Thursday, February 04, 2010
Metro columnist Dan Casey: Honest numbers could spur real donations
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
dan.casey
@roanoke.com
981-3423
Dan Casey
Recent columns
- There's a slip twixt cup, lip for Roanoke coffee shop owner
- 82 years of food fit for the King
- At work, on floor, in life: Rick Schmitt had all the right moves
Read Dan's blog
You could easily take everything I know about art and run it off a computer printer, fold it up and cram it into a sandwich-size plastic baggie. You would still have room for a decent PBJ.
Even so, I am a big fan of the Taubman Museum of Art.
I have plunked down my money and ambled through its upstairs galleries and felt those psyche-tickling moments while beholding works that are beautiful, intricate, awe-inspiring, funny and bizarre.
The experience is hard to describe, and well worth the $10.50 admission -- take it from this art boob.
It feels a little bit like the artists are toying with your soul.
It's far harder to comprehend the museum management's extreme reluctance to publicly acknowledge, in specific terms, the dire financial straits it seems to be in.
The nonprofit, tax-exempt museum will not release current revenue numbers related to visitors, fundraising, event or cafe business, nor does the law require it to do so.
Its managers won't even release old revenue numbers, as those relate to operations. The most recent required-by-law tax form they've filed is from before the museum opened.
Reporter Mike Allen asked again this week and got nowhere. I called executive director David Mickenberg on Wednesday, but he was unavailable for comment.
When the question gets asked, they say: "We don't quite know the numbers." Or, "They're not ready yet."
Well forgive me, but almost every really rich person in this town is on that museum's board. And if there is one thing really rich people are good at it's counting money.
Not only do museum officials say they don't know the numbers, but they are laying people off while they say that.
I don't get it. Usually a business first figures its revenue, then projects into the future. And if that future is grim, it cuts some jobs to stanch the bleeding.
The museum did release some first-year numbers (but not specific revenue figures) late last year. Those were in a big story in November.
For your benefit, I have boiled them down.
- Operational costs were about 7 percent higher than expected.
- Attendance was 27 percent lower than projected.
- A $3 million endowment shrank by more than 25 percent.
- The cost of admission grew by an attendance-depressing 23 percent.
- And, by my count, in its first 15 months of operation, the museum has cut 10 full-time positions. It opened with 33.
If you had to translate those numbers into letters and then into a word, it would look something like c-a-t-a-s-t-r-o-p-h-e.
And I write that without a smidgen of glee.
The Taubman Museum of Art is proving to be a very important institution in this former railroad town. Just about every mover and shaker in Roanoke has been involved in cheerleading and fundraising for it.
They have invested millions, and so have the rest of us poor and middle-class taxpaying stiffs.
The payoff has been an arts renaissance downtown, which you can see in all the galleries that have opened.
And that's at least partly responsible for all the new downtown apartments.
The museum has brought Roanoke some high-profile publicity. Just in the past month I read travel articles about it in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Those will draw money-spending tourists.
For the reasons above, it's no stretch to call the museum an economic steam engine in which all of us are invested.
But from those numbers I boiled down, it's also no stretch to conclude that this steam engine is running out of coal.
The museum board should simply open the books and tell us how bad it is.
Such transparency would be empowering for all of us. It could cool public suspicion and fear that we're all going to be stuck out on some prairie in nowhere if or when the engine quits.
It would also prompt many to pitch in and begin shoveling some coal -- to help keep the engine running strong.
