American Museums Have New Missions. Have Their Operations Caught Up?

The shift from object-focused to public-focused museum missions represents one of the most radical transformations of any group of public institutions in the last 50 years.

Art is as old as human history, but art museums as we know them are relatively modern institutions that have always adapted to reflect their times. From the founding of the Louvre after the French Revolution (turning royal collections into public goods) to the American museums founded by plutocrats with missions to educate the public to the “Bilbao effect” that invested in museums as tools for urban revival, the nearly uniform shift to public-centered mission statements is just the latest in a dynamic history. Whether you are a regular museum visitor, casual observer or board trustee, you have almost certainly noticed some significant changes in American art museums over the last few decades. From the artwork they exhibit, how they present it, or the welcome they extend to the public, these elite nonprofits have adopted a greater focus on public engagement than they used to. No longer identifying themselves as stewards of artwork for people who can afford to collect it, many museums now embrace their nonprofit status to serve and engage the public at large.

But how is such transformation reflected in museum operations, and how can museums leverage innovation to support their evolving missions? Through collaboration with museum colleagues and academic researchers, we have gathered as much publicly available information as possible to assess these institutions and their practices.

These changes aren’t accidental; museum leaders and their boards have explicitly approved them. Nearly 90 percent of American art museums now center the public in their mission statements (and only 11 percent center objects or their collections). Furthermore, 60 percent don’t even mention objects or collections in those missions. As a result, their stated purpose is no longer built around preserving objects and assuming the public will be interested in them; it is now built around engaging the public in the process of finding meaning in art.

That shift from object-focused to public-focused represents one of the most radical transformations of any group of public institutions in the last 50 years. Remuseum, an independent research project, has now started documenting these disparities, or “aspiration gaps,” between what museums say they want to offer and what they have been built to provide. 

Transparency and Trust

Transparency offers one example of that gap. While museums may now center the public in their missions, they have not yet centered the public in the information they share. We recently documented that only 17 percent of American art museums publicly share two of the most basic data points that they have: their number of visitors and their consolidated financial statements. Forty-three percent of museums share neither.

Why would a museum that centers the public in its mission statement not be willing to share how many members of the public it serves or provide financial statements that have been audited according to common standards and then approved by their boards?

One answer may lie in the slow process of change management. These institutions built their identities around expertise, which was shared only when they were ready to share it, and missions and operating systems that were built to serve traditional boards, funders and collectors. It would follow that their approach to sharing information might reflect that object-centered past, with its focus on serving elite insiders, more than the public-centered present.

Whatever the reason, to an outsider (or a possible donor), this approach to transparency can imply a distrust of the very public the museum says it seeks to serve. It risks losing young philanthropists who expect not just transparency but impact from the institutions they support. It risks the high level of trust that the public has granted museums. It invites scrutiny from politicians (like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently vetoed $32 million in funding to his state’s cultural institutions) who might have their own reasons for defunding elite cultural institutions. And it begs the question: Who is the museum really for? 

The good news is that museums have the right missions to gain support from “next-gen” donors, to retain the public’s trust, and to defend themselves from political attacks. They just have to embed those missions in every aspect of their work.

Museum Boards Can Reverse “Mission Neglect”

It is time for museum operating models to catch up with their missions, and there is an important role for museum boards to play in this work. They should be asking how the work they oversee—the budgets and audits and acquisitions and policies they approve, the way that institutional information is shared with the public, the way their collections are utilized and the measures of impact and public service they use to evaluate the leaders they hire—reflects their particular museum’s mission. 

Four of the museums that do share their visitor numbers and financial statements online also responded with the same information to a public request: the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Portland (Maine) Museum of Art and the San Antonio Museum of Art. Others may want to learn from, or at least copy the models of these “super-transparent” museums, or from the few museums—like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California and the University of Michigan Museum of Art—that have published annual impact reports focused more on the external benefits they generate than the number of artworks they acquired (the subject of most museum annual reports).

Resistance to incorporating their missions in their actual practices demonstrates a disengagement with public values that may reflect a distrust of the public itself and may risk both the relevance and financial sustainability of a field whose sustainability has always been tenuous.  

Most art museums are facing financially challenging times. Visitation for most of them remains below pre-Covid levels, enormous cash injections from federal relief programs have mostly been spent and operating budgets are often 20 to 30 percent higher than they were in 2019. 

Museums’ own missions—and the evaluation, innovation and transparency they call for—offer a key to a future where museums can be relevant to ever more people and thrive. Innovation is happening, though sometimes hampered by criticism from people who liked museums as they were, and Remuseum will do whatever it can to encourage it while also inviting museums to consider what sharing more data will do to advance and inform the field, as well as the public it serves.