Marketing For Sustainability

CLICK HERE TO CONNECT
WITH NINA SIMON

Museum visionary, Nina Simon, reports: “I once asked Eric Siegel, director of the New York Hall of Science, why museums are rarely innovative shining stars on the cutting edge of culture. He commented that as [publicly funded] nonprofits, museums are built to survive, not to succeed.” ...     Museum, Sept/Oct (2009) 

Nina Simon is the author of The Participatory Museum and she regularly contributes essays to her BLOG – museum two – as she flags the shifting paradigms in the 'museumworld' – at least in the USA. 

Paraphrasing Eric Siegel, unlike new companies of almost any kind, rock bands, orchestras, theatre companies, etc. typically, museums and art galleries are not (rarely?) designed to excel and reach the heady heights of innovation and awesomeness. 

Rather, they're all too often designed to plod along and maintain the status quo. ‘Heroic’ efforts are likely to threaten comfortable understandings and possibly jeopardise secure employment opportunities. 

Generally such museums/art galleries can take this stance because they are either far removed from, and functionally unaccountable to, their COI – or established as imitation self regulating fiefdoms of a kind. 

Given the current questioning of fiscal imperatives it is possibly time for a paradigm shift and one that enables museums/art galleries to be more proactive in their engagement with their COIs. A strong indicator of a museum or art galley’s sustainability or otherwise is it seeing itself as something akin to a ‘cost centre’ dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo rather than as being an enterprise of some kind – community enterprise, community cooperative, cultural enterprise, etc. – aspiring to succeed and meet purposeful performance goals.