Alberto Gonzales is saying, "at least I don't work at the Smithsonian..."

It just keeps getting worse for America's national museum. Revulsion over the pay and spending of Smithsonian chief Lawrence M. Small has inspired the full U.S. Senate to freeze the institution's public funding and cap executive salaries at no more than the President's (which would mean a pay cut of more than 50% for Small). The former auditor of the place claimed Small pressured her to back off looking into his spending, and today Small finally did the obvious.

Of course that whole thing follows the general disgust over the Smithsonian's deal last year with Showtime, an issue which remains unresolved.

Meanwhile, and apparently unrelated to the above, a blue-ribbon panel appointed in 2005 by the Smithsonian has concluded that the institution's eight art museums are "failing on many levels." The panel's leaked report says, according to The Art Newspaper, that “The Smithsonian’s art collections, taken together, might be expected to be a kind of national encyclopedia of the world’s art, like those in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, or Chicago; but in reality they are not. [And] to the extent that their designation as ‘national’ museums implies qualitative superiority and leadership, they have seldom lived up to their names.”

Ouch and double ouch...the panel thinks at least two Smithsonian-related art museums should be flat-out closed, and is barely more kind about a couple of others. With the director of the National Museum of Natural History keeping Small's chair warm, the Smithsonian is conducting a national search for his permanent replacement. They're going to need somebody a lot sharper than they've had lately, from all appearances.

Non-profit dirty laundry airing in courtrooms

Updates today on two previously-mentioned pieces of non-profit sector ugliness, plus a new one. (Much of this comes courtesy of The Charity Governance Blog which despite its annoying logrolling for the proprietor and his book, is worthwhile for the relevant news provided with legally-experienced comments.)

In Wisconsin the sad case of the prosecution of the former chief financial officer of a major museum is slogging its way through the courts with still no sign of anybody else being held accountable for what was clearly a mess with multiple authors. Charity Governance sees the defendant as clearly a fall guy: "We hope he decides to force the DA's hand and fight to preserve his reputation. Although the press and others have noted that there is plenty of shared blame in the financial collapse of the Milwaukee Public Museum, to this point, others who had oversight authority over the museum simply haven’t been held accountable in any meaningful way."

Over in the Ivy League, Princeton University appears to have become at least dimly aware that whether or not they win the Robertson donor-intent lawsuit in court they have been getting their butts kicked in the media. I dunno that letters to the editor are really going to change that fact any, even if having read a couple of the pieces that the letters respond to I'd agree that the university isn't being treated entirely fairly by editorial writers. The case itself is inching along with no end in sight. Still looks from here like the university is guilty of being at least cavalier with the donor's funds over the years, and ought to settle the thing before its good name gets tarnished further.

Now this month comes the Salvation Army trying to use what is obviously a technicality to ace Greenpeace out of $33 million left in a will. The sordid details with some comments can be found here, and here, and here. Yecchh -- I'm guessing that Salvation Army staffers, volunteers and donors are not feeling all warm and fuzzy about the organization at the moment.

For the Gates of art museums, 2006 was no fun at all

The J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles just had the kind of year that could cripple a smaller non-profit; as the richest art institution on the planet they certainly have the resources to stabilize things but do they have the will? They've hired a guy from my hometown of Chicago to take over the captain's chair and find out.

The Getty consists of two large museums and a large grantmaking foundation, all devoted to visual art; their endowment alone currently stands at about $6 billion and a lot of the artwork in those museums is literally priceless (never mind the prime real estate). Early in 2006 Barry Munitz resigned as head of all that, under a large public cloud of accusations about lavish personal spending of Getty funds, steering grants to friends, and excessive pay while ordering budget cuts. The apparent lack of effective governance had caused the Council on Foundations to take the highly-unusual (and highly public) step of suspending the Getty's membership, which they restored a couple months after Munitz was forced out and the Getty board adopted various internal reforms. Several other top Getty staffers also resigned during the first half of 2006.

Meanwhile the Getty is having all sorts of problems with the issue of looted antiquities, mainly from Italy and Greece. It's fairly clear that well into the 20th century a lot of sculpture from the ancient world was ending up in major museums via, let us say, 18th- or 19th-century methods.
After years of pressure, the Getty Museum during 2006 agreed to return four major pieces to Greece and in October 2006 agreed to return 26 pieces to Italy. The Italian government, though, isn't interested in settling for half a loaf and is prosecuting a former Getty curator in Rome for criminal theft of national treasures; some newspaper reports say that the Greek government is contemplating similar pressure. For the Italians the fate of two of the Getty's best-known items, the well-known ancient statue of Aphrodite and the so-called "Getty Bronze", have apparently become deal-breakers.

The current director of the Getty Museum, Michael Brand, has an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal claiming that the Italian government has gone back on an agreement and now won't even talk to him. Whether his version of those events is right or not seems to miss the real point, which is that those nations and others are no longer willing to accept the status quo of priceless indigenous works of art being kept on display halfway around the world just because they were dug up when no one was looking. Perhaps at some point the Getty board will realize that these issues are not going away and will just keep damaging the institution's reputation, and that the Getty has the resources to rebuild from the loss of even content of that caliber.

That smell from the Smithsonian is not pleasant

Sitting in Chicago I'm imagining the local reaction if the Field Museum were to announce that HBO would now get "semi-exclusive" dibs on filming in its halls, or the Art Institute sold to Disney the "semi-exclusive" use of its artworks in movies. Yea that was about my response too, upon learning early this year that the Smithsonian Institution had sold a tidy piece of its soul to Showtime. The recent Government Accountability Office report on the deal is not even slightly reassuring.

Basically, the museum traded that "semiexclusive" use of its image and contents for promises of national television exposure plus some cash. The GAO found that the Smithsonian "followed its internal contracting guidelines" (whew!) and found no specific ways that the publicly-funded institution violated any laws. But it's not hard to read between the lines that the GAO staff think that the museum was dazzled by Showtime's shiny beads and sold out cheap: "The Smithsonian contends that it will be able to accommodate the same level of filming activity (outside of Showtime) as it has in the past based on its historical analysis of filming contracts. GAO found that this analysis was unreliable because it was based on incomplete data and oversimplified criteria."

And for government auditors this line is pretty scathing: "In addition, concerns have been raised about damage to the Smithsonian’s image and the appropriateness of limiting the use of the collections [which are] held in trust for the American public." What they said!

U.S. museums are bursting out all over

The American Association of Museums' new annual "state of the sector" report has spurred some media coverage of a building boom now underway. It's not clear whether the trend cuts across all sizes among the estimated 17,500 museums in the U.S., but the big ones at least seem to be merrily satisfying their edifice complex.

Major museums are adding on in literally dozens of cities; a number of new wings or buildings opening now were first planned in the 1990s economic boom. The mix of public and private funding for the capital projects seems to vary widely, which is also true with the operating finances of museums.

The obvious question here is, can the sector afford to operate all this new space? I notice that most of the capital-fundraising campaigns now seem to include new endowments to cover overhead, so somebody has learned something. Still the question of whether the building boom represents supply appropriately rising to meet demand seems unanswered: the Association press release doesn't seem to provide long-term trend data on things like museum attendance and revenues, and data sources like Giving USA don't specifically aggregate museums as a category. (The press release does repeat the non-profit sector's autocomplaint about reduced public funding having forced an increased reliance on private fundraising, but the statistics they offer don't actually support that statement so I dunno.)