Wunderkammer

Lake Street.

It sits across the broad girth of Minneapolis like a belt. It cinches the city from the bluffs of the Mississippi River to the shores of its largest lake: the sparkling Bde Maka Ska. Like a belt, it forms a middle boundary between a top and a bottom. Like a belt, it keeps the pants up over a swelling belly. Like a belt, it has a buckle and that buckle is the intersection of Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue, the throbbing commercial heart of Minneapolis’ primary artery, the epicenter of the Minneapolis polis, so perfectly emblematic of the city’s dazzling civic diversity, and, not incidentally, the epicenter of the days of rage incited by the police murder of George Floyd.

There are many great streets in Minneapolis. Some are longer, others are more beautiful, but none of them running precisely on an east west axis cleave through the same range of citizenry. In both the present and the past, Lake Street is a core sample of Minneapolis through every strata, rich and poor, immigrant and native, queer and straight, creative, entertaining, routine and prosaic, sacred and profane. It’s length bears witness to births and final resting places. It is both a way to get somewhere and a final destination. It spans the virtues and failings of the metropolis which, like all great cities, struggles continuously to invent and reinvent itself.

Working at the Minnesota Historical Society it was my pleasure to know the street more deeply through an exhibit we produced called Right on Lake Street. Originally conceived by my colleague Benjamin Filene and completed by Ellen Miller, Earl Gutnik and others, the core concept was a threeway partnership between the Minnesota Historical Society, In the Heart of the Beast Mask and Puppet Theater, which is an institution at the heart of Minneapolis, and the History Department of Macalester College. Public history students selected locations along Lake Street to research by interviewing people in the community to portray their stories. These stories debuted in public places along the corridor. The artists at Heart of the Beast built whimsical models of the various landmarks portrayed by the students for an exhibition at the Minnesota History Center and the student’s interpretations illuminated this ersatz cityscape.

The exhibit, which opened in 2007, was like Lake Street itself. A little funny, a lot funky, and it represented the relentless change the avenue has witnessed. There was the story of the porn theater closed by community initiative. There was La Mexicana. There was the Schatzlein Saddle Shop and Ingebretsen’s Scandinavian Gifts and Foods. There were landmarks long gone like the Wonderland Amusement Park and Nicollet Park, the home of the Minneapolis Millers, the long defunct minor league team. We had an opening celebration that was well attended by our partners and the public. There was an online exhibit: 21A – Right on Lake Street (21A is the bus route that traverses Lake Street and the interactive exhibit allowed users to virtually follow the route.) It was an interesting experiment. Some of the work wound up adorning the public spaces of the newly renovated Lake Street Sears store which was transformed into the Midtown Global Market an institution that now is like a microcosm of the street on which it stands.

Someone made this custom Google map showing the damage left in the wake of the uprisings of the harrowing last week of May, 2020. Zooming out, the icons symbolizing protests, fires, and looting cluster along the length of Lake Street. These blemishes  splatter the street like open wounds. The scale is inconceivable.

Today, after a night of struggle, anxiety and vulnerability, I want to remember the Lake Street that will survive to rise again, that will once again celebrate May Day and awaken the earth. The Lake Street that bustles with energy and irresistible lifeforces. The Lake Street that is tough, resilient and welcomes all. The Lake Street that has seen it all and will rub the smoke out of its eyes to see more clearly next time. Lake Street symbolizes everything I love about Minneapolis because it is made and remade by and for the people of Minneapolis. It has endured many indignities in the past, but it will never be destroyed.

Long live Lake Street.

My Mom, who happens to live today in a senior community hard hit by Covid-19, had an aphorism for us when her children were coming of age: If you want to keep a job, make yourself essential.

In the aftershock of the novel coronavirus pandemic, if you’re a museum employee, you probably learned over the last two months whether you are considered “essential” or “non-essential” in a crisis of survival. Essential in the topsy-turvy world of disaster response has a very specific meaning, it turns out.  When a museum tries to hit the pause button and hang on for dear life in a state of suspended animation until the emergency passes, essential, unless you are in the midst of planning a funded project, probably means you don’t work in the core programs charged with mission delivery to the visiting public. Essential probably means security, building maintenance and crisis communications. When survival is at stake, the most basic functions emerge as the prevailing priority.  Like the human body when stricken by hypothermia, it’s surprising which functions shut down first and last.

Clue: The essential work is not reflected by what essential workers are paid

If we scan the landscape of America today, something similar is happening in every corner of work and life. Essential now means something surprising. The service workers who distribute our food and medical supplies, who take care of our elderly, the hospital workers, those who teach our kids, who provide security and maintenance, who butcher meat, who provide public transportation, who deliver mail and packages, who so often occupy the lower rungs of the income ladder, are the people still coming to work. Very often that work puts them at a higher risk of infection by the virus. It takes a crisis to reveal how much we rely on them to sustain our lives and yet nothing about the way we’ve treated them in the past is indicative of that vital importance. Imagine what pay structures would be like if workers were paid according to how essential they are to sustaining civilization? Ironically, millions of other workers, often in higher paid jobs, languish in uncertainty.

Essential institutions begin with essential values

We’ve started to become familiar with the stories of a medical system in extremis, where desperate life or death decisions are made by triage. But, in the early stages of this crisis, we’re also seeing critical values surface, values that until now were lurking below the cognitive surface of our decision making processes, values that guide triage outside of the medical system and will rock institutions to their core including museums. All of these values have rationales that existed well before the pandemic hit, but there’s nothing like an emergency to surface the baseline values, those guiding beliefs, commitments and assumptions that we hold to be essential. On some deep level, those values represent a kind of emotional solace, a code of meanings to be derived from the indiscriminate destruction of the viral outbreak. Our values are a story we will tell ourselves to both survive, attach meaning to this experience, and heal. But those values should also cause us to reflect on what is really important. Though this may sound at first like a process of introspection, as it no doubt must be in part, as public institutions, museums should be revisiting these values in the public sphere. Most importantly, part of the scope of finding the future of museums should include questioning the very values we thought we adhered to before a pandemic turned our world upside down and changed our notions of what it means to be essential. 

Perhaps the process should appear to us at first not as a series of answers, but as a series of questions. This is a time that will challenge us like never before to find creative adaptations and solutions, but the search for solutions begins with identifying the challenges. Without wisely defining the problems, the solutions will not be solutions at all.

Innovation, creative disruption, adaptation, “thinking outside of the box,”  until now were thought of as optional novelties in museum work, a corner of the field for dabblers and dreamers. Now, with a startling clarity, we are literally locked outside of the box for an unknown period of time. Adaptation is no longer optional. Museums, as notoriously plodding institutions excelling in continuity, are suddenly forced into a place of dramatic disruption which is not of their choosing. As a colleague once said, calling the pace of museums glacial is unfair because glaciers move too quickly. Museums today are a little out of shape to start outrunning glaciers.

One driving desire in our collective recovery is to try to claw our way back to where we were as quickly as possible, to try to repair the damage and regain the “normal.”  Another is to circle the wagons, retreat to the Alamo, retrench to a place of familiarity, safety and relative comfort. These are natural human impulses. We see it already represented not only in how our colleagues are identifying essential and non-essential staff, but also in the preliminary schemes outlining the adaptations necessary for reopening. We will design visitor services systems that support social distancing. We will remove the things that might promote the spread of viruses (hands on activities, auditorium programs, guided tours, etc.) We will, as Nik Honeysett said in a recent Zoom confab, find “performative safety” protocols that telegraph to our public the concern we have for their safety and well being, albeit with less than perfect certainty that all is actually safe.

As much as I can respect the motives behind these strategies to get back to normal, at first glance they all have three things in common — a willingness to settle for a much reduced quality of museum going experience, an assumption that the old normal is worth recreating in a diminished form, and a habit of mind that our museum going public are consumers rather than active partners in the creation of museum experiences. At a higher level, before we accept this fate and make it the new covenant we have with the public, we have to ask if this is where our values need to guide us. We need to go back to something essential to actually be essential. 

What does the public want? 

The devotion shown to us by our public will be the first test and, unlike so many other tests museums traditionally face, this time the test will be existential. In a time where perhaps 1 out of 4 or 5 American working age adults are out of work, and are not paying taxes, and for whom survival is the first concern, and where the very kinds of pleasant social activities they used to enjoy now come freighted with menace, there is a lot that will seem superfluous. In the same way that doctors have to make triage decisions about who is worth the investment of medical attention when medical attention is scarce, so our constituencies will be faced with agonizing choices about what matters, what is essential to living their lives. Whether or not a museum is essential might be expressed through things as large as state or county budget decisions made under duress, a redirection of the sustaining charitable foundation’s resources to bread and butter community needs, or as granular as a thousand family leisure time decisions made when the bank account is empty, or simple inattention because the museum in town is the last thing to cloud our more limited mindspace right now.  

Audience researcher Susie Wilkening has already done excellent service in gathering first impressions about what the public are thinking about returning to museums after the pandemic. Colleen Dilenschneider has also contributed quick and revealing work.

Not surprisingly, the thoughts of culture goers are not monolithic. To summarize, the good news is that there are many people who can’t wait to get back to the museum within the next 3 months, and some of them are not particularly concerned about risks. On the other hand, there are a greater number of cautious prospective museum goers who are going to be keenly safety conscious and for whom a novel coronavirus vaccine would provide the most reassurance. At first glance, the challenges facing museums will not be as steep as the performing arts, and outdoor institutions like zoos, botanical gardens and sculpture parks might actually experience a boom.

What visitors can’t tell us right now is whether the new museum experience, however that devolves, will continue to be attractive. They might imagine, as we would, that there will be less in the way of safe hands-on activities, but they are unlikely to imagine what it will feel like to look at exhibits, objects and art while trying to maintain distance from other museum goers. They might already be familiar with the anxiety of food shopping with other customers who are oblivious to safety, but we need food to live; food is essential. Do we need museums enough to overcome the anxiety of sharing space with strangers? Museum goers may not imagine yet how needing to buy a timed ticket well in advance might affect their motivation.

So exactly how we reopen prompts worthwhile questions, but these are primarily functional problems producing stopgap, functional solutions. 

What matters?

18 years ago now, Stephen Weil urged us to make museums matter. Though Weil, who died in 2005, might never have imagined a time when so many museums at once were imperiled by the double threat of a pandemic and global economic crisis, he certainly argued that there is a kind of covenant between museums and the community of support necessary for the museum to thrive. Museums, he believed, could prosper in a virtuous circle as long as the public and the museum were in a reciprocal relationship. Museums had to “earn their keep” by being for someone, not merely being about something. He argued for a museum of purposes, not functions, and those purposes are public facing.

Clue: The multitude of red flags, portents and bellwethers

The rippling financial pressures which are now bound to unfold are simply exacerbations of the issues swirling near the surface for years. There have been many canaries in the coal mines, many, many instructive examples in microcosm offering a glimpse of what we now face writ large. Few are the museums fully recovered from the shock of 2008-09, an event that accelerated trends already gnawing at the heels of museums since at least the 1990’s.

In 2015, the Illinois State Museum in Springfield faced a state budget reduction so severe, it had a near death experience. What was striking was not so much that this sort of radical act of defunding might happen in a conservative government cost cutting move, but that public outcry was virtually nonexistent. Instead, it took the actions of the state employees union, rallying on behalf of their membership, to salvage the fate of the museum. After languishing in limbo for nearly a year, the museum has since been slowly creeping back to some semblance of health, but only by charging the first admission fee in its 139 year history. In the process, the staff who were state employees kept their jobs. Their managers were the ones who ultimately proved to be non-essential.

Last year, where I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, a ballot initiative for a modest sales tax increase to alleviate a growing shortfall in countywide support for arts and culture organizations, including museums, was defeated. This might be surprising unless you knew that only 15% of households in the county ever patronized those organizations with their attendance. In anecdotal conversations I had with fellow Charlotteans, I heard many express feelings that issues like affordable housing, gentrification, and economic disparity were more pressing concerns than paying out of pocket to support arts and culture. In the case of Charlotte, a sense of funding scarcity for basic human needs, in a city not incidentally redolent with a great deal of wealth, did not play out in the favor of museums as voters saw it as a choice of one over the other.

In contrast to Charlotte, the Detroit metro area made the opposite decision in 2012 voting to increase a millage tax to support the financially troubled Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Later, in 2014, when the city of Detroit went bankrupt, for a moment it looked possible that the collections of the DIA might be auctioned off to help satisfy the beleaguered city’s creditors since those collections could be seen as city assets. The philanthropic community and the state of Michigan rallied to pay a handsome ransom in the hundreds of millions to the city bankruptcy manager to keep the collections in Detroit. In effect, Detroit as a community doubled down on its support of DIA by acquiring its collections all over again.

These are just some of the instances where the public has signaled loyalty — or lack of loyalty– to the museums it sustains when the crisis comes. Key here is to understand what institutions like DIA in Detroit do that museums in Springfield and Charlotte do not.

Several days ago, in Philadelphia, Mayor Jim Kenney called for the elimination of the city’s Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy. The perception that arts and culture as the broad umbrella under which museums so neatly fit, are superfluous and non-essential, is pervasive and will be hard to shake in a crisis of this magnitude. How could this be so? So many red flags and critical indicators have been lurking there for years with just a little hindsight. By now we all know many school systems never fully brought back museum field trips after the last budget catastrophe of 2008-09. Many of them zeroed out classes in music, art, theater, languages, even history and science, as the drive to focus increasingly scarce resources on the tested subjects of reading and math and No Child Left Behind became paramount when system budgets dwindled. Many schools let the salaries of their teachers stagnate and were distracted by the tugs of magnet and charter school competition. The overall predicament of public education was one of many meaningful, slow burning harbingers of cultural triage in an atmosphere of scarcity and austerity. If public schools were allowed to crumble, why should we expect that museums would enjoy any special privileges? Now, we learn that New York governor Andrew Cuomo is calling on Bill Gates and his foundation to help the state “reimagine” education in the fall. We can only imagine what that will mean.

Museum sustainability has been the chief anxiety of museum leaders for more than a generation. The number of museums that command more resources today than they did 20 years ago is vanishingly small. Far more numerous are the institutions who have been slowly backed into staff and service reductions, cost saving measures of all sorts, and ever more desperate attempts to generate revenue. In nearly every significant category of support: individual, corporate, and private foundation philanthropy, national, state and local government subsidies, the overall trend has been down. The pandemic crisis is a precipitating event, a tipping point, in a long series of events that were already well underway. 

What is to be done?

Before we find answers, we have to ask the right questions. A certain clarity about the moment is required. In a rapidly shifting social environment, we are learning about the allure of wishful thinking. Oh, how we wish this was all over and we could just carry on as we were! The power of positive thinking will find hard limits on the frontiers of remorseless reality. In a pandemic, wishful thinking can literally have fatal consequences.

So let’s not be deluded. We shouldn’t be at all surprised to find ourselves in a fight for existence, a fight I’m afraid that some of us, too many of us, will ultimately lose. The future of museums is not preordained or guaranteed in a situation like this. Museums are by no means a sacred institution any more than newspapers, higher and lower educational systems, the music industry, the norms of governance and checks and balances in a democracy, the secular pillars of science, truth seeking and rational discourse, the preservation of the commons, public lands and spaces, good manners, common human decency and decorous behavior, and so on. All of these things hang in the balance right now along with our treasured museums. All of these things turn out to be things we have to decide to fight for if we are to keep them, or that must be reinvented to find new relevancy and life. They can no longer be taken for granted. There is no room for complacency.

Going into the struggle, the institutions that cultivated strong support networks and reciprocal traditions in their communities will have advantages and allies in the near term that might make the difference between survival and oblivion. Some will wear the protective armor of handsome endowments that, if they can’t entirely insulate a museum from external shocks, at least protect the corpus from complete liquidation. Other institutions, being lean and nimble, creative and resourceful, with few immediate debts and obligations, will be able to pivot quickly by cultivating new alliances and shedding the fatal encumbrances of the past. Museums that never saw the point in being community-centered, or tamped down innovation and initiative, that lacked a vision beyond the most perfunctory continuity strategies, will be the most vulnerable. Though we should take time to properly grieve our losses, nostalgia for what we once had will be of limited utility going forward. We’re not going to have a lot of time for sentimentality.

The values 

Let’s return to values, the things of mission statements, boardroom battles and internecine struggles, the basic conceptual building blocks upon which institutions are said to rest and wrestle. In our experience, most museums will make a nod to preservation (of material culture) and service (to the public) in their mission statements. Few, however, will openly acknowledge overriding, deep attachments to such over-my-dead-body values as connoisseurship, prestige, research and scholarship, revenue generation, social justice, service to schools, interested stakeholders of every stripe, donor cultivation, political expediency, and any number of conflicting and divergent values that only surface in the crucible of an emergency and are sacred cows incredibly hard to even question, let alone slaughter. It is with some sadness and resignation I say that it is probably better that we decide together which cows will go to the abattoir than have others do it for us. But I should also add that there are no sacrifices worth making that don’t also provide at least the potential for real gains if wisdom is exercised and the guiding values are relevant.

An incomplete set of framing questions in search of creative answers in no particular order:

• Who do we need to include to find a common future? Who are our allies? Who have we left out to our detriment? What advice and support will we need from them? What can we offer in return? Are we prepared to listen in ways that will change us? What do new reciprocal models ask of us and our partners? What’s the coalition going forward?
• Who do we serve and what makes us essential to them? How do we find out? Is the value of that a basis sufficient to survive? If not, and failure is not an option, who do we need to reach and what new values need to be cultivated instead?
• Are our baseline values out of step with the times? How would we know? What can we do about that? Who are the friends who can tell us the truth we need to hear?
• Who are the as yet unacknowledged leaders among us for whom the time is ripe to step up? How are they identified and cultivated? What skills, tools and support will they need? What adjustments to our own prerogatives will be necessary to support their growth as leaders? How do we embrace the messiness and ambiguity of learning on the job in a crisis situation without crushing initiative?
• What are our anxieties? How are they limiting? How do they offer us directions to grow? How do we make anxiety, which is inevitable and appropriate under the circumstances,  useful instead of an obstacle to moving forward?
• If we are to survive, how do we earn our place? What is an appropriate amount of civic space to earn given the landscape of emergent community needs? What is the new covenant of reciprocity?
• What support can we offer to a community that is grieving many losses and is grappling with a multiplicity of new challenges? How do we earn compassion by showing compassion? How can we be both the change people need and the stability people crave?
• How do we support our colleagues in this crisis, emotionally and financially? How can we respond to the strain humanely and with compassion? How do we assess the risks to their health and well being and do something affirmative about it? How does everyone become essential in new ways, if essential is elusive in the old ways?
• If everything has changed, how have we changed? How must we continue changing? What are the milestones on this journey? How do we grow into change without it destroying us and the museums we steward?
• Are there experiments we can conduct to find answers to these questions? What are the avenues of inquiry? What tools and skills do we need to cultivate? What’s the low hanging fruit? What will require a longer trajectory and larger sources of support?

In the immediate aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, after a moment or two of hesitancy, museums everywhere closed down. There can be no doubt this was a prudent measure. By all appearances, museums as enclosed public spaces, with a variety of air handling systems, spaces that accommodate crowds and very often encourage high levels of interactivity, on first blush seem to be rather ideal environments for a virus that spreads most efficiently from person to person through breathing infected breath and touching infected surfaces. Conversations on museum professional social media threads started with a flurry of questions about how best to sanitize surfaces, then quickly transitioned to discussions about delivering programs through online media as museum after museum closed its doors to the visiting public, often well in advance of shelter-at-home orders from local authorities.

Following with lightning speed was a wave of announcements of staff and contractor layoffs and furloughs. In a matter of days, thousands of museum people working at every level, throughout the nation and the world, were suddenly cast into an ambiguous future. At this writing, their fate, (and as a museum consultant, my fate) is completely unresolved. Already the first wave has been joined by others as institutions have been forced to narrow the scope of who can be considered “essential”, and the recognition grows that contending with this new reality will likely be a struggle lasting months or years not days.

The very financial viability of scores of museums now appears to be in real jeopardy. By all appearances, we have arrived at a major turning point for the field.

Many museums, though they are closed to the visiting public, have found ways to serve their supporting communities in other ways, outside of the galleries. It has been encouraging to see how quickly museums have used their public service ethic as a springboard to adapt quickly. The Museum Group was able to rapidly aggregate a list of efforts that include using a museum site to directly deliver services to the community, such as virus testing, to the delivery of myriad virtual online programs. Nevertheless, the museum galleries themselves are closed indefinitely. What I will address here is the web of issues surrounding museums as a destination, comprised of real, tangible spaces, filled with real people.

What future?

I’ll start by saying there is nothing about my particular experience that gives me any advantage as a forecaster for the future of the museum as a cultural form. I will not make sweeping predictions here. As a museum professional, my only analytical qualification is knowing something about where we have been and where we were before disaster struck. Nor am I suggesting anything like a passive approach. Even if we feel helpless in the face of this crisis, what we do about it is something we figure out, not something we must accept fatalistically. We are not, in fact, helpless. We have agency and decisions to make. So what follows is one first stab at a framework for making educated guesses, finding some direction and some attempt to pull signals from a great deal of noise. I can’t do this alone, so I will pull examples already emerging from the stress and strain of the immediate crisis and I invite everyone to join the chorus of voices to work on this together.

First, a few analogies I find useful for thinking about dramatic change:

Punctuated Equilibrium

Punctuated equilibrium is a theory in evolutionary biology pioneered by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Summarizing as a layman for other laypersons, the basic idea is that evolutionary change isn’t always as gradual as one might imagine. Rather, in the fossil record, there exist long periods of stasis where little or no change in a species happens, punctuated by short periods of discontinuity, “sudden jumps” in which change happens rapidly.  These abrupt changes are explained by how certain populations of a species occupy niches on the periphery of an ecosystem. The relatively extreme survival conditions on the periphery intensifies natural selection and divergence from a more static lifeform. A change to the larger ecosystem can cause a peripheral lifeform to suddenly move into an environmental niche previously occupied by another lifeform that may have thrived without changing for a long, long time, which then suddenly, for whatever environmental reasons, could not adapt and survive. 

Extending the punctuated equilibrium analogy, in the present moment, there are many institutions, a subset of them museums, which have been existing in a state of relative stasis and continuity, but under the strain of this particular moment, will not survive and will give way to new variants which, until now, have existed and adapted rapidly on the periphery of the mainstream. Indeed, with hindsight, it could be said that many of our bedrock, foundational institutions in the secular, democratic, market oriented societies of the world, have been under strain for some time. The coronavirus pandemic is only the triggering event that brings the crisis to a head, revealing the vulnerabilities in the systems that have appeared to maintain continuity. 

Science Fiction

Imagining a possible future contains opportunities for delight and dread in more or less equal measure. A common feature of science fiction is to identify a current trend, often one that is rather latent and not highly obvious, and extrapolate, often to an extreme degree, speculative versions of both possible or wildly implausible futures. In this way, science fiction has a very interesting track record for imagining a world of new technologies and social forms that often set the course for research and development ambitions. These imaginings can be optimistic, dystopian or neutral, some reach a level of fulfillment (e.g.: robots, space travel), others remain elusive (e.g.: flying cars, time travel). We can ask, given where we have been going, what is the culminating future development indicated? Are these developments positive, negative, or just plain different? What do we want to cultivate and what should we avoid?

A flip side to discontinuity, a science fiction approach to the future of museums might emphasize looking at those nascent trends peripheral to the “core” work museums have been doing and extrapolating there for potential adaptations given the new reality.

Paradigm Shifts

Thomas Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift in his landmark book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. In summary, the key idea is that, in the history of science, there is a discernible  pattern of innovation. At any point, scientists in any discipline or domain work within an accepted theoretical framework or canon, and most of this work is additive or incremental, building, as Issac Newton once said, “on the shoulders of giants.”  When that shared canon no longer provides avenues for inquiry, or cannot provide satisfactory answers to perplexing emergent research questions, a domain is ripe for a paradigm shift. A key feature of an historical moment ripe for such a shift is a great welter of competing ideas. As Jay Rounds once told me, until the new paradigm emerges and its efficacy becomes better established and embraced as the new canon, one idea is as good as another. This helps explain why there is always resistance to the new paradigm before it is embraced. Once the new paradigm does become established, it represents a new theoretical framework in which scientists can work and build upon each other’s ideas again.

It might be said in retrospect that the established museum paradigm (or paradigms) had reached a point of instability before the coronavirus hit. On a financial level, certainly, sustainability was seen to be precarious across the board. Moreover, the traditional academic disciplines and taxonomies around which museums were organized (science, natural history, history and art) were not only no longer mirroring the actual work of researchers in leading edge domains, but were also proving constraining to the creation of relevant exhibitions and programs for the general public. In recent years, an efflorescence of entirely new museums dedicated to previously neglected subjects or stories, seemed to show that traditional institutions and their domain constraints had begun to frustrate the forward movement of the field.

Coronavirus: First Flush Challenges

Challenge: How Long Will This Pandemic Last? The Hammer and the Dance

No one knows how long this will last, or how long museum galleries will have to be shuttered. The current energy directed at “reopening” the economy as soon as possible is motivated by wishful thinking rather than sound epidemiology. Blogger Tomas Pueyo writes in his series “Coronavirus: Learning How to Dance” that, rather than a quick return to “normal,” the experiences of other nations show that we are in a cycle he calls “the hammer and the dance”. The “hammer,” with strict social distancing, is the lockdown period we are in now. The hammer is the severe period necessary to cut down infections which, in turn, reduces the number of cases flooding the medical system. That’s why public spaces like museums are closed to slow the spread of the disease. But after the hammer comes a period Pueyo calls the “dance.” No one knows how long the dance lasts, but it is not a return to business as usual. As the lockdown inevitably relaxes, smaller, localized outbreaks will flare in a series of waves. The new normal requires highly organized vigilance, testing and containment in order to keep these local outbreaks from infecting large populations that are not yet immune to the coronavirus. The size and severity of each successive wave in the dance will depend to a great extent on our behavior. Moreover, a lot of hopes are riding on the herd immunity that humans might develop when a large proportion of the planet’s population has become infected or immunized once a vaccine is introduced. But experts are warning us that this virus is mutating rapidly. An effective vaccine is not a certainty. Even if a vaccine can be developed, if coronavirus becomes more like the seasonal flu, it could require a new vaccine each year.  

Unfortunately, for museums, caution will have to be the watchword. “Normal”, if we see some semblance of it again, is a long way off. If we are to survive and reopen, adaptations will need to be found now.

Challenge: Museums as Social Space

One of the greatest realizations of visitor research in the past few decades is understanding the degree to which museums, in their real world, destination form, with tangible, immersive spaces, are primarily social spaces. Few people visit museums alone. The museum gallery has been revealed to be a kind of conversation piece. The discernments and interpretations of curators are one facet of the museum-going experience, but the meaning derived by the experience is highly dependent on who a visitor is, whom a visitor is with, and what they make of the experience together.

In its unwitting and confounding way, coronavirus has found the perfect hack into our bodies through human nature. It replicates and thrives on the human need for social contact. The glue that holds so many of our social bonds together naturally requires shared intimacy, closeness, and touch. Compassion and empathy, consolation, shared grieving, celebration, worship, rites of passage, courtship and sex, weddings, live entertainment, dining, dancing, storytelling, teaching, learning, a myriad of cultural forms, are built on our natural desire to be together with others. These behaviors are not only the most human, but also the most humanizing. With horrible irony, the very behaviors that humanize us as social beings appear to render us vulnerable to illness and death. A tragic dimension of this reality is that the isolation steps we need to take to protect our bodies also gradually degrade our mental health and well being.

Museums have used the awareness of their social nature to employ all manner of creative adaptations. A convivial museum has been suggested by Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock, a place whose exhibits, programs and public spaces are welcoming and convivial, putting human needs at the highest priority. Museums have been described as “safe space” for gathering and transcending social differences. Elaine Gurian has depicted museums as a rare, special social zone where strangers can come together and interact. Lois Silverman and others have argued that museums do social work. Nina Simon has shown how museums can catalyze existing and new civic spaces for gathering and socializing. Museums increasingly have played a role in advocating for social justice and helping to heal historical trauma through bringing a diversity of people together. The preponderance of this work is predicated on the assumption that the museum is a destination, a place, where you can go and socialize freely without fear.

But how can museums thrive in the future if they are not safe to visit?

Paul Orselli of POW! has suggested that the days of the germy, hands on, tactile museum may be over, forcing a complete reassessment of the programs of the interactive museums, especially children’s museums and science centers. At least, Orselli argues, coronavirus might create new constraints that can spark creativity, even as it spells the doom of all the make believe supermarkets and other mediocre, widely imitated exhibit cliches for children. One museum I’m aware of is already discussing plans to pull all interactive activities from its exhibits in anticipation of reopening.

Call me old fashioned, but personally, I’m not willing to give up the ghost just yet; the idea that children’s and other museums might either revert to static displays like the ones I grew up with five decades ago, or shift to high tech interactives employing hands off gesture, AR or VR technology exclusively, seems like an experientially barren future for museum-goers. For kids especially this is sad since, for more than a generation already, they have faced an ever-shrinking and parched desert landscape of free, unsupervised play outside of museums. Museum visitor researchers know that the caregivers of children show keen sensitivity to the cleanliness of museums. As one microcosm of the pervasive “helicopter” caregiver anxiety impinging on the risky play of childhood, that hygienic worry has yet another mortal threat to contend with in coronavirus. A key future challenge will be to find new recipes for safe interactions in the museum. How this is done without the sheer physicality of embodied learning is a monumental stretch.

By singling out interactivity, however, we may be missing the forest for the trees. There’s a distinct possibility that infection picked up from interactive surfaces is not the foremost risk to the museum-goer. As I’ve stated above, all the evidence seems to suggest that the coronavirus pandemic spreads most efficiently from person to person through breath, and that infection through touching contaminated surfaces is a secondary, far less direct and common pathway. If that’s true, merely asking the public to come indoors and mingle poses a threat to public health as well and this could be the worst news of all for the bricks-and-mortar public destination museum. Several reports from the front lines of the pandemic are sobering. In a South Korean case, just one “super spreader” infected scores of fellow parishioners at her megachurch. The rapid spread of the virus in enclosed, heavily peopled environments like cruise ships, nursing homes and prisons is well-documented and underlines the problem. Other reports suggest that unlucky proximity to air handling systems might spread multiple infections. Before we focus on eliminating infectious surfaces, we’ll need to secure the entire physical environment — a daunting task.

Anticipating this hard future, Andras Szanto, writing for artnet.com has suggested that indefinite closure is not an option. He argues persuasively that museums are mission-bound to serve the public and reopened museums will be absolutely necessary for rebuilding and healing traumatized post-coronavirus communities much as they did after 9/11. In this article he lays out a series of strategies museums might implement to make museums safe. With a keen analysis, he notes that even if we were able to overcome the actual danger of infection in the gallery, we’d still have to overcome a public perception that museums are not safe. Showing concern for public safety by, for example, providing masks and hand sanitizer at admission, is not only a way to limit the spread of the virus, it also signals to the visiting public that the museum puts their physical well being at the highest priority. Sacrificed in the Szanto proposals, however, is close interaction among visitors, and strict limits on attendance, with pulsed entry to avoid crowding. Ultimately, under this scenario, access to the most popular museums might become as scarce and expensive as tickets to a Hamilton show. This would surely deal a heavy blow to the values of pluralism and accessibility driving so much of the mission discourse and work of museums. An unexpected consequence of surviving the pandemic could be increased exclusivity at the very time when museums have been striving to be more inclusive.

Challenge: Financial Sustainability

The first wave of reports coming in from the museums and culture sector are alarming. Hitting the pause button on a museum triggers significant complications for immediate financial sustainability, but the depth and breadth of the impact is likely to vary considerably depending on a number of factors. Small museums, like the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, subsisting to large degrees on admission and store revenue, and lacking cash assets or big endowments, are particularly vulnerable to the rolling crisis affecting museums across the country. A lot of these small museums and other arts and culture institutions are signaling that they are in a fight for survival and will not make it without major investments of relief. Pausing, even for a short time, cannot be sustained. It’s an immediate existential crisis. We will have to accept that many of our most financially precarious museums will not recover and a massive shakeout will occur with all of the devastation that implies, to collections stewardship, the public commons and careers. It could be argued that, in the broadest possible sense, the museums that survive, will be highly dependent like never before, on the commitment of the communities that have sustained them. After several generations of discourse about why it is necessary for museums to cultivate and serve community, we are about to find out whether that relationship is truly reciprocal. For the museums that fail, the answer will have been no.

It would be an illusion to think that the impact has reached only small institutions. Yes, large museums have certain advantages: generous support from national, state or local government, large endowments, cash reserves and other assets, excellent donor and foundation relationships, high attendance and other forms of public patronage. Yet, those institutions also have large expenses and, like small museums, are often highly reliant on earned revenue. Fixed costs entail basic heating and cooling of closed facilities, with baseline security, building maintenance, skeleton crew planning and communications comprising the “essential” workforce necessary to make it through the lockdown. The vast majority of museums have been forced to make layoffs, furloughs or pay cuts to contain hemorrhaging expenses. With depressing familiarity for anyone who has weathered the grueling parade of economic downturns of the last for decades, these cuts have usually been made in traditional fashion by separating “essential” from “non-essential” employees. Unprecedented, though, is the scale of the pandemic cuts, in some instances entailing indefinite layoffs of over 80% of staff. 

Still, not all museums are handling the staff reduction crisis in predictable ways. MASS Action has quickly rallied with a manifesto providing alternative strategies for absorbing the financial blows of coronavirus. Among other things, MASS Action encourages museums to take burden sharing steps that sustain staff across the board as much as possible, to make reduction steps equitable, and to exercise transparency and inclusion in the development of response plans. A silver lining of the pandemic might be that it affords museums an opportunity to explore new and lasting models for weathering institutional crisis and hardship in ways that are consistent with equitable values rather than with the usual brutal, utilitarian, bottom line strategies typical of the business world.

On other fronts, the inflexibility of dedicated endowments has come under scrutiny. The board of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) has suggested that, under the pressure of the pandemic, it is prepared to loosen its rules for the use of endowments to support emergency operations costs where previously such moves were taboo. While it’s clear that AAMD has no real binding legal authority to permit this, the fact that a pandemic can provide the jolt necessary to second guess an important ethical constraint on endowments says a lot about how a crisis causes widespread discontinuity in a relatively static field. Indeed, critics have targeted museums with large endowments who have laid off staff, suggesting that binding donor intent is a poor excuse for not dipping into restricted funds when human needs are at stake in a global emergency. 

Before museums raid the endowment piggybank, even if the relevant laws allow it, it bears pointing out that the investment portfolios comprising endowments have taken a massive hit in the collapse of the financial markets in the wake of the pandemic. Most market observers agree that the volatility will continue and, given the future possibility of a recession rivaling the Great Depression in scale, these investments might not have bottomed out yet. Counter arguments will be made, probably by board fiduciaries, that cashing out endowment portfolios at the bottom of a bear market is a bad idea, indicative of irresponsible financial stewardship. Still, we’re seeing how unstable times can force drastic changes in the ordinary guiding principles if the struggle is for survival.

The layoffs and furloughs have had a way of surfacing some eye-catching realities of museum staffing and employment practices. Prior to the crisis, museums had already been following a number of emergent trends corresponding with the growth of the “gig economy” in the rest of the American workforce. Gig workers, e.g.: freelancers, contractors, consultants, adjunct faculty, independent self-employed earners, etc., now comprise over ⅓ of all American workers. Even as museums increasingly dealt with financial pressure by borrowing business-oriented strategies for reducing staff costs, employees in some places showed increasing interest in organizing unions to build bargaining power in their relationships to management. Following the first shock of museum lockdowns, in a report on layoffs of museum educators at the Museum of Modern Art, it was revealed that these educators were contractors, not regular payroll employees. While the outsourcing of certain museum functions has been a trend for some time, particularly in exhibit design, retail and food service, audience research, IT, marketing, planning consultants, and client representation and construction management for capital projects, the contracting of educators indicates an expansion of the outsourcing trend to yet another critical museum role. One may wonder whether curators are next. 

For museums under steady pressure to sustain themselves, it’s easy to grasp the bottom line rationale behind a practice that relieves ostensibly cash-strapped museums of the cost burdens of the benefits, office accommodations and other responsibilities necessary for employing full-time salaried professional employees. But if the trend mirrors the growing exploitation of adjunct faculty in colleges and universities, it might portend an evermore prevalent practice that museums become the kind of employers that entirely shed their responsibilities to fairly compensate and sustain their workers, reducing their contributions to a kind of professionalized piecework. In a time of intense financial crisis, it’s easy to see this trend accelerating even faster and the collective compensation and job security of museum professionals degraded even farther.

It would be extremely disappointing if museums were to become just another unprincipled bottom line employer to join the race to the bottom, further exacerbating the wage gap in the American economy, but a struggle for survival can pose severe challenges to even the most fundamental principles. This is an equity issue, but it also has implications for the quality of mission delivery. If contractors are seen as superfluous and can be excluded from the core operations of museums, relegated to plug-and-play integers easily contracted and dumped at will, it shows that the mission purposes these affected roles represent are regarded as extraneous as well. If respect for the museum educator profession can be degraded in this way, how can museums seriously regard themselves as educational institutions? The answer is, they can’t.

In this sort of exploitative employment relationship, it is impossible to see how a museum optimizes the accumulation of intellectual capital and expertise of its workforce. The contracting relationship also has the effect of separating the creation of the products from the served public. A full time staff professional lives and learns iteratively from their work. A mercenary, no matter how dedicated, knowledgeable and skilled they may be, is excluded from this privilege. As the corpus of what we know as “the museum” shrinks to a skeleton crew of administrators buying services, and with no workplace culture of expertise, commitment, vision and initiative, we see the prevalence of the “zombie museum” emerge. Without the the traditions, the values, the soul museum professionals bring to practice as full time salaried employees, you have zombie museums that don’t know what they don’t know and the museum profession reduced to peonage. 

A danger of the of the Covid-19 moment is that it forces a spasm of downward pressure on the compensation museum workers depend on to survive. If temporary pay cuts are allowed to become fixed, if laid off employees are replaced by low wage, piecework contractors, museums will have made the least of the crisis.