The Future of Museum Collecting: On Remuseum’s "More Art for More People in More Places"
In September, Remuseum, a new think tank advancing innovation in the museum field, published a report (their third to date) analyzing the growth and costs of permanent collections. Supported by case studies from more than a dozen museums across the United States, “More Art for More People in More Places” delves into the past, present, and future of museum collecting and raises questions about the practice’s sustainability and utility.
As our work at Museum Exchange is so crucially intertwined with many of the issues and pressure points that the report raises, we were eager to review its findings and pass on our key takeaways to members of our community. If you’ve ever thought about donating art to a museum, we hope you’ll read on to learn more about the less visible factors informing museums’ decisions to collect and the challenges they face.
The headline of the report was the insight that the number of artworks at museums are rising as are the costs associated with their care. While this fact likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone, what really resonated with us was the figures behind these trends and seeing them visualized. The report estimates that the collections of the nation’s 200 leading museums have doubled in size since 1998: from 9 million to 18 million objects in just 36 years! This statistic helps explain why so many museums have undergone major expansion projects recently (and raised large capital campaigns to fund them). However, construction costs are just the tip of the iceberg.
As the report notes, each new artwork that a museum brings into its collection carries the responsibilities of stewardship and with it the ongoing costs of storage and preservation. Remuseum cites several studies that calculate the annual costs from $106 to $312 per artwork, which amounts to as much as $25,000 for a museum that adds an average of 200 artworks per year to their collection. The report goes on to estimate that the average museum is allocating as much as half of its annual operating budget to storing and managing its art collection, to say nothing of the additional resources spent on activating the art and engaging the public through programming and education efforts.
These are the hidden costs of philanthropy that we are beginning to see enter the equation. One standout is the Jarl and Pamela Mohn’s MAC3 initiative, which gifted some 300 works of art to be jointly owned by three Los Angeles museums along with funds for a building to house the collection and an endowment to service the ongoing costs of the collection’s care.
We have been seeing this enlightened approach to giving at Museum Exchange as well, albeit on a much smaller scale. One example is donors generously agreeing to underwrite the cost of shipping artworks to museums, especially in the case of museums with limited budgets. The second is the growing recognition that much of the nation’s art is concentrated in a subset of museums and cities. We regularly see donors targeting less prominent institutions outside the major metropolitan areas, which often have more modestly sized collections (but are no less rigorous in their standards) and perhaps cheaper real estate. At these museums their art can often have greater visibility and impact, taking to heart the idea of “more art for more people in more places,” something we are especially proud of.
We’ve been heartened to see donors empathizing with these brass tacks concerns of museums and extending their generosity beyond the artwork itself. We encourage you to read the Remuseum report in full if you’d like to see more metrics like the ones we’ve drawn out and learn how some museums (and donors) are responding creatively to the challenges of sustaining their collecting practices and missions. As always, we are here to help if you are considering making a gift of art to a museum with this knowledge in hand!
