1. Just how big is L.A. MOCA compared to the nation's largest arts institutions?
by Shane Ferro
Published: July 25, 2012
In the wake of chief curator Paul Schimmel's controversial departure from L.A. MOCA, various stories have swirled about the museum, its dire financial situation, and the competence of former art dealer Jeffrey Deitch in the director's position. Comparisons have been made to Los Angeles's other major art museum, LACMA, and other major U.S. arts institutions, not least because MOCA shares trustees (and therefore donors) with some of these museums.
With the idea of exploring the financial position of museums, ARTINFO set out to find out more. It is fairly common knowledge that at major museums budgets are big, ticket sales don't cover all expenses, and directors are paid handsomely to coax hefty checks out of well-known collectors — but we set out to find the specifics. We requested the most recent tax returns (form 990) from the Met, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, LACMA, L.A. MOCA, and, in search of a more comparable museum to relatively tiny MOCA, Minneapolis's Walker Art Center (the documents are available to browse on Scribd). Here are the three most interesting things we found in the numbers from the last fiscal year (July 2010-June 2011):
Relative Sizes
The nation's largest art institutions are billionaires, and even the medium-sized ones are millionaires. The Met, for example, had net assets (basically, a total of all the resources it has on its books, except the value of the art) of $2.9 billion at the end of June 2011, according to its tax return. Both MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago had net assets of just over $1 billion, LACMA reported $300 million, and the Walker Art Center $243 million. L.A. MOCA, with its lack of invested endowment, had a relatively miniscule $38 million. However, assets are built up over a long period of time, and how much a museum spends in one year might be a more apt way of comparing their sizes and scopes on a day-to-day basis. What they spend will vary from year to year, especially if there is an expansion project going on, but the annual expenses are a decent way to estimate a museum's budget. L.A. MOCA had the lowest expenses of the six, with expenses of only $17.5 million. It was just behind the $22 million spent by the Walker. LACMA's expenses were almost six times MOCA's, at just over $100 million. MoMA's were 13 times MOCA's, and the Met, with $345 million in expenses for
the fiscal year, spent 20 times as much as the troubled California museum (of course, in the long term, its pockets are more than 70 times as deep).
Of Patrons and Populism
Think about this the next time you complain about the $25 entry fee for a major museum: no museum on this list could cover even 10 percent of its annual expenses based on its ticket sales. Even the most popular museums in the nation, the Met and MoMA, cover only a measly 9-10 percent of their costs through ticket sales (between July 2010 and June 2011, the Met made $32.2 million on tickets, and MoMA $22.7 million). The Art Institute of Chicago is arguably the worst off, bringing in only $8.6 million through entrance fees despite spending $313 million — but then again, the Institute also includes a well-respected school and its associated costs. So how, then, do museums get by? It's fairly common knowledge that our arts institutions are supported by big donors, many of whom sit on museum boards and, with enough cash, can widely influence the way that the institution is run. We largely still live in a patronage system. Depending on how you look at it, museums either don't have to be populist, or they can't afford to be. Other than for PR purposes, it doesn't necessarily
matter to the short-term health of the museum that a show gets 100 or 1,000 visitors per day, as long as it has a good relationship with a smattering of wealthy patrons who will fund exhibitions and acquisitions and endowments (the latter of which, if large enough, throw off a healthy income on their own). That, really, is where the money is coming from.
The Top-End
Of course, the current problems with MOCA are not caused by its size, per se. Rather, the problem is that its funds have not been managed properly, and Jeffrey Deitch is perhaps not the director to bring things back into balance. Though the Walker brought in roughly the same amount in revenues last fiscal year, its endowment is $152 million, almost 10 times the size of MOCA's shriveled $19-million safety net. Yet the Walker's director, Olga Viso, is paid just over half Deitch's salary, and took a pay cut last year, to boot. The Walker reports Viso's compensation at around $375,000 — Deitch's was $650,000. MOCA seems to be paying Deitch a salary that is semi-competitive with the likes of Thomas Campbell at the Met (according to the tax return $650,000 in base taxable income, though there was an extra $380,000 or so in other compensation and benefits) and LACMA's Michael Govan (about $1 million in base, with $200,000 in other compensation and benefits).
For an institution that desperately needs to cut costs or raise money, is he worth it?
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/815198/as-mocas-money-woes-simmer-a-look-at-how-major-museums-finances-work
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2. Eli Broad Withholds MOCA Payments, Moscow Biennale Turns Into Pussy Riot Rally, and More Must-Read Art News
Eli Broad
by ARTINFO
Published: August 9, 2012
– Broad Behind on MOCA Payments: When Eli Broad rescued Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, he agreed to give $15 million for its exhibition program in 20 quarterly installments of $750,000. But he's missed the last two because the embattled institution is sitting on $2.1 million in unused exhibition grants. "Once our unspent exhibition funds have been used, we will make additional payment," said Broad spokeswoman Karen Denne. [Bloomberg]
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3. Can a Christie's-Funded Creative Think Tank Transform the Way Museums Do Business?
Laurie Winters, founder of Arts Consortium
by Shane Ferro
Published: August 8, 2012
Can neuroscientists kickstart interest in museums? The art world is about to find out.
Program. “I don’t [just] want the membership talking to the membership,” she added. According to Winters, there are four areas that will be addressed at the first meeting: alternative ways of financing museums, attendees’ short attention spans, new ways to use technology, and art critics. Art critics? “They have very strong opinions,” she told ARTINFO, but rarely are they brought into a practical conversation about how museums are run. She wants to change that. Then there are the euroscientists, who will be asked to help museums find ways to rethink their approach to exhibitions considering the rapidly decreasing average attention span of its audience. Contemporary life is speeding up the way our brains process information, which could have an effect on the way that museums consider programming. “How can you encourage or enhance an aesthetic experience when the way people are thinking is different than it was 20 years ago?” asked Winters. In the same vein, the Consortium seeks answers to the equally impossible question of how to fund small- and mid-sized museums in an age of tightening belts and lagging attendance. To that effect, the organization is turning to behavioral economists, who may help smaller institutions “nudge museum goers to slow down or come back several times.” But the consortium might not even need an economist to help change thinking about museum finances, as its executive director is one of those rare art-world people who has no problem talking about the business of culture. When asked about funding from Christie’s auction house, she was quick to break down barriers between museums and commercial arts institutions. “To call them [museums] a nonprofit is a sort of artificial distinction,” she said, noting that museums function like businesses in most respects. “In fact, I would raise the question does that even make any sense
anymore to talk about it in those terms?”
http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/818081/can-a-christies-funded-creative-think-tank-transform-the-way-that-museums-do-business
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