UNITED STATES. The Museum of Modern Art from San Francisco eliminated 29 positions last May, the Brooklyn Museum (New York) 40 positions before that in February, Solomon R. Guggenheim (New York) 20 posts, the municipal museums of San Francisco 36 posts … The list of American museums forced to cut in their workforce because of budgetary difficulties is not to grow. It is a lesser evil, because many “small” museums close downright like the Rubin Museum of Art (New York), Bellevue Arts Museum next to Seattle (Washington) or museums of universities such as that of the University of New Hampshire.
Unlike France where museums are essentially public, mainly funded by subsidies and whose workforce falls under the public service, in the United States museums are private, mainly based on resources related to entries. Visitors find it difficult to return to museums. According to the American Alliance Museum (AAM), half of the member museums had not found their pre-Cavid attendance in 2024. Various factors explain this drop. It can be teleworking, which emptying city centers has the effect of reducing the number of local visitors, but also the drop in tourists, who have not found the United States path after the pandemic or who sulked since the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, or simply a change of cultural practice for certain categories of visitors.
Mechanage at half mast
Lowering commercial revenues are added tensions on patronage revenues, which represent significant amounts in the United States because it is fashionable to give the community. According to AAM, philanthropes are still there for great museums like the New York Met; On the other hand, small donors are lacking. And not everyone has the MET of a gigantic endowment fund (3 billion dollars) which allows to compensate for the million visitors lost since 2019. Public resources, already meager, have also been dried up, either because cities cut in the municipal budget as in San Francisco, or because of the abolition of budgets of federal agencies ordered by the Trump administration.
At the same time, expenses have increased sharply during the years of inflation (2021 to 2023), as everywhere in the world. Faced with this formidable chisel effect, museums had no choice but to increase the price of tickets and reduce their cultural programming, which had a negative effect on the entries. And as museums cannot sell works from their collection to finance their exploitation, only the reduction in the payroll reduction remains in the last solution.
These difficulties do not only concern the United States. In neighboring Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, which accuses a deficit of nearly $ 3 million, announced at the end of June that it was going to suppress at least 30 of the 130 positions in total.
