The Myth of Government Funding for New York Museums
Will Brand at Art Fag City has responded to the idea that Occupy Museums is misguided. He says they should target government-funded institutions, but wait, how much government funding do the targeted institutions actually get? I'm afraid not much.
Will Brand at Art Fag City has responded to the idea that Occupy Museums is misguided. He focuses on another blogger’s take on the topic, rather than ours, but nonetheless I wanted to address one topic in particular. He writes:
For Occupy Museums to direct its criticism at state-funded, public-serving museums is in exact accordance with the methods of the Occupy movement as a whole: every official demand to emerge from the Demands Working Group has been directed at government institutions, rather than private industry.
But the problem is that museums in New York are hardly government institutions. Wouldn’t the Smithsonians in New York (there are two) be more suitable if that’s the goal? I think we overestimate how much government money museums receive. I know I used to think they received quite a bit but when you look at their tax filings you realize it’s a pathetically small.
For instance, the Frick Collection, according to its 990 form, receives $94,000 of its multi-million dollar budget from government grants. Here is MoMA’s piece and it’s even smaller, though PS1 appears to get a bigger chunk (about 20%) of its income from government grants. The New Museum received $194,000 in 2010, which is very small.
The other problem with going after institutions that do get greater government funding, usually smaller and with less powerful boards, is that hurling the “elitest” word around gives the opportunity for critics — usually far right Republicans, though not always — the opportunity to cut funding. It happened in the 1980s and 1990s and it could happen again. The little money the government does allocate to culture could, in this fiscally trying times, be pulled out from under us. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t continue to work at reforming the system, which obviously isn’t perfect, but I simply think targeting museums is the wrong choice.
What do we occupy to raise government funding for the arts?
NOTE: I’ve corrected the budget numbers as someone correctly pointed out that in the case of the New Museum, for instance, “… FY2010 expenditures: $11.1M. Which is not the same as ‘budget,’ which is a closely held, non-990 figure.
