Museums aren’t just casualties of the current economic collapse, they actively fed the boom and subsequent bust, Ben Davis writes for ArtNet. Museum boards engaged in short-sited speculation, gambling huge endowments in hedge funds and other risky investments.
Now that those endowments are worth a fraction of what they once were, and with governments drastically cutting their support for the arts to stave off budget crises, the large institutions aren’t the ones hurt most. “Everyone knows who is getting hardest hit,” Davis writes, “it is the personnel who do the unglamorous day-to-day stuff that makes these places run.”
Source: ArtNet
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