Timeline of Museums and the Recession

Seemingly inspired by the Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum’s recent near-closure, The Art Newspaper is also reflecting on the relationship between art and the recession in Tom Shapiro’s article “Museums and the recession: there is an alternative to closure or selling off the collections—sharing”. In it, Shapiro advocates that museums and galleries facing the possibility of reduced staff, programming and public activities join forces with other local institutions to share staff and collections in order to stay afloat and foster new relationships that can offer resources that are hard to come by on reduced budgets:

Bringing together the best thinking from multiple organisations should result in better processes and practices. Also, as employees talk across organisations, they may develop synergies that have nothing to do with shared resources. For example, an art museum and a natural history museum might start lending works or exhibits to each other; museums might begin to coordinate their exhibition schedules and openings, and there may be opportunities for region-wide collaboration.

While I think Shapiro’s idea is a good one, theoretically speaking, I’m not sure how practical it would be to execute; particularly in small town environments, which many university-affiliated galleries like the Rose Museum find themselves in, where neighbouring institutions and potential partners might be a great distance from one another. And while I could see larger institutions like the ROM finding some beneficial partnerships with slightly smaller museums like the Gardiner Museum, for instance, I don’t know that the institutions that directly “compete” with one another could put aside their differences and make such collaborations work. I doubt the AGO and the ROM, whose recent renovations have put them into direct competition in many ways, would be able to come to agreeable terms for a partnership, for instance. Still, it’s worth contemplating, especially since sharing and collaboration are two strategies artist-run centres have used for decades now in order to thrive on their limited budgets.

And for a slightly more light-hearted take on the creative impact of the recession, check out some of the projects at the Recession-Art blog. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but offers some interesting performance pieces on art fairs, banks and the recession.