, and willing to learn the managerial aspects of the position second. Lane, for one, fits that description, having earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. in fine arts at Harvard University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. His chosen successor, Bonnie Pitman, the Dallas Museum of Arts’s current deputy director, has held both curatorial and administrative positions in museums.
“That’s absolutely the key,” Easton said. “People who are museum curators have a passion for art, and they have Ph.D.s and scholarship in the area. Business techniques can be taught, but teaching a person about art is a much slower, longer process. It’s not assured that someone will be a good museum director just because they’re a good manager.”
Despite the predictions, it remains to be seen what kind of director will fill de Montebello’s considerable shoes—or the 20-plus vacancies at other museums across the country. “Directorship openings?” Lane said. “That’s a phenomenon that seems to reoccur. What might be more surprising are some of the selections.”