Abstract
Art museums exist in a precarious state as they constantly negotiate competing challenges of funding, audience interest, art world relevance, public perception, and artist representation. Museum leaders must balance these competing tensions of precarity as they navigate exhibition choices, hiring decisions, funding opportunities, and intertwined power structures. Response to these challenges leads to experimental ways of working, which incur risks and opportunities. Museums hold political and social positions in all aspects of their operation; this requires museums to experiment with more transparent processes from new art acquisitions to board member appointments. Experience-driven businesses compete with museums for audiences causing some museums to employ experience models. By ceding power to artists, community members, and other cooperative partners art becomes empowerment for residents.
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Notes
- 1.
More information about Museum Hue (www.museumhue.com); Museum of Impact (www.museumofimpact.org); Museum Workers Speak (https://museumworkersspeak.weebly.com/); and Museum Detox (http://museumdetox.com). Each of these groups has gained increased traction in recent years, with new organizing platforms starting. Also, subgroups within larger established museum related membership organizations have united younger professionals around issues of equity and inclusion including in the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works.
- 2.
Wages are also inequitably variable across museums and the cultural industries broadly. Interns are often unpaid, reinforcing that professional training in the field is accessible only to those with the economic capital to support their time. Museum leadership notoriously makes more money than most of their staff members. Since 2008 the artist organizing group Working Artists in the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) has been advocating for fair reimbursement for labor and participation in the arts as well as transparency between artists and institutions to regulate across the industry. Part of this work has been aligning W.A.G.E. certified institutions; each participant is required to pay artists at least a minimum set fee collectively established by artists themselves that aligns with the institution’s own operating budget; the larger the institution the higher the fee. In 2018 the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania became the first W.A.G.E. certified museum. Previous signees have been smaller alternative art spaces making it significant that a large museum like the Institute of Contemporary Art recognized that it is not infallible, and museum leaders are responsible for creating a sustainable future for artists, thus impacting standard practices in the art world and the cultural economy (W.A.G.E., 2018).
- 3.
The top five most Instagrammed museums globally in 2017: (1) Musée du Louvre (Paris), (2) The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), (3) The Museum of Modern Art (New York), (4) The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), (5) British Museum (London). The Louvre was also the seventh most Instagrammed location in 2017. Disneyland in California was first on the list and Times Square in New York was second, which speak to entertaining, fully saturated experiences being valuable social currency to capture as representative of a particular person’s life, vision, and values to be shared with followers. This does not connect user location to these statistics so it does not indicate whether this experience-driven museum is equally valued globally.
- 4.
Leading architects have competed for grand commissions for centuries, seeing a museum as a desirable capstone to solidify their reputations as elite masters of pushing aesthetic boundaries of the built form. Currently, Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi is a hotbed for high-profile museum commissions including the Louvre Abu Dhabi designed by Jean Novel and the future Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry. In the art world, these elite architects have been called “starchitects,” that is star architects.
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Taylor, J.K. (2020). The Precarity of Existence Requires Experimentation. In: The Art Museum Redefined. Sociology of the Arts . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21021-2_5
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