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| Visions & Revisions |
Growing the Guggenheim
12/01/2005
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I finally summoned the
courage to introduce myself. I asked him to put me on the Guggenheim mailing
list, which he did. Soon after that he completely surprised me by telling me he
had decided to make me vice president of business administration at the museum,
as well as a member of the board. I later found out that he had had me
thoroughly checked out to find out if I was a wastrel and what I was doing in
life. And it turned out I had a reasonably good reputation in the mining
business and was serving on the board of Kennecott Copper, a major mining
company.
As I got to know him, my admiration was such that I spent almost as
much time doing chores for him as I did running Pacific Tin. Year after year I
refused to take a salary increase at my company because I didn’t want them to
think they owned me full time. I made myself useful to Harry, and apparently he
thought I did a reasonably good job.
But you were not terribly interested in the museum at that point.
Not at all, aside from being proud of what my grandfather had accomplished in
founding the Guggenheim Museum. But I didn’t know much about it, nor did I have
a great interest in being on the board. My mother and Michael were on the board,
and, frankly, I thought adding another family member was overkill. The problem
for Harry was that he had three daughters, none of whom had any interest in the
family business. So I guess he reached out to me, his second cousin, because he
had no direct heirs who were interested in championing the family legacy.
Eventually he chose me to take over the entire family enterprise.
My role at
the museum has always been a business one. Even as I started my tenure as vice
president of business administration, my concern was, and still is to this day,
the financial viability of the whole enterprise.
The Guggenheim Foundation’s art assets are substantial. Still, you wrote that
“the struggle for solvency is enormous and continuous.” That seems to be a
contradiction.
The admission fee that visitors pay covers only 25 percent of the museum’s
operating costs. So when support from corporations and the government steadily
declines, museums really have to struggle for solvency. The government does
provide some support for the arts, but not to the degree that you can count on
it.
The New York Times recently ran an article that criticized museums
for selling works of art to get money for other purposes. Of course, this is
something you can’t do in the art world. When a museum sells a work of art, the
proceeds can only go toward buying another work of art; it can’t go toward
salaries. But you can stretch it a little bit and put the money toward
maintaining the collection, which is a huge expense.
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