Met Museum to Close Shops, Freeze HiringBy Carol Vogel
Metropolitan Museum of Art
In response to the global economic crisis, James R. Houghton, chairman of the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, posted a letter on the institution’s Web site on Friday announcing that the Met had decided to close 15 of its satellite shops around the country. A year ago the Met ran a total of 23 stores but over the last year it has quietly closed 8, including three in California and one at the South Street Seaport Museum in lower Manhattan. It now plans to close an additional seven, and will instead concentrate on its online shop and has recently redesigned its mail order catalog. Mr. Houghton also said that the museum had imposed a hiring freeze and is curtailing staff travel and entertainment as well as the use of temporary employees. It is also in the process of a museum-wide assessment of its expenses to see how it can further reduce costs. Emily Rafferty, the Met’s president, said Monday that “we cannot eliminate the possibility of a head-count reduction.” The museum’s endowment, which provides about 30 percent of its annual operating revenue, has decreased 25 percent since June 30, 2008 to $2.1 billion from $2.8 billion. Membership and attendance is down too, in large part because of falling tourism.
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DIA chops 20% of staff in attempt to cut budget by $6 million
BY ERIN CHAN DING and BRIAN McCOLLUM • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS • February 24, 2009
In the most sobering news yet this year for the city's arts and culture scene, the Detroit Institute of Arts announced Monday that it is laying off about 20% of its staff -- or 63 of its 301 employees.
The cuts come as part of an effort by the DIA to trim $6 million from its $34-million annual operating budget. The layoffs involve 56 full-time employees and seven part-time workers and come from departments including curatorial, conservation, learning and interpretation, building operations, communications and marketing and accounting.
DIA Director Graham Beal said Monday afternoon that a half-dozen positions would be eliminated from the curatorial department, one of the most visible to visitors.
DIA employees were notified of the layoffs at a staff meeting Monday morning and then told the fate of their specific positions.
"People are stunned," said Beal. "Some people are in a state of shock."
Without actually doing away with storytelling workshops and monthly features like "Brunch with Bach," the DIA does plan to hold fewer of them. Already it has cut back on traveling exhibitions previously set to arrive this year, canceling one on the Baroque period, another on Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Jim Dine, and another on prints and drawings related to books.
"It's our intention to make the DIA continue to look exactly as it does now, with the same range of programs," he said. "But there will inevitably be less activity."
Despite a $160-million expansion that opened 15 months ago and a spike in attendance from roughly 400,000 to 600,000 visitors annually, the DIA has been struggling with its finances for most of this decade.
Money for the expansion was raised through a capital campaign that Beal said is justified because the DIA "was in a sorry physical state. The DIA needed to be fixed.
"We've been criticized for spending money on this enormous, big building when we knew of financial ailments, but it's relatively easier to raise money for bricks and mortar. We can't assume that whatever we hadn't done with bricks and mortar would have gone anywhere else."
The layoffs will save the museum $3.6 million. The other $2.4 million will come from expense reductions. For instance, exhibitions in Prints, Drawings and Photography will be scheduled six per 24 months rather than 12, and will feature works from the DIA's permanent collection.
The museum needs to raise $15 million each fiscal year for its annual operation costs -- in Beal's words, everything from paying the heating and cooling bills to providing storytelling for children. Beal declined to say how much of the $15 million the DIA has raised this year.
The national economic downturn has certainly not helped.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm's proposed budget earlier this month eliminated operational arts funding from the state arts council, which granted $950,000 to the DIA in 2009.
Mike Latvis, director of public policy for the advocacy group ArtServe Michigan, which is fighting Granholm's proposal to eliminate operational arts funding from the 2010 state budget, calls the DIA layoffs "horrible news and sad to hear. Unfortunately, I think, you're gonna be getting more and more of this...
"My hope is that throughout Michigan we won't have to start sacrificing the sorts of collections we can bring in. You can cut only so many employees before you have to start cutting quality."
The national advocacy group Americans for the Arts (AFTA) estimates that U.S. nonprofit arts organizations will trim workforces this year by 260,000 jobs, or about 10% of their total employment. The group also expects about 10% of the country's 100,000 arts organizations to disappear entirely.
The DIA news "is significant but not an outlier," said Randy Cohen, AFTA's vice president of local arts advancement. "It does look like this is a well-thought-out cut, with an appreciation for the consequences in regard to programming and the like. Some institutions are closing altogether, so it could definitely be worse."
Cohen maintains a long-term optimism.
"This is definitely painful for the people of Detroit, because it's an important organization," he said. "But we'll come out of this recession, the DIA will still be there, they'll rebuild, and they'll continue to deliver a great cultural product to the community."
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Art museum cuts staff, exhibitions, salaries, may raise fees
Facing a dramatic downturn in its endowment and waning city support, the Philadelphia Museum of Art is cutting staff, delaying exhibitions, curtailing programs, trimming salaries and — subject to city approval — increasing admission fees.
The cuts will bring the museum’s operating budget down by about $1.7 million to $52 million for the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, and, the museum hopes, will stave off a deficit the following year forecast as high as $5 million.
The museum will eliminate 30 positions — about seven percent of the staff — in all areas, though no curators are being let go. Of those 30 jobs, 16 are layoffs of current personnel, with the remaining positions lost by not filling vacancies.
Senior staff will take salary cuts of between five and 10 percent, said interim CEO Gail M. Harrity yesterday.
Painful as the reductions are, they might not be the last. “If endowment keeps being reduced in value there are going to be further steps taken. We would anticipate further reductions in personnel and operating,” said chairman H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest.
The museum is highly dependent on its endowment, underwriting about 25 percent of operating costs each year with interest and income generated by that chunk of money. But along with markets generally, the Art Museum’s endowment has taken a big hit. At its high in July, the endowment’s market value was $346 million, the largest of any local arts group; as of Dec. 1 it had fallen to $256 million. “And it has been further reduced since,” said Lenfest.
City funding has fallen in tandem with reductions for other city and quasi-city agencies. This year the museum will receive $2.4 million from the city, down from $3 million, and is facing the prospect of a further reduction next year.
The museum anticipates balancing its budget next year with the help of an increase in admission after July, and the postponement of an exhibition, The Crown of Aragón: The Art of Barcelona, Mallorca, Valencia and Zaragoza,” previously slated for spring of 2010.
“It’s fair to say that the curatorial staff is looking at how to best focus on the museum’s rich and deep collection,” rather than paying fees for travelling shows, Harrity said.
