One-Third of U.S. Museums May Not Survive the Year, Survey Finds

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/22/894049653/one-third-of-u-s-museums-may-not-survive-the-year-survey-finds

by mrfusion • 6 years ago

175 145 6 years ago

npr.org

garmaine• 6 years ago

What happens to the collections...

trhway• 6 years ago

the same as with other assets - we're entering the greatest wealth redistribution (it would for example definitely beat the one triggered by 2008). The smaller and more vulnerable get distressed, and are going to be scooped up on the cheap by the big ones who have access to liquidity.

simongr3dal• 6 years ago

It is certainly gonna be a change in distribution, but I would call that a consolidation.

nordsieck• 6 years ago

we're entering the greatest wealth redistribution

I can confidently say: this is nothing compared to the fall of the USSR or the aftermath of the Plague.

jb775• 6 years ago

Why do you say we're entering the greatest wealth redistribution? Are you saying corona triggered something new or that it was already in progress?

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Some crony will buy them up at a discount.

dhosek• 6 years ago

The article gives at least one explanation of this—the museum was legally obligated to distribute the collection to other museums, non-profits and educational institutions.

pmiller29• 6 years ago

Every museum has its own deaccession process. I would expect that small or partial liquidations would follow that process. More significant liquidations might have a different process due to the volume of pieces. I would expect most of these liquidations to be via public auction.

jcahill• 6 years ago

End of April reporting, for comparison:

All but about 5 to 7 percent of the world’s museums are currently shuttered because of the coronavirus pandemic, said Peter Keller, the general director of the International Council of Museums. According to the council’s research, one in 10 may not reopen, he added.

More than 30 respondents to a 41-country survey, by the Network of European Museum Organizations, said they feared they would have to close permanently, among them the Museo de La Rioja and Museum of the Americas in Spain; Kornberg Castle in Austria, the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center in Hungary, and the National Historical Museum of Albania.

The gravity of the situation varies by country, depending on how much museums rely on ticket sales and tourism, and how much government funding they receive. Museums in the United States which survive from earned income and philanthropy are more vulnerable than government-subsidized European institutions. The American Alliance of Museums reported to Congress in March that as many as 30 percent of museums could fail in the crisis, if there was no immediate intervention.

caseysoftware• 6 years ago

I've been working with this team for the last ~18 months: https://www.passitdown.com/

Coming from the Library of Congress' digitization project, I knew the importance and complexity of putting collections online so was drawn to them.

Unfortunately, what was one venue for sharing collections became the only venue for sharing collections. I hope they - or other efforts like them - manage to at least document the pieces that are going to disappear into storage or private collections. :(

remote_phone• 6 years ago

I see a lot of doomsday predictions, but 4 months in, I’m barely seeing any signs of a protracted recession. Everyone seems to be doing okay, and when bars and businesses open up, they are jam packed. Am I the only one that is seeing a disparity between the speculations vs what I’m seeing around me? I truly believe we are in a crisis situation but why aren’t I seeing more signs of these doomsday predications?

buttcoinslol2• 6 years ago

I see a lot of doomsday predictions, but 4 months in, I’m barely seeing any signs of a protracted recession.

Perhaps the trillions of dollars of stimulus money that has been distributed has something to do with it? Or maybe the generous unemployment benefits the federal government has passed out over the past four months to ensure people could pay their bills and purchase things to stimulate the economy?

Without those things we'd be in a completely different scenario. Things may get worse yet, we're not exactly winning the fight against COVID-19 in the US.

techdevangelist• 6 years ago

And those enhanced unemployment benefits expire next week, so far the Senate and White House are wanting them ‘means tested’, so it looks like they may fall off without renewal.

s5300• 6 years ago

When was the last time you stepped into a region that was already impoverished before the pandemic?

roenxi• 6 years ago

Here is a graph of US GDP from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Given that a protracted recession is defined as a couple of quarters of negative GDP growth there are without doubt signs of one:

https://www.bea.gov/system/files/gdp1q20_3rd-chart-01.png

Izkata2• 6 years ago

From Feb 2020 and ongoing [0][1].

[0] see shaded area: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

[1] their source: http://www.nber.org/cycles/cyclesmain.html (was determined in June)

orwin• 6 years ago

One thing you also have to consider (siblings comment are good too) is that the oil price are ridiculously low. This might seems like a good news, it's not.

It makes mining cheaper (good news in the short-term) but also it reduce the incentive to invest in capital-intensive oil rigs. And this will probably mean a small oil shock two years from now. Also, while i did not have the possibility to look directly inot Rystad[0]'s data in 2019, i've talked to people who did and Rystad's predictions about above-ground issue resolution were really, really optimist and still estimated a 1% contraction of european oil supply in 2029 (last time it happened were 2007 and 2009).

Not only counting covid effect on oil-producing countries population hunger but also ISIS resurgence and the continuing crisis in Lybia, i think it would not be dumb to bet on no growth at all in the eurozone.

[0] https://www.rystadenergy.com/

cameronbrown• 6 years ago

As a layman, I don't understand why future investment isn't priced in already?

Izkata2• 6 years ago

US-centric, but:

An estimated 4,400 Chicago-area businesses have closed during the pandemic. 2,400 say they’ll never reopen.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-coronavirus-ch...

30% of Americans missed their housing payments in June

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/16/30percent-of-americans-misse...

32% of U.S. households missed their July housing payments

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/32-percent-of-us-households-...

Evictions are paused, so these missed payments aren't having an effect yet, but missed rent payments are also affecting mortgage payments for the owners - the biggest fallout is still coming.

tomjen3• 6 years ago

A fair question, I think the reckoning in the US will happen in the fall, when protections against evictions expire.

Since the protections have mostly protected the old at the expense of the young, it will be interesting to see the social ramifications.

matz114• 6 years ago

Just end the shutdown, its never a good strategy in the first place, its doing more harm than good.

Jweb_Guru• 6 years ago

As you may have noticed, many states have attempted to end the shutdown, and then quickly reinstated it when death tolls increased dramatically.

matz114• 6 years ago

The case raise dramatically but not the death tolls.

makomk• 6 years ago

Which is in itself kind of a problem. What's the endgame here - what are all these lockdowns helping to push us towards? We can't just lock down forever, it's fundamentally unsustainable and the damage compounds over time, and it doesn't look like there's a way out that doesn't involve a large death toll. Nor is there much prospect of salvation from (say) vaccination or treatment any time soon.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

From what I understand from the latest news reports, the primary way to stop the spread is with masks. So if we can reopen but with masks, that may be effective enough.

nfoz• 6 years ago

It's done phenomenal good in all the countries that have done it properly, and have nearly gotten rid of this thing. I can't believe, after all the available data all over the world, that anyone still thinks "no lockdown" is reasonable.

mrfusion4• 6 years ago

Country level analysis published in The Lancet with this conclusion: “full lockdowns and widespread testing were not associated with reduced COVID-19 mortality.”

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5...

coronadisaster2• 6 years ago

The problem with the lockdown is that they don't want to share data between countries so that we can get a vaccine sooner to end the shutdown sooner.

mrfusion4• 6 years ago

Here’s the biggest problem I see with the lockdowns.

The lack of Interdisciplinary Approach in Policy Making: Doctors fail to realize deaths can happen outside of hospitals in poverty and dysfunctional families. Virologists fail to realize that economy equals life, not just money. People need to consider as many aspects as possible when it comes to policy making: economy, psychology, social science, history, communication, statistics, and more.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

I'm puzzled by today's news on the vaccine. They were saying they would not make it available until it was proven "safe and effective". They said the vaccine may not be effective.

But my understanding is the previous trials demonstrated it was safe. If it turns out to be ineffective, at least no harm is done. So why not make it available? If it works, and is even only partially effective, it would be a big help.

I recall they said the vaccine would be considered "ineffective" if it worked something like less than 50% of the time. But wouldn't a 25% effective vaccine be a vast improvement over nothing?

beowulfey• 6 years ago

You may be forgetting the massive cost of ramping up vaccine production to immunize 7 billion people.

Even at 25% effectivity, with so many other vaccines in the works it would be a huge waste to go with one that is barely effective when there’s another one that might work at 100%. Obviously the decision must be made eventually, but this is why they don’t rush it out.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

The news also reported that they were going to manufacture the vaccine before the trials were complete so there isn't a delay following approval.

So it will be a sunk cost anyway.

(The government is paying for it. Frankly, that's cheap as dirt compared to the economic damage from months more waiting for it to be produced.)

kgwgk• 6 years ago

Something may seem safe when you give to 20 people and less safe when you give it to 20’000 or 20’000’000 people. If it has 1% chance of severe complications that will probably by missed in the phase 1 study.

pmiller29• 6 years ago

Also, some harmful effects take time to show up.

Bjartr• 6 years ago

No vaccine, no medicine really, is 100% safe. A very small percentage of people do have serious adverse reactions to them, potentially deadly. Distributing an ineffective vaccine causes harm to that population for no reason.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

for no reason

It is for the very real chance of preventing 100,000+ additional deaths.

codeulike• 6 years ago

Museum Museum

kilroy123• 6 years ago

This is exactly why I created: https://randomdailyart.com

To bring art to people who can't go see it in person. I haven't been able to visit any museums or art galleries in the past few months. I would really like to.

codingdave2• 6 years ago

The headline is misleading. This quote tells the actual story:

"In a survey released Wednesday of 760 museum directors, 33% of them said there was either a "significant risk" of closing permanently by next fall or that they didn't know if their institutions would survive."

It still shows a high level of uncertainty, but 1/3rd of museums are not saying they may be shutting down in 2020, as the headline would imply. They do have short runways, but note the discrepancy between 33% saying they aren't sure if they will make it a year, yet 87% saying they do not have a year of runway. 44% therefore have short runways yet do not doubt incoming funding.

What we should do is help the funding return to the other 33% in the next 6-12 months.

aqme28• 6 years ago

I don't see how the headline is misleading. "One-third of U.S. Museums May Not Survive the Year" vs your version: 1/3 of museums are at "significant risk of closing permanently" within 12 months.

pmiller29• 6 years ago

“May not survive the year” can be read as either “may close before the end of this calendar year,” or “may close within 12 months.” Unless it’s January 1, those are quite different statements. English sucks sometimes.

Edit: inserted the word “calendar” to clarify a little.

CalRobert• 6 years ago

I guess the silver lining here is that the "employees" are already generally unpaid.

cardamomo• 6 years ago

Museums do tend to have many volunteers, but I'm not sure how this is a silver lining. For one, larger museums employ a fair number of people, from educators to scientists to tradespeople to curators. In fact, many of them are already out of a job. Even museums with large endowments quickly started to lay off workers [0]. I would also argue that to volunteer in a museum is a rich cultural experience -- often a chance for people to engage with a discipline they are passionate about. They may not have been paid, but they are surely missing this connection with the people, places, and objects they love.

[0] https://hyperallergic.com/551571/moma-educator-contracts/

devonkim• 6 years ago

The cruel exception is in military museums where all the military funded museums are paid somewhat decent wages but of course these wages pale in comparison to the military intelligence trainers getting paid $650k+ / year mostly tax-free due to being overseas.

The NBLS statistics for museum workers is highly skewed for federally funded museums and those with long career tenures which makes it look like they're paid nearly as much as most other white collar workers but this doesn't mean there's actually jobs in the field. And this was all pre-COVID.

OPM has been desperately trying to get people to retire earlier by offering huge lump sums but with healthcare the way it is, people are not retiring which puts a drag on a strapped public sector in headcount and requisitions, but the implication to me is that when museum persons are retiring nowadays in public sector they're being replaced with cheaper contractors or simply not being filled in at all. I'm familiar with entire libraries being shut down after a single librarian retired.

mrfusion4• 6 years ago

These words of CS Lewis seem appropriate in our time of COVID as well. Here’s what he said in 1948 about the mental shift required by living with the threat of the atomic bomb:

“How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

SketchySeaBeast7• 6 years ago

Of course now we have an understanding of how the plague works and if we could stop the growth of cancer as easily as we can COVID we might inadvertently cause the closure of some museums for that as well.

throwaway57522• 6 years ago

What a mediocre thought from a great mind. Generally we accept our own mortality even if we fear it, but we fear much more for our children. Most people are altruistic, and the fear of the end of the human species and most life on Earth (ie, fear of the atomic age) is much greater than that of dying of disease or accident.

Since it's not worth a separate comment - every single museum in the US could be kept afloat during COVID by a single rich person. Unless they want confiscatorily high tax rates in the future they should step up now.

swsieber• 6 years ago

but we fear much more for our children

People did back then too, so I'm not sure what's mediocre about it.

We've had to live with situations outside of our hands for a long time. Our ability to alter the impact of adverse events isn't really driven by the magnitude of said events (e.g. family vs tribe vs city vs nation vs world).

No matter the age, you just have to accept that you might encounter very unhappy events.

irrational2• 6 years ago

Or, he had the foresight to realize that (as we have learned by our own experience) the atomic age did not lead to the end of the human species. If anything, if we had more fully embraced the atomic age and gotten off of fossil fuels in the mid-1900s by creating many more nuclear power plants, we may have been able to avert the current climate crisis that is this generations version of the dreaded atomic age.

TearsInTheRain• 6 years ago

Unless they want confiscatorily high tax rates in the future they should step up now.

This sounds like a threat. The government is not going to pay for their spending with higher taxes. They are going to inflate it away.

gen2205• 6 years ago

If only the directors of museums could sell or take out loans on some vanishingly small percentage of their collections...

When you don’t put your most valuable assets on your balance sheet (but do place the cost of acquiring them as expenses) [0], you can’t reasonably expect to be financially stable.

Implicitly, these museums are saying that they’d rather lay off all their staff, than count their art towards their assets [1]. In my opinion, this has always been the real story with financial hardship in the museum world. They have been suffering financially for decades now. Every time membership declines or attendance stalls, they are doomed to teeter closer to the edge.

[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1262403

[1]: see, for example, this financial audit of the museum of Boston. “In accordance with current practice generally followed by museums, collections are generally not recorded as assets in the accompanying financial statements. Purchased additions to the collections are recorded as expenses at the time acquired.” ... “ Museum policy specifies that proceeds from the deaccessioning of an item may only be used for the conservation or acquisition of other collections items.” https://www.mos.org/sites/dev-elvis.mos.org/files/docs/about...

bwestergard• 6 years ago

If the art could be treated as an asset for accounting purposes, it would give museums and very strong incentive to collect pieces that command a high price. This would tend to weaken the internal standards of the community of artists and curators in favor of commercial standards. If you are skeptical of internal standards - if you think commercial standards should predominate - why have non-profit museums at all? Why donate to museums?

Even if you're of the opinion that the existing internal norms of the art world are bogus - as I think many are - it does not follow that market norms should supplant internal norms. Internal norms can change through deliberation.

adolph• 6 years ago

Why would art as asset incentivize collections focused on high prices? Wouldn't there be an advantage to seeking out things that they think would increase in value over time?

Non-profit != charity. Many non-profit organizations are highly focused on the bottom line and given the high ticket price traveling exhibits I think that museums are not different in seeking the cultural relevance reflected by people's engagement, engagement that can be measured in how much they might pay for something.

goodluckchuck• 6 years ago

It's not a matter of standards and norms, but objective reality. The art has value. It is an asset. It could be sold. To pretend otherwise is an act of deception. They're cooking the books. The question is why are they making fake books? The usual answer is to skim / profit / launder / etc.

In terms of how museums choose to curate their collections, I don't really care. That's their business, not mine. However economics exist whether they want to pay attention to it or not. They have bills. They have labor costs. At some point the lights get cut off.

LeifCarrotson2• 6 years ago

Business logic that works in tech doesn't apply to museums. The ancients aren't making more and better history every year.

If you sell an irreplaceable object to make a profit at the end of the quarter, you can't just buy a new one when times are better. On the other hand, the ancients aren't making more history, so your collection never goes out of date. If you lay off all your staff, as long as you keep the collection in good storage conditions, you can hire new staff a century later and reopen just fine.

Museum policy that prevents dumping of assets is good policy. A museum that sells its collection is no longer a museum.

sangnoir3• 6 years ago

Amazing how HN frequently complains about Private Equity buying up tech companies and killing the golden goose for the sake of short term gains, yet the top comment suggests museums do exactly that. (Shrugs)

gen2205• 6 years ago

I agree with you that business rules do not apply to museums.

I am not suggesting that a museum sell critical pieces of their collections to make a profit this quarter. I’m suggesting they sell or take out loans against the pieces of their collections that have never been on display and will likely never be put on display, so that they can continue to curate and display the pieces for the public to enjoy.

I’m suggesting that it’s hypocritical for a museum to claim that it exists in service to the public (as opposed to private collections), but to close its doors or gouge prices, as an alternative to selling or taking out loans on assets that have never been and never will be displayed to the public. From my perspective, a museum with closed doors and good storage is not a museum, it is a private collection with windows and a board of directors.

I realize this does not work for small museums. I specifically have the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and its cousin museums in other large American cities, which are run with similarly hyper-acquisitional).

It doesn’t make sense to me that these museums can continue to acquire art (a big expense), and lay people off. It’s putting art above people, which does not sound like a public institution to me, regardless of my beliefs about the commercialization of art.

jonlucc• 6 years ago

In short, they can right now.

There's an Association of Art Museum Directors. Usually, the consequence for selling art to pay bills would result in that museum being censured by the art museum directors. They announced a couple months ago that they are allowing a 2 year reprieve from those censures due to COVID.

scrozart• 6 years ago

This was the topic of a recent episode of Revisionist History. Museums, art museums in the case of this podcast, horde tons of material they simply pack away and none of them ever note the actual value in annual filings. Then, when in financial trouble, they fire people and want a bailout. It reminds me of the Rolling Stone article about Johnny Depp being 'broke', despite having earned half a billion dollars. He refuses to sell a single property of the couple dozen he owns even though he would immediately be solvent afterwards.

throwaway0a5e• 6 years ago

Most museums are small and their collection is of little value except as a whole. This is especially true when you're talking about niche museums that are basically private collections that have been turned into non-profit museums so they could continue to exist in their totality by the heirs of the deceased collector. Treating their collections like assets would help them a little but not much.

abathur• 6 years ago

Also, many small museums aren't "art" museums with semi-independent objects that have similar value to collectors anywhere.

Many of them have some sort of focus on the history of a place, person, community, people, industry, etc., and much of the value of the artifacts they house comes from the process of curating and contextualizing them to tell us a story about the past.

Because they're telling a story, they may also have replicas of artifacts they can't obtain which hold narrative/educational/illustrative value but fairly little collector value.

Another common genre is something like a house, restored to and preserved in roughly period condition. When these exist because a "significant" person or family built/owned/lived in the house, they'll likely try to obtain genuine objects they can connect to the people there. But they'll of course fill it in with other instances of objects they know the family owned, replicas, and best-guesses.

The person or family may only be locally significant, and the artifacts may have little independent commercial value. The main thing of value is likely to be the building itself.

pmiller29• 6 years ago

...their collection is of little value except as a whole.

I agree that citation adds value to a collection. That’s why we pay curators, after all! But, I would also claim that the benefit of curation to the value of the collection as a whole probably scales with the size of the collection, if we’re talking about art or history museums. For instance, having an entire, working 1960s mainframe that’s used routinely for demonstrations at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is extremely valuable, beyond the monetary cost it would take to acquire and set up the physical hardware. The same system, non working, and with “do not touch” signs all around, is significantly less valuable.

Likewise, a museum with the resources to pull off an exhibit like the Warhol retrospective that was at SFMOMA recently can a full picture of how an artist grows and develops throughout a career in a way that a single work, or handful of works, cannot.

pontifier2• 6 years ago

And here I am working to open a new science museum with no funding whatsoever... I'm currently living in a tent outside

Maybe I'm enough of a cheapskate to survive!

coronadisaster2• 6 years ago

Where?

pontifier2• 6 years ago

I just bought a 220,000 sqft building in Pine Bluff Arkansas.

The website is Serendipic.org

I'm currently just funding everything myself.

Program_Install• 6 years ago

More fallout from the ineptness of our government I presume. Its forecasts like this that start to mount as we continue the downward trend. Truly a pandemic in every sense.

patja• 6 years ago

Museum directors all agree that anyone who sells museum holdings to meet operating expenses is blacklisted from future visiting collections. Let them sell some of their holdings and all will be well. Many of them are sitting on a vast inventory of items that are never seen by anyone.

Wowfunhappy4• 6 years ago

Came here to say this. Malcolm Gladwell laid this out in a recent Podcast (although I didn't know about the blacklisting thing). http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/42-dragon-psychology-...

lumens• 6 years ago

Malcolm Gladwell touches on this beautifully in the most recent season of Revisionist History:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dragon-psychology-101/...

snowwrestler6• 6 years ago

The purpose of a museum is to share knowledge, and selling objects into private collection is a direct violation of that mission. They might as well set the stuff on fire; the effect would be the same.

Edit to add: it's a myth that objects not currently on public display are "never seen by anyone." Some get seen by the public when used or loaned out for temporary, traveling, or themed exhibits. The rest are generally made available to researchers with interest in that field.

pmiller29• 6 years ago

Doesn’t that only specifically apply to art museums?

mcshicks• 6 years ago

My wife works at our local science museum. It's very tough for them, even in good times a lot of museums scramble for funding. They were able to reopen for a few days and then shut down again. They did PPE loans so all of the employees still have jobs for now, but its hard to know what will happen in the next few months, and will they be able to generate enough revenue. They do summer camp programs and have been switching those to virtual but I'm not sure how much revenue that will generate. Additionally they are kind of scrambling now to get more online content. In addition to donations, memberships and admission they have gotten some grant money in the past as well. Maybe when there is some clarity about when and how they can operate they might get some more donation money from local companies or philanthropists but I think the issue is how do the hang onto their staff. I think they were hoping the PPE loan could get them through but now its not so clear that was the best choice for them.

irrational2• 6 years ago

What percentage of restaurants might not survive?

What other types of establishments are likely to have a high percentage not surviving?

pmiller29• 6 years ago

Something like 20% of restaurants that were open in February are now permanently closed. It might be even a little more than that — I don’t have the data right in front of me. Extend that timeline to next fall, as in the article, and probably almost all the non-chain restaurants would be done for.

Edit: it’s worse than I thought. Data from Yelp suggest about half of restaurants may be permanently closed. I have no idea how that breaks down into national and regional chains vs independently owned restaurants, however.

See https://www.eater.com/2020/6/26/21304219/over-50-percent-of-...

pmiller29• 6 years ago

That reminds me: maybe I should renew some memberships early, or up my contributions.

One-Third of U.S. Museums May Not Survive the Year, Survey Finds

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