The Recession and US Museums

Much of the reaction to these trying circumstances will therefore be confined to what individual museums, or small coalitions of museums, can do. Museums’ boards and directors are—quite reasonably, given their central mission of stewardship—highly conservative and, perhaps less reasonably, highly motivated by peer approval. Therefore, radical alternatives to genteel but irrevocable decline—such as merger, relocation, restructuring, resource sharing—are only likely to be contemplated as a last resort when an institution is faced with imminent closure. By that time, solutions are significantly more difficult to implement, as the time, money and organisational will required have been exhausted. As Hegel said, “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk”. It is interesting, if not entirely comfortable, to speculate on some of the fault lines that are likely to grow as the pressure caused by the triangulation of the dark forces of speculative expansion, recession and a diminished civic mandate increases.