Are there Limits to Financing Culture through the Market? Evidence from the U.S. Museum Field

Abstract

The commercialization of nonprofit organizations has recently taken center stage as one of the pivotal policy issues facing this sector in the United States and elsewhere. In many ways, American museums have long been at the forefront of the trend with the operation of retail activities in the form of museum stores, mail-order catalogues and, most recently, web-based virtual shops. While museums in other parts of the world have begun to follow the American example, there has been relatively little scrutiny of the viability of this commercialization strategy. This article examines US tax and census data to chart the development of museum merchandising revenues from the 1980s to the 1990s.

Both authors worked at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies while developing the research for this paper.

Notes

Both authors worked at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies while developing the research for this paper.

1. See Cummings, M.C.; Katz, R.S., Eds. The Patron State: Government and the Arts in Europe, North America, and Japan. Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford, 1987.

2. Toepler, S.; Zimmer, A. Subsidizing the Arts: Government and the Arts in Western Europe and the United States. In Global Culture: Media, Arts and Cultural Policy in a Global Context; Crane, D.; Kawashima, N.; Kawasaki, K., Eds.; London: Routledge, 2002; 23–46.

4. Schuster, J.M. Deconstructing a Tower of Babel: Privatisation, Decentralisa-tion and Devolution as Ideas in Good Currency in Cultural Policy. Voluntas 1997, 8, 261–282; and Toepler, S. From Communism to Civil Society? The Arts and the Nonprofit Sector in Central and Eastern Europe. Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 2000, 30 (1), 7–18

7. Willan, P. Italian Anger at Plan to Privatise Museums. The Guardian, November 5, 2001; 15.

8. Cocks, A., op cit.

10. Ibid.

11. Cocks, A., op cit.

16. Burdon, J. Fly-Past–Museum Shop to Open at Heathrow. Press Association Ltd., September 25, 1996.

18. Kam, L. National Museum to Start Chain of Shops. Straits Times, November 4, 1993; 5; Ho, J. Museum Shops Thrive on Sale of Heritage Gifts. Straits Times, January 4, 1997; 3

19. See Salamon, L.M. The Marketization of Welfare: Changing Nonprofit and For-profit Roles in the American Welfare State. Social Service Review 1993 67 (1), 17–39; Salamon, L.M. The Nonprofit Sector at a Crossroads: The Case of America. In Third Sector Policy at the Crossroads: An International Nonprofit Analysis; Anheier, H.K.; Kendall,J., Eds.; Routledge: London and New York, 2001, 17–35; Weisbrod, B. The Future of the Nonprofit Sector: Its Entwining with Private Enterprise and Government. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 1997 16 (4), 541–555; and Weisbrod, B., Ed.; To Profit or Not to Profit? The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

20. Weisbrod, B., op cit.

25. Because the Economic Census does not collect data on income from the sale of investments and other assets, we have excluded this revenue type from the SOI analysis to minimize distortions.

26. In fact, as shown in Table 1, the 1997 SOI file gives total revenues of just over $3.1 billion for the 212 museums in the sample. For the same year, the Census gives total revenues of almost $4.9 billion for the much broader sample of 4,413 museum establishments.

27. As shown in Table 2, net income from fundraising events is typically less than half of one percent of total revenues for museums in the SOI sample.

28. Anheier, H.K.; Toepler, S. Commerce and the Muse, op cit.

29. Ibid.