RUNNING an American museum ain’t what it used to be. To see how much the job has changed you need only look at the differences between Glenn Lowry, head of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and Alfred Barr, its first boss. Since he started in 1995, Mr Lowry has doubled the museum’s footprint and quadrupled its endowment to nearly $1 billion. Barr, a former academic who became director in 1929, was a leading figure in the modern-art movement in America, but he lived at a far slower pace. Once, while reading out a passage by Lenin in a speech, he fell silent. After a long pause, he looked up and apologised to his audience: “I’m sorry. I got interested.”
Over the years American museum directors have become responsible not only for questions of aesthetics but, increasingly, for the business side of their institutions too. They are both artistic director and CEO. Given the relatively meagre public funding for the arts in America, the CEO element is no small part of the job and helps explain why, in many cases, the identity of a museum is so closely tied to its leader—le musée, c’est moi, if you will.
A...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1caGQBD
No comments:
Post a Comment