"I think America is slowly overbuilding culture, and there is evidence that museum visitation is flat while our population rises, especially among those with secondary education degrees. Museums should be educating collectors about museum visiting trends so they can make informed decisions about how they want to share their holdings." -- Anonymous
"They will help improve professional interchange and creativity within our field; create more cultural interchange in communities; build audiences for museums overall; raise salaries for museum employees since museums will need to compete more for competent trained staff. Most importantly, they preserve more sites within the public domain instead of privatizing them. Creating more public spaces for art, culture, history, etc improves civic life in general and creates a better environment for us all." -- Marjorie Schwarzer, Museum Studies, John F. Kennedy University
"I am sure the explosion of museums will garner greater consideration of California as a cultural destination. However, being that the pool of resources, supporters, contributors, high level staff (directors and curators) for all non-profits is finite, I can't see how all the new and existing museums can survive. Perhaps the benefit will be that the smaller and less efficient museums will have to partner with others to pool resources and strategize. If that is the case then perhaps it is what the doctor ordered." -- Rochelle Mills, Director, architours
"In one specific case, the effect would be negative. It is disheartening to see that the Fisher family, despite their long years as supporters and patrons of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, are now taking their entire collection and building a single-collector facility to house it in the Presidio. Why did they not donate that work to SFMoMA? There has always been available land for an extension of the SFMoMA building, and the Fishers could just have easily helped fund that along with the donation of art. It is a troubling new development to have these major benefactors building monuments to themselves rather than helping to bolster the work of museums that have decades of experience and track-record behind them. Such a museum in San Francisco inevitably will hurt SFMoMA, although the museum staff has been too polite (and politic) to say so publicly." -- Anonymous
"The real issue is whether a startup museum has done the proper planning and developed a realistic financial model to ensure its sustainability. This includes an honest evaluation of potential constituency and need. Will it be built around compelling ideas that can animate the public over time? The proposed Fisher in SF may have a life as it seems it will be largely funded by the family (at least initially) and be housed in a part of the city conducive to tourism. Others may fail or be relegated to marginal status by an inability to attract audience or raise ample funds." -- David Burton, Director of Government Affairs, Autry National Center
"New museums in areas or cities where there are no other museums may have relatively little negative effect on other museums. In situations where you have a new museum being established in a town or city (even a large city) where there are other museums already in existence, I think the new museum cannot help but negatively affect the existing museums. You will be competing for visitors, donors, and publicity. We have a potentially similar situation happening locally where a new organization wants to establish a "living history" park that will overlap the focus of a cultural history museum, Mission, and historical society already in existence. The start-up of this new history park will be competing for finite revenue right from the start: first in the case of foundation grants and donors to build the history park and then later in the case of donors, visitors, and publicity once the park is built. The argument of the people involved in the park assert that they will help all the other organizations by bringing in visitors from all over who will then visit the other local attractions. Our experience however has been that people and especially those with children get "culturally saturated" fairly easily and therefore it is unlikely that the same visitors will visit additional cultural instituions in the same area. The current local cultural groups work together to support each other. We each have our own area of expertise that makes us unique. Bringing in a larger entitiy that will be duplicating some of those areas of interest can only be detrimental to the local smaller organizations already here who may lack the PR and development people at the disposal of larger entities." -- Anonymous
"Concentrations of cultural institutions tend to fare much better than individual institutions stranded alone. National and international visitors are more likely to visit a city based on a variety of museum offerings than to travel to see a single museum (with the Louvre and Smithsonian being relatively rare exceptions)." -- Anonymous
"Increasing the oppportunities for the public to see the 'products' of museums builds audiences and attracts 'consumers' in much the same way that clusters of restaurants and merhandise do. I think the impression of increased cultural activity promotes all of the like institutions, as long as they recognize and take advantage of the partnership." -- Steve Comba, Assistant Director, Pomona College Museum of Art
"The more new museums, the better, in my view. New museums create more opportunities for artists and works to be shown. The additional competition forces existing museums to become "better" and more responsive to the visiting public. Most collectors, when giving art, want their work to be exhibited on a continual basis, something that can't always be assured by existing institutions. Collectors, who can afford it, have a perfect right to protect and control their "aesthetic" by building structures to house their artworks. This is not a new idea." -- William Moreno, Executive Director, Claremont Museum of Art
"If new museums are really just for-profit entities masquerading as preservation organizations, or if they don't adhere to professional standards, the effect will be catastrophic." -- Anonymous
