The renovation and other efforts, Lehman claims, have resulted in more visitors. The changes—which include major staffing and programming overhauls—have also meant plenty of criticism. In short, Lehman has attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional 19th-century museum and the way people live now in the 21st century, in order to keep the Brooklyn Museum relevant. He is not alone in this initiative, and his ideas about how to accomplish these goals have been instituted—or thought about, anyway—at other institutions around the country. Perhaps what one sees in the new entryway of the Brooklyn Museum and in the actions of its director reflects a vision of the art museum of the future.

We live at a time of self-reinvention in the museum world. One institution after another is expanding, revamping, hiring Renzo Piano or some other hot architect to make the building’s exterior look cool, eye-catching. New departments of media have emerged, buying and displaying video and computer-generated installations in advance of collectors, who have otherwise shown limited interest at most in acquiring these things, in order to appeal to the media-saturated youth culture. Museum restaurants and gift shops have sprung up, and these institutions continually advertise their suitability for dinner parties, bar mitzvahs, wedding receptions and corporate get-togethers.*

Thirty-plus years into the blockbuster era, every museum director is searching for a formula that will bring in more people and more money. Will renting out major works from the collection shore up the operating budget? Will naming buildings after big benefactors generate more big benefactors? Few museum directors come out of this struggle unscathed. Most have tenures comparable to those of baseball managers.

What may be changing the most at museums nowadays are the leaders’ jobs—not so much the titles of these jobs as the job descriptions. Directors, for example, are now expected to supervise an ever-growing staff, try to keep their trustees content (or at least in line), make the ultimate decisions on what collections objects to buy and sell as well as which exhibitions to stage, develop programs of outreach and whatever else will keep the institution relevant to a new generation and generally come up with a plan that brings in money, money, money.

The job of curator has also been in transition, conforming to the evolving vision of the museum that the new-style director establishes, but the shift has been less smooth. In part, that may owe to inevitable boss-employee tensions, but the rift may go to the heart of what a museum historically has been and what it now must do to stay viable. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1999 and the Detroit Institute of Art in 2003 both made major shifts in curatorial responsibilities, yoking separate curatorial departments together based primarily on geography. At the Boston museum, the departments of American decorative arts, American arts and pre-Columbian art were merged into a new Art of the Americas department. The Detroit Institute merged ancient Greek and Roman objects into the European art department and lumped Islamic, Middle Eastern and East Asian art into one mega-department. In January of this year, the Cincinnati Art Museum also began to group curatorial responsibilities based primarily on geography, moving European drawings into European art and Asian drawings into Asian art, for example.

In every case, these moves have found both supporters and critics whose language indicates which side of the issue they are on. Curators are often accused of wanting to protect their “fiefdoms,” while directors are said to be seeking a “centralization of power.” Certainly, the director has greater ability to call the shots, as suggested by a panel discussion on “Reinventing Curatorial Practices” at the January 2007 meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). “It would have been an unlikely thing” for the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) “to discuss ‘reinventing director practices,’” said George Shackleford, director of the department of the Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and current AAMC president, in an interview for this article. Ordinary tensions between museum directors and curators appear to be entering a new stage.

Nowhere have these tensions come to the fore as much as at the Brooklyn Museum, where Lehman created an uproar that reverberated far beyond New York’s city limits by dividing the curatorial staff into two separate teams. One is now a collections division involved in scholarly research and interpretation, record-keeping, care and conservation, loans, donor relations, rotating objects in the galleries and acquisitions and deaccessions. The second is an exhibitions division that develops exhibitions ideas, encourages collections curators to do so and searches for exhibition opportunities presented by other museums. “Job descriptions will be reviewed and rewritten to reflect divisional priorities,” according to the 2006 reorganizational plan, a statement that must surely have rankled long-time staffers. The stated aim of the reorganization was to generate more communication and new ideas among curators through establishing an interdisciplinary structure. But restructuring soon led to departures, such as the retirement of Amy Poster, who chaired the Asian Art department and had been at the museum for 37 years, and Richard Fazzini, head of the department of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern art.

Curators around the country met the news with alarm. An August 2006 statement by AAMC decried stripping curators of their areas of specialization: “Without recognized expertise for each major area of art—of particular urgency in encyclopedic collections—the museum cannot fulfill its primary mandate: the preservation of works of art and the responsible presentation of them to the public for whose enjoyment and appreciation they have been brought together. It goes without saying that collectors and donors are unlikely to continue giving works of art to an institution that lacks adequate staff to maintain and study its collections.”

Is the highly specialized museum curator today’s Luddite, standing in the way of the inevitable? “When I came here, I found a number of curators weren’t in sync with the commitments I had made to greater accessibility and diversity,” Lehman told me, noting that the museum serves “the most diverse community of any museum in the United States.” Visitorship was 40 percent “people of color.” Additionally, the average visitor age was in the mid-50s; in the ten years that Lehman has been at the helm, that average age has dropped to 35. Previous to Lehman’s arrival, attendance was slipping, and the museum’s financial resources, never at the level of the major museums in Manhattan, were “falling down.” Appealing to an audience that needed to get larger and younger but would continue to have a significant minority component became his mandate. Starting in the late 1990s, the museum began shifting its orientation toward community and family, as manifested in such exhibitions as “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes, and Rage” (2000) and “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth” (2002), as well as the Gallery/Studio program for teens and Arty Facts for children aged 4 to 7.

“The Brooklyn Museum is not necessarily a tourist destination,” Lehman said. “We had been as an institution focused on the Manhattan museum visitor. When I came here, I said, That’s over. We have two-and-a-half million Brooklyn residents, and we need to become the most accessible institution we can be. We can be both a neighborhood and a national museum. Or, let me put it this way, we are a world-class museum with roots in our neighborhood.” Curatorially, the new hires are more diverse, he said, noting the new Islamic art curator, Ladan Akbarnia, who is of Iranian heritage. “We are looking to have voices at the table that reflect the diversity” of Brooklyn itself, he said. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Brooklyn’s population is 35 percent Caucasian, 34 percent African-American, 20 percent Hispanic origin and 8 percent Asian, with smaller pockets of Russians, French natives, Yiddish- or Hebrew-speaking Jews, Italians, Poles, American Indians and Arabs or other Middle Easterners. “In 25 years, there is a great likelihood that half of the curators will be people of color, and that will make the institution more productive in terms of the collections relating to our communities.”

Besides wanting to make the curatorial department more diverse ethnically and racially, Lehman wanted members of the department to be in greater communication with each other and the rest of the museum. “The curatorial department was a silo’d situation, with curators in their own offices, focused on their own areas of expertise, without the opportunity for day-to-day interaction with other curators and staff in the museum,” he recalled. The museum redid its offices, literally pulling down the walls so that different specialties could have greater access to each other—“bringing them in closer proximity with one another and encouraging them to talk about their collections.”

Nineteen curators remain at the Brooklyn Museum. (No one at the museum was able to provide the exact number of curators before the reorganization. Sources inside and outside the institution say it was somewhere in the mid-20s.) Sixteen continue to focus on their areas of specialization, while three now concentrate on exhibitions. Lehman has denied claims—from AAMD’s George Shackleford and others—that he was “downsizing” the curatorial force: “You can’t do that and care for all the objects in our collection and take a leadership role in the country at the same time.” He added that the “change in job description was maybe one-half of one percent of their former role.”

Some have accused Lehman of making a power grab. Museum board member Michael de Havenon wrote in his statement of resignation, “The initial objective of the reorganization is the disempowerment of the curatorial staff in order to consolidate decision-making in the hands of the administration.” Lehman argues just the opposite, claiming that his domination was more secure when curators worked separately rather than as a team. “I want curators to play the greatest role they can in this institution,” he said. Still, under the plan, curators do cede some control to other staff members, particularly those who work in education, “so that visitors can access the information we are putting in the galleries.” No one will visit the museum if its displays seem too remote from their lives and levels of understanding, Lehman contends.

Certainly, museum directors are asserting more authority over the work curators are doing, respecting their expertise but not just accepting their say-so. “Directors have to think about the gate, what brings people in,” said Tom Sokolowski, director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. “Curators may say, ‘Here’s my small, highly erudite exhibition that got a good review by so-and-so in the New York Times,’ and to them that’s all that matters. A museum director can look at the same exhibition and say, ‘No one came to see it; it was a failure.’ So who’s right, the director or the curator? They may both be right, but it’s the director’s job to make sure that exhibitions are good and that the gate is good, too.”

Other museum directors note that staff have entered the realm formerly occupied exclusively by curators, including conservators and educators. “Historically, the job of the curator is to collect, preserve, exhibit and interpret works of art, but for whom?” said Jack Lane of the Dallas Museum of Art. “The sea change I have seen is bringing in the staff responsible for education into programming decisions, making sure that the exhibits appeal to a broad audience and that there is a strong educational component.”

The curator has traditionally had three jobs, said the Boston MFA’s George Shackleford: physically caring for the objects in the permanent collection, researching and interpreting these pieces and organizing exhibitions. Conservators already have the responsibility for the physical care of objects. The Brooklyn Museum’s plan to separate the care and research components of the job from the exhibition element assumes that a good researcher cannot also be a good creator of shows. But even the process of creating exhibitions has become fraught with new, more heated expectations. “We have seen a huge growth in the importance of attendance-building exhibitions in the institutions, shows that bring people through the door,” Shackleford said. “We are all very conscious of this need to feed this yearning on the part of the administration and the public for popular and spectacular exhibitions. It’s hard to figure out.”

Perhaps Arnold Lehman is among the new crop of museum directors who have figured this out. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, Lehman had served as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) for 19 years, earning a solid reputation for his management and ability to generate strong revenues and programming. However, within months of his departing Baltimore, his long-time deputy director and chief curator Brenda Richardson (who had been on the job there for 23 years and was highly regarded throughout the museum world for her scholarship and taste) was summarily booted out in “an administrative restructuring.” It is not clear what, if anything, Lehman learned from Richardson’s ouster, but clearly just being good isn’t always rewarded in this life.

It doesn’t appear that Lehman left Baltimore because he was being pushed out or that he used that museum as a testing grounds for the type of restructuring that he undertook in Brooklyn. His ideas evolved while he was in Brooklyn, trying out ways to jump-start an institution with a huge collection and declining visitorship. One can speculate about what went through his mind. Baltimore isn’t Brooklyn: It is far enough removed from Washington, D.C., not to compete head-to-head with the multitude of museums in the nation’s capital or even with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Brooklyn, however, is dominated by Manhattan, even as its population grows, and the institution has found it difficult to stake out a place culturally. If it can’t vie for acclaim with the Metropolitan (the Brooklyn Museum long ago gave up the idea of being encyclopedic) or the Whitney or Guggenheim, should it consider itself more like the New-York Historical Society or the Queens Museum or the Staten Island Cultural Center? Lehman’s various changes suggest an effort to establish an identity for the institution that works and fits with the times.

Lehman is arguably an ambitious man who sought a larger stage for himself, but there also may have been some sentiment involved in the decision to return to Brooklyn. He was born there, the son of a mechanical contractor father and a former fashion model mother, but raised principally on Long Island and in Manhattan. As a boy, he was quite familiar with both the Brooklyn Museum and the Brooklyn Dodgers (stating that he had more “interest than aptitude” in both art and baseball), before arriving in Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins in 1962 (“I didn’t get into Harvard,” he says). Graduating in three years, he went on to Yale, where he earned a doctorate in art history. A fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum in 20th-century art preceded being named director of the Miami Art Center in 1974, where he spent five years building a museum from scratch. On the day that museum opened in 1979, Lehman was being introduced in Baltimore as BMA’s new director.

His tenure in Baltimore was marked by tripling the museum’s membership and increasing its endowment from $1.5 million to $48.5 million. On his watch, a new wing for modern art and two sculpture gardens were inaugurated. More than 300 exhibitions took place during those 18 years; among the most notable was “A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum,” which he and Richardson had orchestrated. The level of controversy he sparked in Baltimore did not foreshadow what was to come in Brooklyn. He prompted one of his biggest brouhahas when he authorized removing ornate frames from the museum’s 42 Matisse paintings, which had been especially made for them by the donor Etta Cone, and replacing them with the type of simple strip frames that the artist had actually preferred. A lot of ink was spilled pro and con on that issue.

As the Baltimore Museum’s director, he was solid but not yet a reinventor. It would be his successor, Doreen Bolger, who put forward a $30 million expansion plan for the institution intended to add 100,000 square feet of gallery and storage space, parking spaces, a new library, improved stairs and elevators and a north-side entrance and expanding the auditorium, gift shop and restaurant. (A year after she took over, Bolger had those gilded wood frames put back on the Matisses.)

Given his tenure at Baltimore, what is surprising is that Lehman has become as much the story at the 184-year-old Brooklyn institution as anything going on at the museum itself. He brought the 1999 show “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” whose Chris Ofili collage painting The Holy Virgin Mary—representing a black Madonna whose exposed right breast consisted of cow dung, surrounded by images of female genitalia lifted from pornographic magazines in place of the traditional cherubim—focused a firestorm of condemnation. The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights called for a boycott of the museum, and then New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared the show to be “insulting to Catholics” and withheld the city’s financial support for the institution. The museum fought back in court, winning back its full municipal funding and briefly making Lehman, supported by his board of directors and a galvanized public, the leading voice against censorship in the arts. But severe criticism followed the revelation that collector Charles Saatchi had provided much of the underwriting of the exhibition and was in the process of arranging the sale of many of the pieces in the show at Christie’s, a fact about which Lehman had not been fully candid.) That Lehman held onto his job after the firestorm is evidence either of his ability or his good fortune.

“I’m part of a 100-year-old, maybe more than 100-year-old, system that needs to be brought up to date,” Lehman said, referring to almost everything in the museum, from the way it provides information (“We need to be more technologically engaged”) to its job categories (“We’re simply talking about curators accepting some changes in their assignments to better support their areas of interest”) to its physical structure. “Ninety percent of our galleries are not climate-controlled,” Lehman stated. That “impacts the well-being of the objects in the collection, and it impacts visitors during the summer. We have had to close galleries because they are too hot.” To this end, Lehman embarked on a $100 million climate-control project. “This is not a glamorous area for museum directors; there are no kudos for the quality of your ductwork. But it’s something that desperately needed to be done.” He added, “It gets me how anyone can say I’m not interested in the collection here.”

During this period of upgrading the galleries, objects will be removed from view, and some of them will go on tour. Works from the Egyptian collection will go on a 10-city tour, while works from the American and European Impressionism collection will visit museums in four or five cities and watercolors from the works on paper collection will travel elsewhere. Sending out traveling exhibitions will serve a number of purposes, one of which is to generate revenue for the museum, “helping us to pay for the upgrading of the galleries and the reinstallation,” Lehman said. It will also “publicize our collections around the country to people who don’t know about the Brooklyn Museum.” Reinstalling these works will create new opportunities for curators at the museum to evaluate these pieces, which he hopes will lead to fresh publishing of information about them. The reinstallation will also take place in the more visitor-friendly manner that Lehman sees as vital.

Lehman has taken a number of steps to put new life into the old museum, all of which have drawn a mix of praise and criticism. Some reinstallation has already taken place, and the museum has staged some pop-culture exhibitions whose connection to scholarship was arguably strained. Among these exhibits were “Hip-Hop Nation,” which included hip-hop music fashions, video displays, photographs of notable stars and the written lyrics of certain songs, and “Star Wars,” which featured props, costumes and models from the George Lucas film trilogy. (Again, Lehman isn’t alone in this type of programming: The Guggenheim staged such shows as “The Art of the Motorcycle” in 1998 and the 2000–2001 “Giorgio Armani” display of haute couture, both of which were met with critical reservations.) The museum’s $63 million entryway pavilion renovation in 2004 inspired praise for offering a less imposing entrance for visitors as well as a variety of public amenities (restrooms, telephones, coat-check, drinking fountains, ATM machines and air conditioning)—“the front entrance of the museum, with its heavy bronze doors that could barely be opened, we used to call the dead zone,” Lehman said. It also garnered criticism for making a grand historical edifice look more like another suburban mall.

The museum is already looking to reach current and potential audiences through establishing pages on MySpace.com and other popular websites and by enabling visitors to hear gallery-by-gallery talks through their cell phones. “We’re trying to improve cell-phone reception in the building—which is not easy in a building with 10-foot-thick walls—in order to increase access to information,” he noted. “Using cell phones also happens to be a less expensive way to provide that information.”

Perhaps less noisily, others have been expressing support. “The Brooklyn Museum was a dusty place that no one ever went to,” Tom Sokolowski said. “Now, that’s not true.” Former Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Thomas Hoving similarly noted that “nobody ever [went] to the Brooklyn Museum. They’d ask, How do you get there? Do you know how to get there? Now, people are showing up.”

What may be more significant than specific endorsements are similar museum changes elsewhere. These days, updating an institution’s physical look and amenities, jazzing up the didactics and offering youth-oriented displays are as much the norm as tinkering with staff. Adam Weinberg, who took over the directorship of the Whitney Museum of Art in 2003, sought to eliminate the curatorial specialization by period or medium that was implemented by his predecessor, Maxwell Anderson (1998–2003), which resulted in the departures of senior curators. Curatorial “restructuring” has taken place at the Milwaukee and Toledo museums of art in this country, and overseas both the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery in London have redefined curators’ responsibilities.

“Every museum is trying to create curatorial work systems while maintaining specialists in various areas,” said the Milwaukee Art Museum Chief Curator Joe Ketner, whose first action on taking the job in 2005 was establishing a curatorial department administrator in order to “standardize procedures” and to “introduce a more humanities discourse into the creation of exhibitions.” Exhibitions, he noted, cross all curatorial boundaries, involving conservators, registrars and educators, and job descriptions need to encompass these “crossovers.” At the Toledo Art Museum, the creation of temporary exhibitions was separated from collections management back in the late 1990s. Curators may propose exhibitions to an exhibitions review team—consisting of the museum’s director, chief financial officer, registrar, exhibitions designer, marketing and retail staff, as well as representatives from the curatorial departments—but the curators are not in charge.

Critics see Lehman’s running of the Brooklyn Museum as a Brave New World, but it may just be the latest wave among institutions that are being changed from the inside out. The conflict that has surrounded his changes—and Malcolm Rogers’s shifts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston before that—may have something to do with personality clashes: Directors of these institutions may just be moving toward a certain concept of the future faster than their staffs.

Some museum directors stay in their posts for a very long time, while others bounce from one institution to another. Philippe de Montebello took over the reins of the Met 30 years ago, while James Cuno has held several top jobs (Harvard University Art Museums, Courtauld Institute in London and now the Art Institute of Chicago) over the past five years. There are no statistics in this area, but it seems that curators—certainly chief curators—tend to stay at one museum longer, which may lead to a proprietary interest in the way things have always been done. Recognizing that their time may be short, incoming directors want to “get in and get things moving,” which may lead to personality and philosophical conflicts with “very entrenched staff members,” according to Gail Anderson, a San Francisco museum management consultant and author of the 2004 Reinventing the Museum. “My heart goes out to curators when they’re going through reorientation, but my sympathy stops if they have been given time to process the changes and there still is resistance.” She added, “I sympathize with the curator who says, ‘Oh, God, here’s another new director.’”

Changes at the top, however, aren’t as traumatic to staff as having to adhere to vastly different job expectations, and these changes may become the norm. Directors and curators increasingly inhabit different worlds, and a growing number of directors no longer emerge solely from the ranks of curators but, increasingly, have backgrounds in development, marketing and the business realm. The late J. Carter Brown of the National Gallery of Art was perhaps the first touted MBA (in 1958) in a museum director’s chair, but others followed. Jack Lane of the Dallas Museum of Art, who received an MBA in 1971—he later earned a doctorate in art history—stated that his business training helped him understand such areas as “accounting, strategic planning, individual behavior and organizational structure and gave me the confidence to discuss these issues with trustees who largely come from the for-profit world.” For his part, Lehman sees “no downside in encouraging museum directors to acquire more business and administrative knowledge. It doesn’t lead to a different vision of the institution” than that of the curators. Rather, “Curators need to gain a greater understanding of the director’s responsibilities.”

Art acquisitions only seem to get more expensive, and the prices of everything else just go up while government support for cultural institutions remains shaky. Streamlining and efficiency, the gate and other concerns that mean money and sustainability into the future will continue to dominate museum directors’ thoughts.

No one knows this better than Arnold Lehman as he continues to steer his institution toward a more diverse, visitor-centered future. Time will reveal whether Lehman is ultimately seen as the man who saved the Brooklyn Museum or demolished it.