Museum 2.0 Deliberately Unsustainable


By Nina Simon

I once asked Eric Siegel, director of the New York Hall of Science, why museums are rarely innovative shining stars on the cutting edge of culture. He commented that, as nonprofits, museums are built to survive, not to succeed. Unlike startups and rock stars, museums aren’t structured to shoot for the moon and burn up trying. They’re made to plod along.

Maybe it’s time to change that.
Last year, I met Mark Allen, the founder of Machine Project, an extremely cool “post-educational” space in Los Angeles that is part contemporary art gallery, part workshop space, part mad scientist party central. They host events like Dorkbake for which people design their own Easy-Bake-esque ovens and then bake cakes in them. They’ve transformed their space into a magic forest and a cardboard model of the Roman Empire. Their mission statement is: “Machine Project exists to encourage heroic experiments of the gracefully over-ambitious.”

At one point, Allen commented that they have a “deliberately unsustainable” business model. In other words: Do great stuff while you can, and when you can’t do it anymore, stop. This is the model that governs most businesses and artistic endeavors. It’s the reason terms like “jump the shark” exist. Most companies, rock bands and sports teams are only brilliant for so long. Then they start to slide; then they die.

The current financial crisis demonstrates what happens when companies set up artificial life support systems to prolong themselves far beyond their ability to provide great products and services. The unusual part of Allen’s statement isn’t the acknowledgment that Machine Project will only exist as long as it is relevant and good; it’s the desire to close up shop when the excellence ends. It’s incredibly rare for an organization or company to seek deliberate
unsustainability. Most want to provide consistent jobs for their employees so their families can be secure. They want to provide quality products that are reliable over the long run. They want to promise consistent services that consumers can bank on. That’s why TV shows jump the shark. When they can, they will claw their way through as many seasons as possible.

The problem arises when the desire to sustain overcomes the desire to be superlative and more resources go to surviving than succeeding. This is abundantly clear in the case of U.S. automakers and banks, whose current arguments for financial support rest on their need to survive, not their ability to succeed. Is that true of your museum, too?

For some museums, awesomeness has never been part of the mission statement or core services. Elizabeth Merritt from AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums wrote a provocative post on her blog in March about the financial future of museums in which she suggested, among other things, that 20 percent of museums should be allowed to fail in the coming decades. As she puts it: “Museums have an amazing ability to survive in the most adverse environments. They are the cockroaches of the nonprofit world—sometimes it really does seem like you can’t kill them with an atomic blast. Most of the time some improbable deus ex machina saves the day: for example, an unexpected cash gift or a free building. Mind you, this often only saves the distressed museum from closure—it does not cure the underlying dysfunction. The museum may simply struggle along for another ten years before the next potentially fatal crisis.”

The underlying dysfunction that Merritt mentions is often an inability to focus on anything but survival. To make it, museums need to survive and succeed. As an exercise, I think it’s important for museums to list two types of things:

1. Core services that people depend on and need to survive. These include museum jobs in a stable workplace and programs that address a societal gap not provided by other organizations. For example, maybe your museum provides job training for at-risk youth, and your community relies on your consistent ability to do so.

2. Services you provide that make you awesome. These should be the reasons you go to work in the morning. What draws people through your door, gets them excited and connects them passionately with your content?
You should be able to point with pride to both ways you support the community with reliable, consistent services and supreme awesomeness. I’m not suggesting that sustainability is not an important institutional goal. For some collections-based institutions, conserving and protecting artifacts may be the heroic service rendered. But not enough of us are, in Allen’s words, “gracefully over-ambitious.”

The societal problems that museums seek to solve are huge and, in many cases, quixotic. That’s a good thing. It means that we are trying to make a big difference in the world in the way culture is preserved, democracy is championed and learning is valued. It’s not enough to relegate these grand, heroic goals to mission statements. We have to pursue them—foolishly or rashly or successfully—in our activities every day. We need funding strategies that allow us to take the risks and share the results honestly. And if those strategies aren’t fully developed or available, we have to do it anyway. Even if we fail trying.

The desire to survive will always exist, whether you run a small institution or a giant one. Sustainability always emerges as a core value of organizations. It’s human nature to want to keep your job and keep doing what you’re doing. The challenge is to not make it your primary goal.