Milwaukee Public Museum

Gotta love the Milwaukee Public Museum: they screw up on a blockbuster exhibit, lose $800,000 on the deal, but cover the shortfall by laying off encouraging employees to retire early and a $650,000 "infusion" from the endowment fund. Nothing to worry about here, folks.

Steve Schultz at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the story.

County Supervisor Jim "Luigi" Schmitt, who also sits on the museum board of directors, said while the current shortfall was troubling, he doesn't expect any noticeable reduction in the museum's overall quality.

Laying off more employees, including curators, won't have any "noticeable" negative effect.

Chief Financial Officer Michael Bernatz said Thursday...the museum operation was basically sound and was moving to a financial model in which the museum was less reliant on blockbuster special exhibits to stay afloat.

"We have a plan for getting the operation back on track," Bernatz told a Milwaukee County Board panel.

So, just what is this plan? Do the county taxpayers get to know what it is?

Interestingly, one of the commentors is another journalist, Michael Horne, who did a worthwhile article about the museum and it's scandalous treatment of their bicycle collection in last August's Milwaukee Magazine.

I don't think that Horne even begins to realize how much of the iceberg remains unseen. I hope he keeps digging: I think there is plenty to see here, folks. More of my opinion here and here, as well.

The Milwaukee Public Museum: Four Felony Charges Filed Against Former Chief Financial Officer Terry Gaouette

Milwaukee District Attorney Jeffrey Doss has filed charges against Terry Gaouette for actions leading to the financial meltdown at the museum.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has the story.

Charity Governance on the Milwaukee Public Museum

This is old (June 7) but new to me, and you may have missed it as well. Lots of interesting points about the "management" at the museum, and the Wisconsin Attorney General's office.

"We would have loved to have a quorum today"

I'll bet.

The Milwaukee Public Museum continues to make negative news. Dave Umhoefer has the story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The promised release this week of a long-overdue internal Milwaukee Public Museum audit - expected to show a much larger 2004 deficit than previously disclosed - was delayed Thursday as transition problems dogged the institution.

An audit committee of the museum board failed to get a quorum, and a top official balked at signing off on the audit amid concern about taking responsibility for the acts of previous administrators.

So, it may be a $5.4 million drop in assets instead of a $2 million drop, but a couple of the Audit & Finance Committee members had other commitments, so we still don't know.

This does not sound like a routine meeting for Audit & Finance Committee members to skip. They undoubtedly had good reasons, but I continue unimpressed with the Board. Should the Milwaukee Public Museum find Board members who are committed to having fewer commitments?

Unique or merely significant?

"In the long run, we suspect tourists are more likely to plan a visit to see something unique rather than something that is significant, but that can be seen in greater quantities elsewhere." Charity Governance.

Which would you more likely travel to see?

Charity Governance has some comments on the proposed gift of $25 million worth of Rodin sculptures to the North Carolina Museum of Art (It appears that the gift to NC would cost another $115 million or so), then segues briefly into the finances of the Milwaukee Public Museum.

The writer for Charity Governance seems to think that raising taxes for culture is an economic benefit, an idea I find highly questionable. I think free money is a bad idea: it permits disfunctional behavior to continue without cost to the recipient. Welfare for the culturati is bad for those very culturati. They just don't understand that. Raising taxes is also a bad idea in itself: it discourages businesses from locating or expanding there. Discouraging business is hardly a tool for economic development.

The Milwaukee Public Museum has quite a few unusual collections which it could highlight in exhibits, and those collections could be all the better if they made commitments to those collections, hired interested and qualified curators to build those collections (and allowed them to do so- no, make that "required" them to do so- rather than the current "make it damn near impossible to do so"), and marketed the results both within the area and to the seriously interested public around the country- or even the world.

Reaching the seriously interested would result in trivial additional visitors, but after the interested realized that the museum has a track record of interest, it would be far easier to get donations of money and objects from those very people who have much of the best stuff in their own collections.

How often do serious collectors give their favorite material to institutions with a demonstrated lack of interest? The shame is that it does happen from time to time. Perhaps more accurately, collectors give to museums which briefly profess interest, then a curator leaves and the institutional lack of commitment emerges as the dominant force. Over the years collectors realize that, and refuse to support the institution. That happens all the time with museums with a poor mission focus.

I don't know what the Milwaukee Public Museum should focus on, and it isn't my responsibility to decide. They have plenty of interesting collections to choose from, tho: antique typewriters and business machines, guns- with considerable strengths in ignition systems and 19th century American military firearms, glass- especially Victorian glass, waterfowl decoys, clocks, posters, Northwest Coast Indian material including the third biggest collection of NW Coast masks in the US, postage stamps of the world, costumes (clothes). The Milwaukee Public Museum has all sorts of interesting things which it demonstrates a long term lack of interest in.

I don't believe that any serious collector who knows the situation would consider giving them anything significant. If there is one I'd love to hear from him or her about why they would do so. The museum does little with what it has. Why give them more to ignore?

Back to that opening statement from Charity Governance: I think one must distinguish between the local/regional market and the long distance traveler who is deciding where to go to see collections. The latter is a very small group. Most of the locals may be too uninterested to know or care that a collection is lousy: look at the pleasure people show in the gun room at House on the Rock . Last time I was there (only time, for that matter) I guessed that 99+% of the "antique" guns were very low quality modern reproductions. So far as I could tell, I was the only one there who knew that, much less cared.

Their market was happy with stuff I think wasn't real much less good. Maybe they thought the "antique" guns were "unique" rather than significant. ("Unusual" may be a better term here than "unique", tho.) One might make similar comments about nearly everything at House on the Rock: everything is unusual, but little is good or significant. Result: The place packs them in, half a million of them a year at $15 a head. The Milwaukee Public Museum may be very lucky that House on the Rock isn't across the street.

Why is it so difficult for a museum with resources like those of MPM to focus itself and market itself? Why can't it make a commitment to being excellent at something? Why does it waste interesting collections? Why does it waste good curators?

Pigs at the trough

Oh, excuse me, make that "...at the regional cultural district."

Every so-called cultural institution in southeastern Wisconsin smells free money from people who don't use those institutions. Even the cultural institutions called "golf courses."

Apparently none of them understand that free money is bad for them. Like other forms of welfare it releases them from the consequences of bad behavior. Result: More bad behavior. Free money debilitates, and the catastrophe at the Milwaukee Public Museum seems to be a catalyst for coercion of the taxpayers of five counties. Make that six counties. Oh...no...make that seven counties.

The Housing Trust Fund Coalition, an alliance of community groups, called Tuesday for "a regional authority that can support arts, cultural groups, public parks and affordable housing needs throughout the region."

Yep: Housing is a cultural district issue.

Paul Mathews, president of the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts...said figuring out how to fund cultural institutions is paramount and authorities shouldn't spend too much time debating a cultural district's structure. He backed a 2003 task force's call for a half-cent sales tax for recreation and culture.

He would.

Greater Milwaukee Committee President Julia Taylor...did not rule out the possibility that sports teams also could be part of the cultural effort.

Well, then, I think all the pistol leagues should get regional tax support, and the taxpayers who object can sell their houses and move elsewhere if they must. Taxpayers should also support the paint-ball teams. Whether they want to or not. Actually, especially if not: if they wanted to we wouldn't have to tax them, would we?

Local golfing experts said they could see some advantages in a regional approach...

I bet they can.

Pigs everywhere, and I bet half of them are Republicans.

Larry Sandler had the story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Does the Milwaukee Public Museum deserve our support?

My opinion: Not yet. Not nearly yet. The problems there are so basic, so long standing, so deep seated, and the policy makers appear to me so clueless that support is better given to more deserving institutions. I hope that changes, because the Milwaukee Public Museum has some fine staff people and could be a great institution, but the policy for today seems to be "Keep steaming for the iceberg, but throw a third of the crew overboard."

Nothing in the recent coverage by the Milwaukee Journal sentinel suggests that anyone involved even understands what the problems are.

The crisis right now is over money , but that isn't the core of the long-standing problem.

I don't think the policy makers are stupid, I think they are so ignorant that they don't even know what questions to ask, and if by accident they do ask one, they don't know enough to know a good response from a ridiculous one.

Until MPM policy makers decide which specific areas MPM is going to be a leader in (and dispose of all collections and staff which do not further those goals) they will continue this "All things to all People, except to those who know better," and they will not deserve my support. They have a decades long track record of mediocrity masquerading to the community as A National Leader. The mediocrity is not in the curators, it is in the policies which fritter away their resources by specializing in nothing at all.

I do hope MPM decides to be great at something besides running an amusement park, but until I see real evidence that there is a goal of excellence in something- and a concomitant move to stop doing anything else- they are not going to get my support.

I started volunteering at MPM about 16 years ago, and have put in over 3000 hours total in the Anthropology, History, Photography, and Conservation sections. I have tremendous respect for many staffers there, but none for the policy makers both within the museum and on the Milwaukee County Board. A couple weeks ago I signed a codicil to my will eliminating a five-figure bequest to the museum: I am satisfied that the money would be wasted.

The local politicians involved certainly give me no confidence in their thinking. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported :

"Milwaukee County Supervisor Lynne DeBruin, who chairs a County Board committee that deals with museum issues, said...she thought it would be "a major problem" if (new MPM CEO Dan) Finley chose not to move into Milwaukee County (from adjoining Waukesha County). The museum has no residency requirement but receives more than $3 million in county tax funding a year.

What kind of fool does it take for such a consideration even to come to mind? This is not a small person: the county owns the MPM building and its collections. DeBruin is a politician with some significant power: her concern in this financial and management crisis is where the next CEO lives.

I think several things need to be done in order to have a chance of turning the Milwaukee Public Museum around. I don't think any of them will be done.

First, the museum needs to be de-politicized. Comments like DeBruin's help show why: people with no understanding of museums and whose real interest is local politics need to relinquish their power by privatizing ownership of the museum building and collections. Then let the museum swim on its own, or sink. I won't hold my breath. Nearly universal opinion is that privatizing is never going to even be discussed. Not possible. Politicians will never give up their power. Unfortunately, I think this is the core structural problem the museum faces, and since addressing it isn't possible, little worthwhile can be done.

One of the effects of county ownership of collections is the politicization of collections. In order for the museum to sell any high value objects they have to get the County Board's permission. The County Board wonders why that money shouldn't be deducted from the county's annual support, so there is precious little reason to think about actively curating a collection. Make the process tough enough and no one will bother.

Second, the policy makers need to decide what each curatorial department will be excellent in doing, and stop wasting resources pretending to do anything else. In other words, be a leader at something, rather than also rans at every thing.

A number of years ago MPM bought the Tirimbina Rain Forest in Costa Rica. Since they were in a financial crisis at the time I thought the decision rather strange, but that it might prove a good long-term action if they used Tirimbina to focus the activities of the Botany Department, and possibly the Zoology Department as well. So far as I know, such a radical idea never occurred to them. They never used Tirimbina to focus staff retention and hiring on Costa Rican rain forest research. Instead they have some good people who work in areas utterly unrelated, both in Botany and Zoology. The result: curatorial and financial resources are dispersed instead of concentrated. Prominence in nothing is also the result. With the same number of curators they could be excellent in rain forest science. Instead....frittered all away, and lack of prominence makes fund raising all the harder.

This lack of focus continues through all the curatorial departments. Good people work in areas which have nothing to do with each other. Huge History collections which have little if any relationship with each other go uncurated from one decade to the next. Stamps, guns, clocks, glass, posters, decoys, Asian Export material, you name it, they have it, and they don't curate it. The museum does not have a single curator with specialized expertise in any of the above collections. They aren't interested in having such people either, because they don't specialize.

If you think that having all of the above collections is important, ask what the museum has used them for over the last decade.

Ask: What research papers have the staff published in refereed journals on any of those collections in the last decade? What scholarly publications has the museum published about those collections in the last decade? Which outside researchers have used those collections, and where were the results published?

For those collections which have seen some research and publication, what do outside scholars think of that publication? Was it accurate? Useful? Important? Fluff?

The gun and stamp and decoy collections combined are likely worth at least three million dollars, and may be worth several times that. These are community resources and the community has a right to demand an accounting of how they are used. Guess what: They aren't used. The policy makers have no idea why they should have them, beyond that they already do have them.

If the museum policy makers decided, for example, that the History Section should specialize in glass, they could sell the stamps, guns, and decoys, and use the proceeds to endow the glass collection. With three million in a specialized endowment, they could attract a a serious glass specialist to curate the collection. Think of what the glass collection could be like after a decade of a specialist spending the income from three million dollars on acquisitions. MPM would be known for something, and that would make it a lot easier to raise money.

Instead, they are not known for stamps, not known for guns, not known for decoys, and not known for glass. They are not known for clocks, not known for posters, and not known for Asian Export material, yet they have millions of dollars of the community's assets tied up. Why is this good for the community?

I am a collector (not of glass) and collectors do not long support institutions which do not give a damn about their own existing collections. If MPM cared about its history collections it would have specialists in those areas. It doesn't, and that is not the curators' fault. It is the fault of the policy makers who apparently don't know enough about their own jobs to understand that they have major policy problems. Until they do understand that, they won't move to correct the problems they don't even see.

A bit over a decade ago a senior staff person on the Exhibits Committee and I were having a conversation about exhibits, and I commented that the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a policy of aiming every exhibit at three audiences: the general public- who walk in with no specialized knowledge or interest-, the interested public- primarily collectors-, and scholars. I was told that as far as MPM was concerned, the interested public didn't count.

I was floored. Who did this person think was ponying up $100,000,000 for the Milwaukee Art Museum's addition across town? Scholars? The uninterested public? I, as a decoy collector, was and still am part of that very interested public so airily dismissed. So far as the Milwaukee Public Museum is concerned, I am part of the only segment of the public which doesn't count: people who are seriously interested in the things which the museum collects.

If excellence at something is the proper goal, the Milwaukee Public Museum is a goal free institution, and that has been the case for decades.

Until the museum is controlled by policy makers who choose specific areas of expertise for each department and stop those departments from doing anything else, until they take the step of deaccessioning all of the collections which do not further those specific goals -and put the proceeds to endowing the goals they will pursue- and until all of the curators work only on furthering those goals, the Milwaukee Public Museum will not get my support.

It makes me sad that after 16 years of seeing what fine staff and collection resources the museum wastes that I doubt that I will ever write them back into my will. It is a shame that politicians and vision-free board members and senior administrators keep a potentially major institution down. It ought to be great. It can become great. But I don't think the people at the top have a clue about what the problems are, much less the solutions.

UPDATE: Bruce Murphy at Milwaukee Magazine has some interesting comments on the financial meltdown at the museum. While I consider this a separate issue, it does seem to speak to the cluelessness of the board.

I do want to be clear tho: The issues of policy, purpose, vision, and pursuit of excellence at something specific which I wrote about are not simply the result of the current board members. These are issues which appear to have been left unaddressed for decades.

UPDATE II: Please feel free to comment, either anonymously or signed, by clikking on the "Comments" icon below.

Milwaukee Public Museum finance

If you are interested in the financial crisis over at the Milwaukee Public Museum, a site called Charity Governance has been running a series of articles. They are quite critical of the Board, and it seems to me properly so.

I have long had a lot of criticisms of the way the museum has been run for the last several decades, but the crisis revealed over the past couple weeks is in a class by itself.

The article linked above has a link to a pdf of an interview with Museum President Mike Stafford which appeared in this month's "L&S Today", which is a University of Wisconsin publication. Given the revelations of the last couple of weeks, paragraphs 2 and nine are rather breathtaking.