Museums have been through bad times before and worked hard to insulate themselves from heavy weather on Wall Street. The key seems to be building a loyal constituency. That's because we live and die by our ability to relate to our public. By and large, despite economic swings, people will support institutions they believe in. At the end of the day, no one has to go to a museum, but millions decide they want to.
Museums also have the advantage of being affordable, compared with other places to spend.
The last few years of boom times have allowed museums to build a strong financial base, setting records in membership and fund-raising. At the Whitney Museum of American Art, annual attendance almost doubled in the last two and half years, to about 600,000. Still, museums acknowledge, it is harder to raise money for unsexy costs like infrastructure and operating expenses than for cultural programs. As a result, they are careful to diversify their income, so if one source dries up, others may continue to flow. It's thinking for the next five years.