Art of the Moment
the eye interviews glenn lowry
PrintFounded by the daughter in law of John D. Rockefeller only nine days after the beginning of the Great Depression, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art has made it through the most difficult economic times in American history. It continues to face those challenged today. Meredith Perry chats with Glen Lowry, the executive director, about running MoMA in a time of economic hardship and the trajectory of the museum toward a younger engaged audience.
Many people would list MoMA as one of the most essentially New York institutions. How do you see the museum’s role in New York City?
The museum has been very fortunate because over the years it’s built up a remarkable collection of modern and contemporary art, and I see the museum as a major civic center around which people can coalesce to look at, think about, and talk about art.
The museum opened within two weeks of Black Tuesday and has survived to this day. Now that Wall Street is facing the greatest recession since then, does anything change for museum?
There’s no way to ignore the impact of what’s happening today. It’s now just a reality we’re living with, so it means being very careful with what we do. But we are committed to presenting a program that is as robust as it was a year ago, and I hope we will be able to do that. We have to make every dollar go father, and it’s harder to raise every dollar, but that’s a kind of internal problem. Form the point of view of our audience, I hope that we will be able to carry on our mission, more or less, as it’s always been.
How does the acquisition of pieces change for MoMA?
What certainly is true about the current state is that there is less money available to acquire works of art, but at the same time, the cost of buying art has gone down significantly, so there’s a bit of a trade-off taking place. The issues for all of us is that the cost of producing exhibitions is just very expensive, so finding the funding to do that is a bit complicated.
Raising the price of admission to twenty-dollars is something that you have been criticized for during your time as director. Do you think that this has changed the accessibility of the museum to the general public?
We thought about it a great deal and did a lot of surveying our audience and of potential audiences for the museum, and what we realized is that given the scale of our operation, the number of exhibitions we were producing, that $20 was not unreasonable, and more importantly it was the minimum admission price that we could afford and still have a balanced budget. It wasn’t that we were looking to raise our admission to the highest possible number; we were looking to keep it at the lowest possible number. To keep the museum open costs about $50 a visitor, and our trustees were able to find ways, through our endowment and other means of fundraising, to essentially subsidize $30 of that 50, but it was the balance that we couldn’t find, which is why we raised our admission to $20. At the same time, we extended our program of free admission and discounted admission to a much broader range of people and a much broader range of times, so that in fact when you look at what the average visitor pays, it’s something like 7 1/2 -it’s less that 50 percent of the full adult admission price.
Do you think that it’s possible to define a typical MoMA visitor? Do you have a certain demographic?
It would have been possible 15 or 20 years ago to define a typical MOMA visitor. She would have been 55 years or old, she would have come from a fairly affluent background, and she would have had at least a B.A. … Today, it’s more complicated. … The average age of our visitors has dropped to something like 35. The average income has dropped as well, although the majority of our visitors still have a university degree.
Young people often experience modern art differently than do people from older generations. Do you see modern art as more of a young person’s field of interest?
I absolutely do. I think one of the reasons that a place like The Museum of Modern Art has become such a popular place to be is that it naturally attracts a younger audience because it’s an audience that actually is eager to see what it’s peers are doing, and more importantly, understands the material much more quickly. And for those us who are older, we feed off that energy, we feed off your enthusiasm. We feed off the fact that you see things that we don’t. And that’s a powerful force, and it’s one of the reasons that we are so committed at the museum to contemporary art. It’s the art of our moment, which means it’s the art of your moment.
Do young people working at MoMA bring a different perspective to the workplace than older employees do? How do you see the future of MoMA as a new generation enters the work force?
I absolutely think younger people bring different perspectives and different expectations, and I think that’s essential. And I think if we’re an intelligent institution, we will constantly regenerate ourselves by not only attracting a more youthful public, but by attracting a more youthful staff. And that staff will actually change what we’re interested in. That’s critical. It’s a kind of constantly iterative process that happens over years and years and years, but its impact is deep and profound.
9 April 2009
vol. 6, issue 9
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