Museums for the New Millennium:"Is my mother safe?"
John Edgar Wideman, Homewood, and Culture
Museums for the New Millennium:
 |  |
MR. ELLIS: I don't hear your stomachs grumbling anymore, so I would guess you have found some repast somewhere.
If you look at your program, and you look at me, you will see that I am not Nina Archabal. She could not make it because of bad weather so you have me to contend with this afternoon. I am not going to say much except it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Ellsworth Brown.
He was elected president of the Carnegie Institute of Museums in February of 1993. It's located in Pittsburgh, obviously. Carnegie includes the Museum of Art, the Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Science Center, the Carnegie Music Hall, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Before his appointment in Pittsburgh, he was director and of the Chicago Historical Society beginning in July of 1981. Earned a PHD in American and Canadian history from Michigan State University in 1975, an M.E. In history from Western Michigan University in 1967 and a BA in history from Hillsdale College in Michigan in 1965; was president of the American Association of Museums from May 1990 to May of 1992, and continued to serve as a MAP visitor, senior examiner for the accreditation commission and chairs the association's nominating committee and the governance task force. He has memberships in the governing council for the American Association for State and Local History, the governing board of the Illinois Arts Alliance, the Advisory Board of Sculpture Chicago, a board member of the National Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Property, Loyola, University of Chicago Public History Advisory Committee, the board of the National Cultural Alliance, a board member of the Citizens for the Arts in Pennsylvania, a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, a consulting editor of the Journal of Arts Management and Law. He is also a member of the Smithsonian Council.
Clearly this is a man with too much time on his hands. Ellsworth Brown, ladies and gentlemen.
[APPLAUSE].
MR. BROWN: Thank you for that kindness. I know that's going out on the web, too, right? For the record, in the next two weeks, I work.
Thank you so much for having invited me to speak to you. I have by the way, you see this is bound. We had this machine, thinking of Jennifer Jarratt losing -- it's's what I call the Adam and Eve problem. We have a missing leaf somewhere. So I bound mine. If you find there is a similarity between what I say and what Harold Skramstad said, it's because I took notes on the back and there is a tendency to merge the speeches. It's a handy device. If you ever want to use it, feel free.
I did talk to Nina last night and she really wishes she could be here, but clearly with the storm in the middle of it all, it was not possible and she sends her regrets. I wish she were here, too.
I also speak to you in the spirit of the Secretary of the Smithsonian who said that it perhaps was not his role to think normatively. That's a polite way of saying what the CEO of one of the two largest banks in Pittsburgh said, which is it's his job to keep people unsettled and, because this is on the web, I won't name which one. I will let both bank employee groups know that they can guess and it's probably the answer, it's either one.
[The following is an edited version of a presentation made at "Museums for the New Millennium." Do not quote or copy any of this text without the written permission of the author.]
It is an honor to be among you, colleagues all, who offer the Smithsonian Institution our congratulations on this sesquicentennial. The Smithsonian means much to many of us who have found leadership, friends and intellectual engagement, drama and challenge among you who work here. It is also an honor to celebrate, with you, the contributions of this legendary institution.
Museums at the Crossroads
Our institutions, still being born of enthusiasm, idealism, self-consciousness,
boosterism - aIl of the descriptors that help explain the United States - are at a crossroads. Actually, we are in the middle of the intersection, and it is governed not by traffic lights, but by only
the sketchiest of rules ... say, a four-way stop.
On the one hand, we celebrate an awakening that has been building over time. The report on the Commission on Museums for a New Century was followed by Excellence and Equity, a ringing declaration embedded in the title.
ICOM came to this awakening even earlier, at the ninth General Conference in 1971. There, differences between collections-centered museums and what Patrick Boylan recently described as the "integrated museum concerned with the whole of its natural, cultural and social territory and setting" were settled in favor of the latter. I am sure some of you were there. If so, I would be interested in knowing where you stood then, and whether you stand there now.
The American Association of Museums' ethics statements, first advanced in the 1920s using the phrase "in service to society," dropped this concept in the "professional" 1960s, and, in the l990s, reaffirmed our professional techniques and our obligation to service.
Foundations claim the awakening, too and now ask pointedly the question I first received ten years ago from the head of the AMOCO foundation: he said, "Of course we'll support your museum. It's a fine institution and important to the community. But now, tell me... who comes?"
On the other hand, the effort to achieve the AAM's current Code of Ethics was long, and forged with difficulty, a kind of "on the job training" for the field. The development of Excellence and Equity was achieved primarily by educators, without broad participation by museum directors. And by reason of national circumstance, ICOM - a vibrant force in many countries where the 1971 message is heard with greater sympathy - is not a dominant force in the United States.
The survey of your interests as you gather here includes this litany:
| Can hands-on, personal involvement compete with high-tech exhibits?
What does the increase in non-museum administrators foretell? |
How will the Net and the Web level our audiences? |
Can we serve new audiences without aggravating the old ones?
| |
If the messages that are begged by this marvelous symposium for the new millennium, this "symposium with an attitude," are being heard with increasing frequency, it is still my opinion that the messages remain a patina that has yet to become a stain, has yet to sink deep into the fiber of our professional ranks and ingrained attitudes, has yet to recolor misguided acts of professional self-preservation.
We need this symposium now more than ever, as the lines of winning and losing are drawn between those of us who, with the arrogance of one presidential candidate, believe we have the "Vision," and those - like the other candidate - who are convinced that we will destroy what is most important about museums. (You want me to tell you which candidate has the "Vision," don't you? Actually, either candidate may be used in either half of the equation.)
To explain where our field is down deep, consider journalist Neal Ascherson's observation, in a wandering account of the Black Sea, that "autopsy, when the Greeks invented the word, meant seeing for oneself." It is, he said, "a word about individualism and independence of mind." By the late Middle Ages, however, "autopsy was at war with authority," with authority the winner, dependent upon the dogma of the Church and established philosophers. Thenceforth, additional inquiry became annotation, expanding but not challenging the accepted, and banishing autopsy to the courtroom, where it remains today, shielded by centuries of law and practice.
Museums today shelter deep-seated authority, threatened and enjoined but not yet gone. In the face of dogma, those who wish to challenge authority find the autopical approach to be ineffective. After all, what good is one's verifiable knowledge to those who already believe?
Here it is... the key to understanding museums in the next millennium There is a difference between authority and information. Authority is about position, which is about power. Information - about which one can be an authority - is egalitarian, can be shared, learned and used by many, shifting power to the individual for whom it is increasingly available. Do we wonder why it is so hard to turn ourselves from inward to outward goals?
And so I have deliberately decided to talk to you not in terms of what I know, but in terms of what I believe. I draw the power for my convictions from anecdotes, from emotional experiences, from the things that have changed my perception.
I came to museums because I needed a job.... Faced with unemployment after a temporary teaching position, I was urged by a friend to explore work in a small county museum. "But I know nothing about museums," I protested. "So?" he replied.
I learned that museums had better tools for teaching history than classrooms had, and I moved from South Dakota to Tennessee to Chicago to find bigger and better tools.
Along the way, history changed, became the "new social history." Now, good history is the history of everybody. This begged an understanding that those who make and remember history also have a claim to it and that we must talk to them about it. And this means that we must be about the role of institution in communities, as much as about history, which becomes the media
As a result, and as one who is charged with oversight of four museums with different missions, the overarching vision I have adopted out of my experience is, simply, to make a difference in the lives of people over time.
Anecdotes, modest vignettes, have helped me come to this: a woman visiting the Chicago Historical Society's "Chicago Goes to War" exhibition, for example, who, moved by her memories of the homefront and personal separation from a lover, gathered strangers around her in the exhibit and sang "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me." Or of the power of song and the spoken words of Frederick Douglass, able to draw tears from those who otherwise read, with less passion, our carefully written labels about slavery.
Without scientific validity or statistical standing, anecdotes still serve. The title of this speech comes from the November 1993 issue of Discover magazine, a rich source of anecdotes.
"10 Great Science Museums," says the magazine cover. The feature is about natural history museums, primarily. "I have loved museums as far back as I can remember," began one article. "Most children have a bug period; I never grew out of mine," wrote another. Retired astronaut Buzz Aldrin said that "There's a lot of my own past in this museum" of Air and Space, here in Washington.
Writer Judith Stone watched through the eyes of her nine-year-old niece Jessica who, upon entering the Field Museum in Chicago, exclaimed "I love this place. Isn't it beautiful? I've been sick here a lot. I used to always have to throw up after the car ride." Stone observed that for children, the ratio of "cool" to "gross" in a natural history museum needed to be about even. (Parenthetically, "hot lava is very cool, and certified gross is naked people.")
Indeed, Jessica's excitement recalls to mind the story used by the late Lee Webber, President of the Field Museum, to demonstrate the uplifting value of museums. He observed a high school class tumbling down the grand staircase, two students roughly engaged. One said to the other, "If we weren't in a world-class museum, I'd push your face in!"
Happy articles, celebratory articles, the kind we like to have in the press.
We were pleased to find ourselves among the ten, remembered by John Edgar Wideman, a Pittsburgh author who began his story of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, in the neighborhood of Oakland. I'd like to share some of it with you:
The words continue. .. gangs, flash fires, drive-by shootings, bullets, nobody's safe, "no trolley connects Homewood [his mother's neighborhood] with Oakland" anymore. "Homewood school children don't arrive excited, nervous, awed by the monumental facade of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. ... There is no cultural center like Oakland where all kinds of people can mingle, reconnect with each other and with themselves."
Trustees called.
John Wideman is a professor of English at Amherst College, father of a successful daughter now in college. John is also the author of My Brother's Keeper, about his brother, who is serving a life sentence for murder. John's son is currently in prison, sentenced as an accessory to a different murder. And two years ago, John's nephew was murdered in his home in Homewood.
Wideman' s needs overshadowed our need for the happy story we expected. In John's story, we find the part of the world that is estranged from us, or needs us, but doesn't have us.
He continued then, to write about the "good stuff" he remembers about field trips to our museum: Tyrannosaurus rex, mountainous Brontosaurus. "Gradually," he said, "I'd learn the names of these creatures, memorize their vital statistics, and they'd be the reference point for measuring every other living thing, from other little boys to pro football tackles, the rest of my life."
John had questions:
Even as we celebrate our new-found attitudes, the world inserts a foot in the door. Each speaker has been asked to leave with you with a query to consider. Here is mine:
John wrote about a museum of natural history. I am privileged to share responsibility for four museums: Carnegie Science Center and The Andy Warhol Museum are new; the museum of art and museum of natural history are a century old. Old cultures, new cultures, different museum cultures. Artistic and scientific. Contemplative and activist. While our museum of art represents a classic set of museum values, for example, The Andy Warhol Museum celebrated its second anniversary last May with a live radio broadcast of two Elvises and a Marilyn (Monroe) skydiving from an aircraft at night, with fireworks on their legs, onto a barge in the middle of the Allegheny River. It may have lacked taste, but it was fun.
Having established my biases, I would like to discuss each kind of museum, explore briefly the questions surrounding new technology and, finally, consider pertinent questions about management.
Natural History Museums
Stephen Weil, one of our wisest mentors, observed to me that museums of natural
history are the only museums that can speak easily of the future. By extrapolation, their data
demonstrates trends in the environment and the health of species, a unique ability that, though
mirrored by the popular press, remams significantly unrealized.
Natural history provides grist for publishing. The issue of Discover magazine that
features Wideman's article was the largest in the magazine's 13-year history. This month's issue of Popular Science and the June 5th issue of Newsweek exploit the ever-popular subject of dinosaurs, in this case Paul Sereno`s discovery of something bigger and "more monstrous than T.
Rex."
And there is more: in Popular Science, just to the left of "Head to Head: Ford vs. Chevy Pickups" (and for our visitors from abroad: which truck is better remains an important American question), we find the article "Surfing for Science." This is not an insignificant article. The magazine's circulation is two million, and it devotes eleven pages to the Web and science. We learn the offerings of fifty-three Web sites, from the human genome project to hands-on science centers worldwide and the Yahoo science and technology indexes.
A clearer message about the extent of the information age cannot be found.
The linkage between what museums of natural history do and what people are interested in is not explained solely by the availability of data and projections of the future, however. Fred Rogers once told me that children between the ages of three or four, and about seven or eight are fascinated by dinosaurs because they are at once real and imaginary, matching a child's mind in which reality and imagination remain coupled; they are powerful, important to a child beginning to realize his or her limited power; and they are affirmed by adults eager to buy children books, models, and trips to the museum.
This probably explains why a four-year-old can spell "stegosaurus" but doesn't remember the days of the week. It also explains a universal fascination with what might have been, or could have been, and what might be. And it is this frontier, if exploited properly, that guarantees the future of natural history museums.
Natural history museums are places of information that is held, used, gathered by scientists. But one of the strengths of the computer age is that information can be readily disseminated and manipulated in ways that preclude needing a museum. Indeed, while museums hold the original genetic material of living things, universities have moved from collections - many of which have been turned over to museums - to genetic research that plumbs the sub microscopic world where the future may be found. Ten or eleven botanical gardens and museums themselves have joined to place a survey of North America's biodiversity on the Internet.
But it is not possible to place on the Internet the kind of scale that caused a small child to stand transfixed beneath our T. rex, exclaiming over and over to himself, "That could eat you up! That could eat you up!" It is not possible to digitalize experiences, and emotions. And it is likewise reassuring to know - believe, at least - that humankind will always need these things, because what matters most to us is what we love, hate, or fear, even more than what we know.
History Museums
This is also why history museums, which first discovered this truth, can succeed
with relatively less effort than other museums. The power of memory and emotion is closely
linked to history museums, for it is in them that we most readily see ourselves. In this city, a
comparison between the creation of the Holocaust Museum, in which the voice of the survivors
was unassailable, and the development of the "Enola Gay" exhibition both testify to this power. It
is not easy to talk about emotions, even in history museums, and more difficult in science museums, where the loss of objectivity and fear of the maudlin are anathema. And yet we must remember the public's interest in genealogy, in family histories told and retold at reunions, weddings, and funerals, in personal frameworks of the past, and what it is that makes a national consciousness.
The act of seeking the history of ordinary people helps us develop a sense of how important the keepers of history are. Coming to this conclusion from an opposite direction, Lois Silverman, assistant professor of recreation and park administration and director of the Center on History-Making in America at Indiana University, writes in the 1995 issue of the museum journal Curator (Vol.38, No.3) about the new-speak phrase "visitor meaning-making," which she thinks is no less than "a new age in human science."
"Meaning-making" affects "a range of disciplines concerned with the nature of information exchange." Put simply, "the paradigm has transformed the definition of communication from a one-way linear path" (like this speech) "where meaning represents the significance intended by a sender to a receiver, to a process of negotiation between two parties in which information (and meaning) is created rather than transmitted, and meaning is in the eyes, head, and heart of the particular beholder."
In other words, "meaning-making" is about sharing authority.
Art and history museums especially depend upon, sometimes are abused by, and can be enhanced by subjective experience and perspective. History, it seems to me, offers the most ready forum for this kind of negotiated meaning. Successful museums, like the Minnesota Historical Society, the Missouri Historical Society, and so many others that now share their authority, and unsuccessful museums like the New York Historical Society, both know this now.
Museums of Art
As a concept, "meaning-making'' is particularly appropriate to museums of art.
The inherently subjective nature of art, supported by knowledge but ultimately appreciated for its
appearance, its message, our interpretation, is ideal for the process of negotiation.
But I am more concerned for their future than for that of any other kind of museum, because the question of authority, the kind that comes from position, - not from knowledge, is most finely focused in art museums.
Years ago I read a book called The Saber-Toothed Curriculum, about a cave man who discovered accidentally a fortune in fish, trapped in a stream by an entanglement of vines. Suddenly wealthy, returning regularly to the site, he prospered. The vines were reliably in place, and his worry was not that they would be damaged. In fact, he had learned to duplicate the tangle by tying new vines into nets. His real concern was that he would be discovered.
The obvious solution was secrecy, which was risky. The chosen solution was more powerful: he shared his secrets with a select few, to whom he gave titles. And they developed a sure way of holding others aloof from their fishing business: they named the nets: gill nets, weirs, seines. And they named the knots. They developed a profession, and none without proper knowledge tried to duplicate the fishermen's success, upon pain of ridicule and embarrassment.
If natural history museums use Latin names, these are readily learned, and those who do so can become welcome and valued amateurs among the curators because their knowledge is reliable and useful. It is uncommon in natural history and history museums to encounter phrases like "it holds the wall well," or "the dinosaur speaks for itself." It is uncommon to eschew interpretive devices because they might come between the visitor and the specimen or object.
Lest you think I have an antagonistic streak, let me reassure you that I do not. It is true that, once, I was told that I would not know good art unless it glowed in the dark. And upon reflection (no pun intended here), I suppose this is true. Recently I replaced a primitive landscape in my office with an Andy Warhol painting of Mt. Vesuvius. It is spectacular, bright colors, quite flashy. The other evening I entered my office after dark, and you know what...? Fluorescent paint. Must be a good one.
In truth, I have enjoyed coming to art, learning to relax and to accept it or pass by without difficulty, to the next piece. It is a new experience for me, and a good one.
But a mere month ago, I was talking to a curator of contemporary art who, with me, observed a curator of line art (nineteenth century paintings, but let's not discuss definitions lurther) was having a difficult time defending a piece against attack by a knowledgeable amateur. It's easy for me, said the curator of contemporary art. I simply describe it, say it's good, and nobody can argue with me. Indeed.
Inadvertently, particularly in contemporary art that depends so heavily on individual judgment and upon its linkages to other contemporary art, the question of authority rises against a society that values shared authority, dislikes finding itself in a subsidiary position, and is uncomfortable when told that something is, because someone said so.
More than in any other field, art requires "meaning-making" and the process of negotiation that occurs best when people interact. By the time we reach the millennium, we must set aside our reluctance to use tool - labels, sound, music, computers - so that we go beyond a catalogue tied to a bench in the gallery, a larger label hidden in a pocket.
But does this mean that we sacrifice an environment that is truly beautiful, in order to make meanings? Does this mean that in helping people make meanings, we offend those who already understand meanings and do not want to be disturbed, or crowded out in the five-deep manner of Cezanne's friends in Philadelphia? Sometimes it does, but when it does, it can be the result of strategic or tactical decisions. It certainly imposes challenges exceeding those of other kinds of museums. For a field that finds itself far behind other museums, with a steeper hill to climb, the issues are deadly serious.
The public media does not help. Stories about art, unless they are about the purchase of the Codex, rarely penetrate the popular press the way science and history do. Museums of art have to do it themselves. The good news is that they have begun, with truths revealed by the Getty Museum in its groundbreaking studies of audience, and now replicated with help from the Pew Charitable Trust, for example.
The future of art museums, too, is tied to experiences, not information. To show what a painting looks like can be the Internet's task. To gather information about it, we can assign the World Wide Web. But Barry Gaither spoke recently, in a speech in Pittsburgh, about the concept of "museums in the public interest:" museums that help people live together, that educate and, in the process, unite or mutually justify divergent views." Museums, he said, are forums of cultural dimensions, havens, partners, safe places in which to discuss difficult questions, places to search for identify.
John Edgar Wideman thought so. "Culture," he said, "is not mindless accumulation of some laundry list of objects or people or styles somebody else has intimidated us into accepting. Culture is a way of locating yourself in the world, a world that doesn't make much sense without a conscious, active, continuous process of orientation, learning, accommodation."
Science Centers
This brings us to the enigma of museums, the science center. From 1973 to 1995,
143 science museums and technology centers opened, a 108% increase. Forty-six opened in the
last five years. Ten more have opened or will open this year, and ninety-one of the existing centers are expanding this year. Attendance at the top ten science centers totaled 32.2 million visitors in l995.
Why?
If natural science is in the popular press, "harder" sciences dominate it, exploiting the fanciful or exotic and chronicling the rest: life on Mars, faster computers, black boxes with answers to crashes... it's all there, every day, everywhere.
Why?
For one thing, science centers are vernacular architecture. The architects are living, the materials familiar, the shapes modern. Our audiences watch the designs roll out in the newspapers or, for the less-fortunate, in public hearings, and watch them being built and help pay for them. For these reasons, they are comfortable places, one of the sensations we are increasingly told that is necessary to attract audiences
This raises the reciprocal problem, of course. Classical buildings have the power to awe, to provide jaw-dropping impact, but they are also a nineteenth century class statement misplaced in a society that prefers, against all evidence, to insist proudly that it is classless. For those unaccustomed to the rules or to the need to perceive the rules as they go, this can be devastating.
For example, three years ago, in response to our newspaper advertisements for rubber dinosaurs (Dynamation's, I think), a woman called on behalf of her children. "May we come?" she said. We did not misunderstand the question, for her second was, "How many may we bring?" and her third was "How long may we stay?" She did not know the rules.
Science centers succeed because they employ the full range of tools that reflect how people learn, and because they do so more efficiently than other museums in which "professional" barriers preclude their employment. For example, whereas adults are able to deal abstractly with concepts and data, children prefer "full body learning." We know that many people learn best by doing, by manipulating, by trying things themselves. Too few art and natural history museums take full advantage of this knowledge; some history museums do.
Technology
| "New tools?"
"What will happen to art museums" when we can see art on the screen? |
Will Bill Gates' Corbis snap up copyrights and licenses?
| |
One calming way to think about technology is to identify the few technological innovations that have actually made a significant difference in our lives. I suggest that you will be surprised at how little fundamental things have changed.
Consider Corbis, for example. It was the 800 gorilla of the May/June 1996 Museum News cover. The specter was raised of one company amassing copyrights and licenses to digital images from museums, but what are we talking about here? Not digitalization, but the sale of copyrights and licenses, which was possible long before digitalization.
What has changed? Video images have less fidelity than those in long-available printed sources, including posters we sell. Old fashion slides have been used for years without fear of replacing museums. The manipulation of images is as old as photography. As a unique conceit now, the Wall Street Journal still eschews photographs and prints engraved versions of them, a throw-back to the nineteenth century when the integrity of the engraver provided the assurance that we were not being deceived by manipulated photographs, like the kind Matthew Brady's photographers took.
The one thing that has changed is the speed with which information can be accessed and manipulated, and the wide-spread availability of this information. To the degree that museums have been providers of information, just as libraries have been, this is a portentous change, hardly comprehended in its possibilities. In fact, the implications for libraries are, in my opinion, far more serious than for museums.
For museums, technology has broadened the amount of information that can be shared, diminished the need for experts to relay it. It has increased curiosity's range. And at least as important but in a way unrelated to the contributions of technology - the availability of information by electronic means matches the expectations and familiar ways of a new generation of information seekers who, in the most fundamental manner, are no difrerent from you and me when we browsed the library stacks and card catalogues.
In my opinion, the key to a museum's success, even a museum that is fully wired for staff and visitors, remains the degree of human and interpretive interaction, the kind of welcoming environment a museum can create, and the signs and symbols of shared authority that it can spin out to the sensitive antennae of potential visitors. These things are mutually compatible.
For scholars, the implications are somewhat greater and too complex to discuss now. I suggest that you read an extremely important publication by The Getty Art History Information Program, called Research Agenda for Networked Cultural Heritage. Published in 1996, it discusses at length the infrastructure necessary to digitalize information. It speaks to the preservation of context and source, and archival concerns as well as to access. I find a discussion by Susan Hockey of something called "knowledge representation" especially fascinating: the consideration not of "which sources to capture first," but "what about any source do we need to have explicitly represented?" We need information about the limitations, assumptions, and biases of sources; we need to go beyond text, to context, and to standardize the ways in which this additional knowledge is represented.
In other words, the digital information age is also about the rich context in which information exists. Museums that care about people, and museums that care about context, will succeed if they are managed with this in mind.
Management
Sandy Boyd, a university president and attorney by experience and training and
president of Field Museum of Chicago for about 15 years, retires at the end of this month. His
replacement is John McCarter, formerly the CEO of First Chicago Corp., a large bank. The new
director of the Smithsonian's own Museum of Natural History, Robert Fri, has a distinguished
background in government and business.
Professor Dr. Wolf-Peter Fehlhammer, who became the director of Munich's Deutsches Museum in 1993, invited McKinsey & Company, a management consulting frm, to reinvent his museum. We finished an engagement with McKinsey & Co. last year. Their benchmarking work makes it clear that a number of world-class museums have recently been forced to introduce wide-ranging projects to combat a variety of problems, from reductions in funding and declining visitor numbers to changes in top management.
These examples suggest the changing paradigm, which represents an attempt by those who govern us - and sometimes by those who manage us - to align the wide variety of things we do with the needs of a variety of customers. In my opinion, a museum that aligns its research, collections strengths, educational programs, exhibitions, customers, and marketing will be a powerful force.
To achieve this alignment, I believe that we need to do several things.
First, museums need to shift the leadership, by replacement or, better, by education, from "supercurators" to "general managers." All right, we won't use this title. It does not fit the culture. But the director must be able to judge and implement project management, human resource development, and horizontal management styles, and empower people.
Most of us find ourselves ill-equipped for the task, and thus, second, museums need to provide training to help employees meet this shift. There is a remarkable dearth of such training within the profession, which explains why we have begun to turn to those from outside it. This training needs to be extensive, consistent within an institution over time, and ongoing, and one need look only to a local, high-performing business to discover the benchmarks of a good training program.
Hard business analysis must be applied to the principal decisions we make. I do not know whether someone from OMSI, Portland, Oregon's science center, is here, but they may affirm this. OMSI moved to a larger and better building in 1992, at a cost of about $52 million. Four years later, they are struggling to pay off $33 million they borrowed. The president, Ed Gibson, says that the center could close within a year if grants and donations do not flow in.
In Pittsburgh, our own Science Center - now four years old - and our two-year- old Andy Warhol Museum were conceived in the late and flush 1980s and early 1990s, children of concepts developed in an immediate way. At the same time, we could have plotted statistics that could have given us pause: between 1986 and 1995, the number of Fortune 500 companies in Pittsburgh declined from fifteen to nine. The population declined by ten percent, requiring a similar increase in market penetration to maintain our status quo in membership, fund raising, and attendance.
We were lucky. Our organization is large enough to sustain the costs of two new museums. But it would be diflicult to label "economically rational" many of the major decisions of our field in the 1990s.
Hard business decisions need to be applied elsewhere, too. I have had several experiences with McKinsey & Co., Inc., and in each instance they have said the same thing: "We have never worked with a smarter group of people," they say. "Your employees are dedicated, articulate, well-educated, enthusiastic." "And," they add, "they don't know how to execute." It is not realistic to hire humanists, scientists, and require them to think about large questions in the forenoon and shift into performance mode in the afternoon. But some combination of staff that collectively achieves both needs is required.
We need to adopt clear goals and measurable outcomes, and simple business plans that will achieve them.
We need to connect personnel evaluations to these goals and outcomes.
We need to remember, always, that we have to sell what the customer wants or needs. We do not have to meet all of their needs, of course, and while "customers" can be members of the public, they can also be scholars or small and focused groups of professionals such as teachers.
We need to know with the sureness of Proctor and Gamble what these wants and needs are, before we make decisions, removing the "I think-you think" argument from the table and replacing it with "we know the following, and therefore...."
We need to understand trends in management styles and work to implement them, despite the handicaps of older buildings constructed to indicate authority by the placement of offices.
And finally, we managers and leaders need to become engaged in the full array of community systems that can help us become an integral part of the communities in which we work. I was disappointed to see no more than a handful of my colleagues at the White House Conference on Tourism, partly the result of limited access by virtue of limited participation in the systems that could get one there. We must belong to chambers, convention and visitors bureaus and the boards of business development organizations, and sometimes we must run for office. One of the standards by which we must judge our employees and ourselves is the degree of penetration we achieve in the systems of community that surround us.
Why must we do this?
We must do it to respond to John Wideman, with whom I close:
[APPLAUSE].
MR. ELLIS: We have about five minutes before we start our next session, and I am not going to in any way denigrate what we have just heard by assuming that in five minutes' time we can ask any questions of significance. I would simply challenge you to jot down what your thoughts are at this point and to use those thoughts to begin your conversation in the sessions that are about to begin. I would also suggest that you take this time to take your break so that you may enter and have as much time as possible in those sessions to in some way begin to broaden the comments and the wonderful commentary that you have heard from Mr. Ellsworth Brown. Let's give him another hand.
[APPLAUSE].
Go back to Proceedings page