Over the last couple weeks, art museum staff - especially at SFMOMA, Philadelphia and the Guggenheim - have highlighted how too many art museums are acting like corporations, not charities.

Let's take a moment to talk about that, and to consider what might be done about it. 1/x

Art museum governance has been in a low-grade state of crisis for years.

Art museums are not run like other non-profit charities. Their boards are almost entirely made up of rich folks whose only qualification for art museum leadership is that they shop for art.

In fact, the dirty little not-so-secret of the art museum world is that a lot of trustees are on boards only because such "service" moves them to the front of the line at art dealerships, allowing them acce$$ to the newest work by the hot-hot-hottest artists.

Art museum trustees do not give lavishly. Many -- most? -- give the minimum institutionally required board dues, and go along to get along.

Wealthy trustees gave just enough to keep the peace, to keep dissent about a broken system buried.

For years now, the biggest story in American art museums *should have been* how billionaire charity boards were pushing more and more of the costs of running their glamorous art museum charities away from the 1% to the 99%.

Then, when the pandemic hit, instead of supporting their staffs, trustees (CNBC has reported their net wealth has gone *up* during the pandemic, and by hundreds of billion$) decided to lay off the men and women who made their charities go.

American inequality laid bare.

If you're a billionaire with little to offer your mission-oriented institution except your checkbook and the vague hope that when you die you might give your museum your art, and you aren't giving to your charity at a time of maximum crisis, what good are you?

(A: Not much.)

Meanwhile, art museum boards are typically bereft of experts with knowledge and experience related to the charity's mission. It is rare to find art historians, critics or artists on art museum boards. Nuts.

Christopher Knight referenced such here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-bubonic-plague-millard-meiss-black-death

Many art museums fail to represent their non-billionaire-class givers on their boards.

Example: I can't think of a major art museum that has members' reps on its board.

Take SFMOMA, where 9% of revenue comes from member dues. I bet no trustee kicked in 9% of SFMOMA's revenue.

It's routine for many (or most) charities to include on their boards someone(s) representative of the community the charity serves, someone on the 'receiving end' of the institution's mission.

I've never heard of such on an art museum board.

Oh btw, SFMOMA takes in 12% of its revenue from those it serves. That 12% has no board representation.

Overall, 21% of SFMOMA's revenue comes from the little people, audience + revenue unaccounted for in its governance.

San Francisco's 1% doesn't want them in the room.

I'm picking on SFMOMA because it's such an obvious mess. (Rare is it that a museum is such a tire fire that it flat-out vanishes for 3+ weeks.) I could have said much the same about Philadelphia or Dallas or wherever.

Anyway, back to the art museum workers getting stuff done right now.

Their union movements and open letters to their museums have exposed how gross, distorted and unmoored from mission-oriented reality much art museum governance has become.

The twin crises of the pandemic and American racism have come together in a way that has led to staff demanding that the broken American art museum system radically reform itself, from the bottom up and, in the case of necessary board/governance reform, from the top down, too.

People who care about art and sharing it with the public are blowing the whistle, loudly, and all over America. We should thank them, and include them in necessary reforms.

The art museum field's governance needs a significant overhaul, and it's long overdue.

Here's hoping @darrenwalker and @fordfoundation, who(m) I imagine as sympathetic to this POV, steps up. Or you, @MellonFdn.

The art museum field needs saving from its own out-of-touch, stingy, staff-fighting, union-busting, fat-cat boards.

/end

I'm getting DMs asking about university art museums.

They're often exceptions to the above. Their governance is typically tied to their university and includes faculty, practitioners and sometimes students/other audience.

For me, they are the most interesting part of the field.