To experiment with new ways to raise money, museums need to be unshackled from the unattainable romantic standards that forced Brooklyn museum director Arnold L. Lehman to dissemble in front of his accusers rather than admit to otherwise fairly commonplace practices, and that sent his colleagues in the museum world running for cover. Yet surely museums must not become galleries in disguise, mere means to augment the value of private collections. Arts professionals may want to take a cautious look at the newspaper industry, where the strain between the content side and the business side is more openly acknowledged. I do not wish to argue that the news media have solved this problem. Far from it.
Processes are in place to resolve conflicts between the business side and the news side.
A cottage industry of think tanks and watchdogs monitors activity. In the museum sphere, the opposite seems to be happening. An anachronistic belief in the purity of the project leads to the denial and demonization of business practices and the people associated with them. About 100 years ago, the French academy, until then a fantastically effective arts promotion and distribution system, imploded under the weight of its own success. There were simply too many artists in Paris to cram into such a monolithic system.