Emily Rafferty
07/01/2005
New art collections are born every day. People who discover a passion for art or have recently come into wealth seek to learn how to put together an art collection. Most collectors start slowly, with, say, decorative glassware, then graduate to antique glass and art glass.
Each new generation produces collectors. More young art lovers, especially those in their 30s and 40s, are taking an interest in collecting, whether it be modern art, sculpture or photography. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we have a group known as the Apollo Circle, for ages 21 through 29, which offers private minicourses on art collecting and connoisseurship.
At the Met, we can encourage and inspire new collectors. While it would be unprofessional of us to advise them on the quality and price of artworks on the market (that is the function of galleries and specialist advisors), our curators often establish long-lasting relationships with individual collectors. This may lead, in time, to the museum borrowing items from that collector for special exhibitions or, in some cases, acquiring part of the collection for the Met.
Part of the mission of the Metropolitan, as it has been since its founding in 1870, is to collect, but we also have a long tradition of receiving gifts from outstanding collectors. These people are a virtual roll call of corporate leaders, including J.P. Morgan, the Havermeyer family, the Annenberg family, Julius Bache, Roy R. Neuberger and Benjamin Altman.
The Met is an ideal showcase for their bequests. It consists of a vast complex of 21 buildings that comprises essentially 18 museums under one roof. With a staff of 2,500 people, an operating budget of $200 million per annum and a capital fund-raising project of $900 million, we are in effect a sizeable corporation. We just happen to be a business whose assets consist of more than 2 million works of art spanning 5,000 years of world culture.
I mention this because I find that the business community is not always as aware as it could be of how professionally we run such nonprofit and cultural institutions. In many cases, these are very sophisticated operations; the administrative staffs are highly accomplished and bring to bear any number of business skills. I always stress these facts to reassure donors and collectors that these institutions are capable, responsible and worthy of their trust.
Nonprofit Motives
As the new president of the Met, I benefit from the counsel of 45 elected board members, many of whom come from the business world, including the current chairman, James R. Houghton, chairman of Corning Glass. Likewise, the staff can call on the collective wisdom of a distinguished board of trustees, among them Leon Black, Michel David-Weill, William C. Rudin and Steven Rattner, who is the chairman of our Business Committee.
Like so many commercial enterprises these days, we at the Met have to think
globally; fortunately, because ours is a truly international collection (we
have, for example, the largest collection of Egyptian art outside of Cairo), we
are able to raise funds from governments, corporate sponsors and art aficionados
in Japan, India and Europe. In turn, the museum serves art lovers around with
the world by loaning works from our permanent collection—more than 5,000 each
year.
People ask me how the art world is faring today. In the past few years we have
survived various problems: 9/11, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the
outbreak of SARS in the Far East (tourism is our currency with 42 percent of our
visitors from overseas). Today we are still not operating at pre-9/11 levels,
but we are getting close.
Working without a balanced budget will in no way deter us from acquiring new
works because we have three separate budgets: operating, construction and
acquisitions. If we know there is a piece coming up for sale and we want to have
it, we set up a special fundraising drive for that specific project. We often
find ourselves still raising money the day the item goes on the block.
Financially, we expect to be back to a balanced budget by the end of fiscal
2006. We are so upbeat about the future that we forging ahead with our
improvement programs, which currently involve new galleries for 19th-century and
Islamic art.
Emily Rafferty is president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.