Identity Crisis at the Brooklyn Museum

Arnold Lehman believes that he has seen the future of American museums, and other museum directors would see it, too, if only they would read the 2000 Census.

"The 2000 Census says very clearly how this nation has changed –– what we're looking at in terms of our demographic present and our demographic future," Mr. Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, said recently. "If cultural institutions don't recognize that there's been a revolutionary change and that we have an obligation to these audiences, I think many are going to be out of business, either figuratively or literally."

In his nine-year tenure at the museum, Mr. Lehman has had one overriding goal: to bring the museum's attendance back to where it was in the early 20th century –– a million people a year –– by reaching out to Brooklyn's culturally diverse and, in part, economically disadvantaged population. His attention-getting tactics have often been criticized. In 1999, after members of the art world came to his defense over the controversial "Sensation" exhibit of works from the collection of the advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, they were dismayed to learn that Mr. Lehman had concealed Mr. Saatchi's role in sponsoring and influencing the exhibition. Critics ridiculed other exhibitions on hiphop, in 2000, and "Star Wars," in 2002. A reinstallation of parts of the permanent collection, which began in 2001, met with similar reactions. The art critic Hilton Kramer wrote: "Everything is overlabeled, overpackaged and otherwise divided into simplistic categories."

Of course, the museum is not the only cultural institution in the city trying to expand its audience. The new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, has announced goals similar to Mr. Lehman's. His initiatives have included broadcasting a performance of "Madama Butterfly" in Times Square; streaming operas live on the Internet; and, most recently, presenting a full-costume performance from Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" on the "Late Show With David Letterman." So far, his efforts have been generally lauded.

But Mr. Lehman crossed a line in his relations with the art world this summer when he reorganized the Brooklyn Museum's curatorial staff –– dividing it into two teams, one for collections and the other for exhibitions. Some saw this as an effort to centralize power and thus pursue his vision for the museum more efficiently. By October, two senior curators and two board members had resigned out of frustration with the museum's direction.

It seems a good time to ask: Setting aside the question of Mr. Lehman's popularity (or lack of it) in the arts community, will his approach work?

Founded in the last years of the 19th century, when Brooklyn was still an independent city, the Brooklyn Museum was originally intended to be the largest museum in the world. In the end, only a fourth of the original design was built. It has the second-largest art collection in the country, with more than a million objects. (The Met has two million.) Such a large collection takes substantial resources to maintain, but the museum has a harder time attracting wealthy patronage than its counterparts in Manhattan do.

"It's always been a starved animal," the museum's director between 1983 and 1996, Robert Buck, said.

In 1991, the city, facing a budget shortfall, slashed arts funding across the board. The Brooklyn Museum, which at the time got roughly half its budget from the city, lost about a third of that ––equivalent to more than $2 million. (Today, the museum gets around 35% of its budget from the city.) At the same time, despite the world-class collection on view, attendance dwindled to between 200,000 and 300,000.

When Mr. Lehman took over in 1997, after serving for 18 years as the director of the Baltimore Museum of Art, his strategy was to forget about Manhattanites and to concentrate on Brooklyn's diverse population.

One of his tactics was to attract young people by making the museum a center of social activity. He started a successful program called First Saturdays: On the first Saturday of every month, the museum offers free admission to the galleries and special events. First Saturdays draws thousands of visitors and has been imitated elsewhere.

Mr. Lehman's other strategies –– the reinstallation of the collection and the populist exhibitions program –– have been much more controversial. The reinstalled areas of the museum, which include the Egyptian collection, the Hall of the Americas (showcasing North, Central, and South American objects), and the American collection –– now called "American Identities," to acknowledge a multiplicity of cultural narratives –– feature brightly-colored walls and lots of instructive wall text.

To the dean of the Yale School of Art, former MoMA curator, and longtime resident of Brooklyn, Robert Storr, the reinstallation is "a categorical disaster: It is the most intrusive, controlling, textbooky, dumbed-down version of a permanent collection anywhere in the country," he said. "Pictures are sacrificed to graphic design. Objects are put in relationships that make their meanings more obscure rather than clearer. And the texts that are put there are not at the level of the intelligence of the audience or of the people who have been forced to write them."

If the new audience were coming in droves, this criticism would be moot. So far, however, they're not. Mr. Lehman expresses pride that 40% of the museum's audience is made up of minorities — but the overall numbers, though higher than what they were in the 1990s, have recently dropped. The longterm change is hard to judge since, according to the museum's spokeswoman, Sally Williams, attendance was not measured scientifically before 1998. Attendance in fiscal year 1997 was probably between 175,000 and 200,000. (Others pointed out that attendance has always fluctuated depending on exhibitions, suggesting that this was a low year.) In fiscal year 1998, the first full year of Mr. Lehman's tenure, attendance was 550,000. But since then, it has fluctuated. In the last fiscal year, it was 400,000. (For comparison, annual attendance at the Met is between 4.3 million and 4.6 million. The Met's attendance figures, like those at many institutions, declined sharply after the attacks of September 11, 2001, but they have crept upward since then.)

Such results raise questions about just how effective a focus on attracting non-museum-goers to a museum can be. Some suggest that Mr. Lehman is actually pushing in the opposite direction from the relevant demographics. After all, in the nine years that he has been engaging the underprivileged and disenfranchised, more money has moved into Brooklyn.

"I don't think the museum has grasped that –– I don't think they're aiming at that audience," Mr. Storr said."If you look at the development of Brooklyn, if you look at who's living there now, where the money is, the Brooklyn Museum is in a position to make a quantum leap. But that's something you have to prepare and spend all your time thinking about –– how you can be the best that you can in a world that's going to get better. Rather than thinking how to make concessions to a world, which is I'm sure not easy."

Mr. Lehman is not daunted by criticism. He sees it as resistance to necessary change. "When we first installed ‘American Identities,'" he said, "colleagues came and looked at it and said, ‘Are you crazy?' They were shocked that we had so much vastly different material on view, and that the galleries were so boldly colored, and that we asked visitors to talk about the objects, and then put labels like that on the walls."

But he said,"if you travel around the country, you will see more and more institutions following suit."

(Through Ms. Williams, the curator of American art at the museum, Terry Carbone, said that she did not know of any museums so far that had imitated "American Identities," but that representatives from several institutions –– the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum ––had come to see the installation.)

To many in the curatorial world, the recent reorganization is an infringement on curators' traditional roles, which include both doing research on the collections and putting together exhibitions. To some who are closer to the museum, it suggests something more –– Mr. Lehman's wish to pursue the path he has laid out for the museum, unimpeded by internal criticism and counter-opinions.

One of the board members who recently resigned, Michael de Havenon, who had served on the board since 1984 and was head of the collections committee for five years, said in a statement to the Sun:

The initial objective of the reorganization is the disempowerment of the curatorial staff in order to consolidate decision-making in the hands of the administration. Ultimately this will facilitate the mounting of more populist exhibitions that do not relate to the collections and the display of the permanent collections in a thematic manner that does not emphasize adequately their aesthetic, cultural, and historic significance. Realization of these objectives risks further alienating the museum's traditional audience.

Mr. Lehman, for his part, described the reorganization as leading to both greater accountability and greater unity in moving forward toward the museum's stated goals. "One curator who does six exhibitions in six years and one who does one exhibition in six years are going to be looked at," he said. "It's going to share more of the responsibility of this great institution. And it's going to help address an institutional vision that's supported by everyone in the institution, rather than some people in the institution."

Mr. Lehman and the museum's trustees have had significant success in raising money for improvements to the museum's physical building. They raised $131 million in a capital campaign completed last year. The funds went to a large-scale renovation of the museum's entrance, a new audience survey, and the endowment. When Mr. Lehman arrived, the endowment was $55 million. According to Ms. Williams, the endowment is now between $80 and $90 million, which is comparable to those of some museums with similar budgets — though with much smaller collections — like the Seattle Art Museum or the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

"We were successful in raising a great deal of money for [the new entrance] and also in increasing the amount of our endowment," the museum's chairman, Norman Feinberg, said of the recent capital campaign. "When you have a museum, you have to think long-term; we're not here looking for quarterly reports," he continued."I see our program being long-run, and I see success on a long-term basis. We continue to be able to get new trustees –– very good trustees with both great skills and wealth. And we're hoping they will be important participants."

In the next few years, the museum will install climate control in the galleries that house the permanent collection, which will allow curators to reinstall the museum's collections of African, Oceanic, Pre-Colombian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Islamic, and Indian art. The goal, Mr. Lehman said, is to do with these collections –– which span thousands of years –– what the museum did with its "American Identities" installation, by looking at themes of globalization and the cross-influences among cultures.

"I'm not saying that we're going to make a large mishmash of everything," Mr. Lehman said."We will have clear galleries of all of these cultures. But at the edges, we have to make changes, we have to show how these cultures, whether it's 4,000 years ago or today, have communicated, what the influences have been." How, he asked rhetorically, do you arrange the collections in a way that "makes sense to today's audience –– a smart audience, an audience that heavily comes from many of these cultures?"

Mr. Lehman said that the museum would, necessarily, make mistakes as it experiments with ways to draw a new audience. "One of the things that I'm most thrilled about and is clear is that we're willing to take those kind of chances, to look at what we've done, evaluate it and say, ‘You know that didn't work. We didn't get that audience that we wanted to really be engaged in this. And we're going to look at [doing this] another way.'"

Asked for an example of an exhibition or initiative that was less than completely successful, he demurred with a joke about there being more examples than would fit in a reporter's laptop.

"We're very self-critical," he said. "As much as others might be critical of us because we break from the norm, we're more self-critical than anything anyone else can say. But that doesn't mean that we stop trying to move forward, and stop experimenting, and stop doing things in a different way. I mean, what's the point of doing everything the way everybody else does it? No one is going to get ahead."