How to Save The Metropolitan Museum of Art

How to Save The Metropolitan Museum of Art

We hear that the destiny of one of world’s greatest encyclopedic art museums, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is in jeopardy. There have been staff layoffs and a planned new wing has been placed on hold. Attracting 7,00,000 paying visitors annually and benefiting from an endowment currently valued at $1.7 billion, one would assume that The Met is a financially sound institution with its programs functioning expeditiously. How could this cultural icon, soon to celebrate its 150th anniversary, be in serious trouble?

Like millions of others, I love The Met! It is my most favorite museum in the world and has been an integral part of my life for 74 years. In 1943, I would  accompany my sculptor uncle, Bill Zorach, to The Met on Sunday afternoons. He and his cronies like Max Weber and Abraham Walkowitz  had a weekly rendezvous in the empty and silent European Painting Galleries. They would sit on the sofas and kibbutz in privacy. Later, my association with The Met included: graduate student observer, researcher, guest curator, consultant, overseer of hundreds of thousands of dollars of New York State funds as Director of the New York State Council on the Arts Museum Aid Program, and of course as a gallery visitor, along with being a café and bookstore patron.

Throughout my museum career, I have been an innovator. In 1951, I created the first regularly scheduled cultural program series on a television station (Art in Your Life) for the then San Francisco Museum of Art (Now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). When I did the Harlem On My Mind exhibition at The Met in 1969, it revolutionized The Met, American museums and museums around the world, making it impossible for any of them to continue to ignore the significance of ethnic minority cultures. I planned the exhibition as an immersive multi-media experience. While revolutionary fifty years ago, it is now a common museum experience. Today, the impact of Harlem On My Mind still resonates.

With driverless cars on the horizon and a recently announced underground Hyperloop train transporting passengers from New York to Washington in 29 minutes, institutions and the traditions associated with them are disintegrating rapidly. From my position as a museum professional / innovator with over sixty years experience, I consider The Met to be a department store in the age of Amazon. It needs to revise its image as an art museum and transform itself into a cultural entertainment attraction modeled after Disneyland’s merchandized visitor experiences. As outrageous as this might seem, I believe that on careful analysis, it makes sense. 

For the Arts & Leisure Section of The New York Times, on October 10, 1988, I wrote this piece, “Can Museums Learn From Mickey and Friends?” I quote: “And distinctions between museums and Disney have become increasingly blurred - the Metropolitan Museum of Art has replicated a Ming Dynasty Scholar’s Courtyard and Disney has built a half-scale replica of Beijing’s Temple of Heaven; the Smithsonian Institution has built an IMAX (giant-screen) theater, and Disney presents ‘quality art exhibitions.”

Rather than continuing to function as an august institution, image transformation could lead The Met to a more open and friendly personae. If exploited in the realm of social media, its 7,000,000 annual visitors might be a more valuable asset than its 1.7 billion dollar endowment. Currently, millions of visitors pass through the admission desks without a record of their names, contact information and preferences. We live in an era in which social media has emerged as a dominant form of advertising, consumer validation and marketing. The Met’s admission processing should mirror online event purchasing methods producing a valuable data base that could be exploited in myriad ways: weekly, monthly and annual passes; gift shop and bookstore purchases, auditorium events, plus a plethora of new “products” to be targeted and marketed to these millions of contacts.

Obviously, this is virgin territory for The Met. Where to go for guidance? As distasteful as it might seem to some, with its merchandised visitor experiences, Disneyland is the answer. Over the last five years, attendance at Disneyland’s Anaheim location has varied from 15.96 to 18.28 million. Entrance is available only by online purchase with monthly and annual passes ranging in price from $20.47 to $1,049. The Disney annual pass provides discounts for dining, merchandise and special events. With visitor passes, Disney obtains valuable data relative to visitor preferences. Similarly, it would be possible for The Met to track visitor preferences if the Met’s visitors were obligated to use their credit cards to purchase admission, in the process, providing contact information. Within the museum, visitor experiences could be managed by smart phones. Visitors would gain entrance to exhibitions and galleries with their smart phones contributing valuable data regarding visitor preferences that could be used in future program planning and marketing. For example. If people visited the European paintings galleries, they could later be offered packets of post card reproductions and catalogues that they might not have taken the time to purchase in the museum. The Met has announced its intent to improve marketing of the reproductions and ancillary products that it produces. With a knowledge of visitor preferences, the museum would be able to improve marketing of those products.

Beyond post cards and reproductions, The Met now has other marketable products: recordings of concerts as well as recordings of lectures and other auditorium events. Think of it this way. Everything that happens at The Met has a potential afterlife that could be marketed to target audiences.

New technologies - Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences and drones - offer incredible possibilities. With a data base indicating which galleries and exhibitions a visitor has seen and when Virtual Reality experiences can be marketed, it will be possible to sell VR tours to people from around the world who will want to again experience their visits to The Met. With Augmented Reality, people would be able to digitally place themselves in The Met’s galleries. Not as satisfactory as VR or AR, drone tours could be an ancillary product.

“Recently, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art got two million text messages. The museum’s new Send Me SFMOMA project—which sends works from its 34,678-piece collection to anyone in the world via text message—is a decidedly modern method of sharing its art with the public. In recent weeks, it has also become a viral success.

“Anyone can take part, by texting 572-51 with the message “send me” followed by a short description of what you’re in the mood to see. This could be an emoji, a color, or a keyword—just type whatever you’re craving at the moment, and the result will be art to match. A trial run in March proved so popular that mobile carriers blacklisted the number, suspecting it was spam.

“The project officially kicked off in June and has become a sensation. When actor Neil Patrick Harris tweeted about the project to his 26 million followers on Tuesday, the museum had so much demand that its servers crashed, according to Gothamist.

“It started out as an experiment and quickly went viral, revealing a deep appetite for art among the public. We hope to provide Send Me SFMOMA as long as the public embraces it,” a museum spokesperson told Gothamist.”

Although this service is free, it demonstrates the potential opportunities that lie

ahead for The Met to market its resources.

So, I don’t see The Met’s future as being bleak! In fact, I see that it holds exciting possibilities that can soon resolve its crisis.  However, it must abandon its current image as an inert treasure house and become a visitor/entertainment enterprise. To remain relevant,The Met must undergo  a systemic transformation and adopt the persona of a cultural product which needs to be merchandised. This transformation will not occur over night; however, it will eventually alter its fiscal profile overcoming the debt that it now struggles to manage. Predictions are dangerous; however, I think that I can say that if The Met adopts my recommendations, it will emerge from this crisis and be able to reinstitute some of the programs and personnel positions recently curtailed.

Nothing proposed above suggests any diminution of The Met’s programmatic

professional standards.