"The words “museum” and “mausoleum” sound an awful lot alike. And according to two recent studies out of Washington, D.C., if America’s museum directors and curators don’t make some fundamental changes in the way they do business, their institutions might soon become tombs."
Last Thursday, the National Endowment for the Arts published the sixth in a series of surveys it has conducted since 1982 that seek to measure public participation in the arts. The news was not good. The NEA found a notable decline in theater, museum and concert attendance and other “benchmark” cultural activities between 2002 and 2008. In 2002, 39.4 percent of people 18 and older participated in such events within the previous 12 months. Last year, that number had dipped to 34.6 percent. Sure, the economy probably has something to do with the drop. But if you look deeper into the study’s numbers, you will see that by and large cultural institutions are having a difficult time keeping pace with the demographic changes that are reshaping the American population.
Elizabeth Merritt was one culture observer who was not the least bit surprised by the NEA’s new statistics. She directs the Center for the Future of Museums, a year-old initiative of the American Association of Museums in Washington. To put it bluntly, her job is to devise strategies to protect museums — once called “the most powerful and useful auxiliary of allsystems of teaching” — from “creeping irrelevance.” Because museums tend to be more democratically oriented than, say, opera or ballet, she feels a strong compunction to prod the people in her field to become more observant and responsive to the changing public around them