Why Art Museums as We Know Them Cannot Survive

Amusement parks, as we know, are places of frivolous entertainment, where people can while away the time amid tilt-a-wheels, sugary fluff, and other delights. Museums, on the other hand, are sites of learning and quiet introspection. At least, that’s how it used to be.

In Indianapolis, the iconoclastic museum director Charles Venable seems to be heretically mingling these two cultural models with Newfields, a rechristened “place for nature and the arts” that he has shaped around the Indianapolis Art Museum. Walking through the park surrounding the museum, visitors can encounter exotic foods, meme-video screenings, theatrical productions, and more. Inside, mini-golf and car shows are given equal weight to art exhibitions.

Some people think it’s a cynical, lowest-common-denominator attempt to bring in the crowds. Others think it’s fun. Less contested is Newfields’s success. Membership and admission sales are growing at a fast clip, and this holiday season’s Winterlights show—a “curated” wonderland of one million colored bulbs festooning the trees around the museum—sold 70,000 tickets. Nearly half of those went to visitors who were either new to the museum or had not visited in the past year.

Venable, a veteran museum administrator, believes such attractions are necessary to keep art institutions like his alive in an age of shifting consumer tastes, changing demographics, and fickle millennials. But such measures, he says, aren’t sufficient on their own.

In the second installment of our two-part interview, artnet News’s Andrew Goldstein talks to Venable about why Rembrandt is a hard sell these days, what he learned from shopping malls, and why museums should stop expanding—and instead, consider getting smaller.

Selfie-takers at the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acre. Image courtesy of Newfields.

Many fields are discovering that when you start focusing on metrically determined goals, you start thinking a lot more about how to meet those numbers than about the quality of the product you’re providing. This is something we’re seen in journalism, for instance, with the rise of clickbait and echo-chamber journalism, where you tailor the news to tell a target audience exactly what it wants to hear. It seems something similar is happening at Newfields, where you have had several car shows, like “Revved Up: Cars in Art” and “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas.” Clearly, these are engineered to appeal to a broad audience—especially in the home of the Indianapolis 500—but your typical art-loving museumgoer might see this as pandering.

We do get some people who think that way, but the automobile design show that we did with Atlanta [the High Museum of Art], “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas,” is a good example. Art people showed up for that exhibition, and they gave it very high marks. They loved it! But a whole bunch of other people who had never been to the museum before also loved it.

You know, we’re also doing that very traditional, scholarly Japanese painting show, starting in 13th century Japan and going into the 20th century, drawing on one of the great permanent collections in the world. If I did nothing but hang that show and spend all the money that we’re spending on it, that show would have, what, 15,000 visitors in Indianapolis? Which means that my cost per person will be maybe $1,000, even if everyone buys a ticket, because we invest so much more in scholarship for a show like that. I’d be a fool if I didn’t try to figure out how to get 50,000 people to see that show.

Learn more at artnet.com