Sustainable Cultural Enterprises in a 21st Century Context

His whiteness: The young Rauschenberg
before his canvas. Interesting to note how
the gallery chose to blacken the walls behind
the piece, perhaps to louden up the silence some
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Globally, the current financial crisis demonstrates what happens when companies establish, and rely upon, artificial life support systems to prolong themselves beyond their ability to provide sustainable and relevant products and services. In the end they will only exist as long as they are relevant and are delivering ‘the goods’ – however that is contemporaneously understood. They will eventually close up shop when the excellence ends. It's incredibly rare for an organisation or company to aspire towards deliberate unsustainability as their shareholders, and their COIs, generally will not countenance the concept. Deliberately pouring funds and resources into fiscal ‘black holes’ is not only unsustainable but also a purposeless folly – something that cannot be tolerated for very long. 

 Most companies/enterprises/institutions want to provide consistent employment in order that employees can deliver their best work – and so that their families can be secure and as a consequence be available to deliver. They are purposeful enterprises that aim to provide quality products that are reliable over the long run. They aim to deliver consistent services that consumers, their COIs, can depend upon and reliably engage with. When and where they can, they will innovate and analyse for as long possible in order to be sustainable – to keep on keeping on. In the case of museums/art galleries the alarm bells should ring loudly when the desire to simply ‘continue’ overcomes the desire to be remarkable and extraordinary, indeed be awesome, and when more resources and effort is directed towards surviving rather than succeeding. 

This has become abundantly clear in the case of the failures of the USA’s ‘automobile industrial model’, and likewise their finance and banking system. The arguments for financial support rests on the model’s/system’s self asserted need to survive, rather than its ability to succeed. 

A like scenario is being played out in Europe as the sustainability and credibility of whole economies are being increasingly questioned – and as a consequence looking less and less sustainable. All this is possibly true of your museums and/or art galleries too. The arguments that it seem are being run here is that these ‘first world institutions’ are too economically important – albeit they are demonstrable failures – and thus culturally and socially too important to be allowed to fail. 

There is no hint of an argument that these institutions/nations are viable yet there is an almost unspoken economic edict being promulgated that they exist in a space that is beyond criticism and critique. Nothing should be! 

Sadly this trust in 'the system' has been proven a folly as we watch the knock on effect felt in the almost relentless devaluation of everyone’s superannuation accounts post the late 2000s financial crisis – often called the global recession, global financial crisis or the credit crunch. For all too many museums and art galleries, being at the cutting edge of academic endeavour and research has not really been part of their aspiration nor is it likely that you will find such a sentiment reflected in their purpose statement – primarily for the reasons discussed above. 

Elizabeth Merritt from American Association of Museums wrote a provocative article about the financial future of museums in which she suggested, among other things, that 20% of museums should be allowed to fail in the coming decades.

 As Elizabeth Merritt puts it: “My observation, after thirty years of working in the field, is that museums have an amazing ability to survive in the most adverse environments. They are the cockroaches of the nonprofit world--sometimes it really does seem like you can’t kill them with an atomic blast. Most of the time some improbable deus ex machina saves the day: for example an unexpected cash gift or a free building. Mind you, this often only saves the distressed museum from closure – it does not cure the underlying dysfunction. The museum may simply struggle along for another ten years before the next potentially fatal crisis.” 

The underlying dysfunction that is being pointed to here demonstrates an inability to focus on anything but survivability. Clearly, museums and art galleries need to both survive and succeed. Apparently this is less of an imperative if they deem themselves to be unsustainable. 

Unsurprisingly, Nina Simon advocates that museums need to submit a reality check that looks at two sets of issues: 

1. Core services that people in a community that it depends upon and needs in order to survive. These include employment and income opportunities for staff and service providers plus programs and projects that address social and cultural issues not provided by other organisations or businesses. For example, possibly a museum may provide job training and supplementary employment for at risk youth, emerging and other cultural producers that the community relies upon – and needs to have consistently available. Likewise, in a cultural tourism market, museums need to be relevant in every aspect of their operation in order to survive and to allow ‘the industry’ to not only survive but flourish. 

2. The services that they provide and that make museums and art galleries awesome remarkable and outstanding places. Those things that drive people to and through their door, gets them excited, and that engages them passionately with their projects and programs in multidimensional ways. 

A sustainable museum/art gallery must be able to point with some self-assurance and pride to the ways it supports its COI with reliable and consistent services as well as outstanding program delivery. Irrespective of an institution’s size, the imperative to survive will be omnipresent. Keeping, your job and keeping on doing what you're doing is not irrelevant. The challenge is not to make it an institution’s raison d’être or its primary goal. To do so would be a perverse reassignment of its purpose.  

All this points to a need for paradigm shifts towards many museums’ and art galleries’ purposeful sustainability. Likewise, it points to the need for innovative and purposeful marketing strategies to facilitate the paradigm shifts in play across the current institutional landscapes. Museum and art galley policy sets are the indicators of their intended sustainability. 

Interestingly, it turns out that ‘photography policies’ are indicators of not only an institution’s intended purposeful sustainability but also its social cum cultural relevance not to mention its credibility in a 21st Century context –  this idea will be developed later in the paper.