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June 15, 2010
Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds
The New York Times
by Robin Pogrebin
When it opened a new glass entrance in 2004 meant to beckon the masses, the Brooklyn Museum said it hoped to triple attendance in 10 years by concentrating on a local audience. It had stopped worrying about competing with Manhattan museums or about its image — despite its world-class collections — as a poor man’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Instead, the museum invited the neighborhood to view its McKim, Mead & White Beaux-Arts building as a community resource and openly celebrated popular culture with shows like its recent photographic history of rock ’n’ roll.
But six years in, the effort to build an audience is not working. Attendance in 2009 dropped 23 percent from the year before, to about 340,000, though other New York cultural institutions remained stable.
...The attendance drop of 23 percent in 2009 came as attendance at 32 other cultural institutions monitored by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs lost an average of 1 percent, according to city statistics.
NoLandGrab: What The Times fails to realize, or at least acknowledge, is something that's obvious to folks who've followed the battle over Atlantic Yards. In April, 2008, the Museum chose to honor the immensely unpopular Bruce Ratner at its annual gala. Is it any wonder Brooklynites have stayed away since?
Posted by eric at June 15, 2010 11:41 AM