I am not sure how I came across it, but Yale University’s School of Management published a series of stories about The Business Behind The Arts. One of the stories briefly profiled Daniel H. Weiss who was president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2015 to 2023.
He addresses a number of topics, including balancing the mission and purposes of museums against their need to be sustainable. He gives a number of examples, including how the Met had spent seven years preparing a Michelangelo exhibit that was on display for three months. He says it advanced the mission of the museum, but was not a good financial decision.
It was interesting to get his perspective on this balance. Especially since during his tenure The Met made the controversial decision to eliminate the pay-what-you-wish admission fee for anyone who didn’t live in New York. Weiss talks about how he had enjoyed free admission at the National Gallery when he was an undergraduate in Washington, D.C., and how when he attended Yale, the director of Yale University Art Gallery argued the Met should be free given how wealthy it was.
However, he said once he took the helm of the Met, he discovered the budgets were more constrained than most people imagined. Apparently admission revenue had declined by 67% over the previous decade.
He was also faced with a significant amount of deferred maintenance. Apparently, the skylights over the European Painting Gallery were supposed to have been replaced during President Lydon Johnson’s administration. As you might imagine, deferring repairs was undermining the infrastructure of the building and not just threatening the collection with leaks. It ultimately cost $150 million to replace the six acres of skylights and associated HVAC, roofing, etc. He says there was not much philanthropic support for the project so I infer that the admission revenue is helping to pay down that cost.
The Yale article includes a video they made to accompany a case study on the Met which includes a backstage tour of some areas, including the skylight area.
