Big tent salvation for the arts

The words “museum” and “mausoleum” sound an awful lot alike. And according to two recent studies out of Washington, if America’s museum directors and curators don’t make some fundamental changes in the way they do business, their institutions might soon become tombs.

Just last Thursday, the National Endowment for the Arts published the sixth in a series of surveys it has conducted since 1982 that seek to measure public participation in the arts. The news was not good. The NEA found a notable decline in theater, museum and concert attendance and other “benchmark” cultural activities between 2002 and 2008. In 2002, 39.4% of people 18 and older participated in such events within the previous 12 months. Last year, that number had dipped to 34.6%. Sure, the economy probably has something to do with the drop. But if you look deeper into the study’s numbers, you will see that by and large cultural institutions are having a difficult time keeping pace with the demographic changes that are reshaping the American population.

Elizabeth Merritt was one culture observer who was not the least bit surprised by the NEA’s new statistics. She directs the Center for the Future of Museums, a year-old initiative of the American Assn. of Museums in Washington. To put it bluntly, her job is to devise strategies to protect museums -- once called “the most powerful and useful auxiliary of all systems of teaching” -- from “creeping irrelevance.” Because museums tend to be more democratically oriented than, say, opera or ballet, she feels a strong compunction to prod the people in her field to become more observant and responsive to the changing public around them.

For Merritt and her colleagues, perhaps the most troubling news from the NEA study was the declining percentage of Latino adults visiting the nation’s art museums. In 1992, the survey found that 17.5% of Latino adults had been to an art museum in the previous year. That number dropped to 16.1% in 2002 and 14.5% in 2008.

A 2005 study out of UCLA found a similar trend in Southern California. Between 1984 and 2005, the rate of Latino museum attendance locally declined, while Anglo attendance saw a rise.

Although some of that drop can be explained by the increase in the number of blue-collar immigrants, who may not visit museums because of financial or cultural reasons, Merritt also seems convinced that museums have not done a great job of reaching out to the stratum of minority populations that does share the income and educational profile of Anglo culture lovers.

Last year, her center published a report on the future of museums that focused on the demographic challenges they face. What they found was that only one in 10 “core museum visitors” today is non-Anglo. Given the fact that nonwhites are projected to make up roughly half of the national population by mid-century, that figure should terrify anyone who loves museums.

Why are museums lagging behind the demographic shift?

Merritt implies that it’s almost in their nature. “Even the most extroverted museums are projections of the people who founded or direct them,” she told me. “Perhaps because they are so passionate about what they do, they are sweetly self-absorbed and have a tendency to assume that everyone likes what they like or everyone thinks like they do.”

To help museums figure out what their potential audiences might like and think, Merritt’s center has commissioned another study -- to be released in May -- that will explore how museums might change their current practices to attract more diverse audiences.

In the meantime, the good news is that theirs is not a lost cause. According to the NEA study, museum-going -- particularly art museums -- is largely the province of people with higher educational attainment and incomes. Because whites have more years of education than Latinos or blacks (the NEA does not collect data on Asians), it makes sense that they have higher rates of museum attendance. That said, the NEA survey also shows that nationwide, only 26% of whites had visited a museum in the previous 12 months.

This suggests that the most effective and realistic way for museums to catch up with demographic shifts is to try harder to reach the growing college-educated, English-speaking Latino middle class. In particular, they should be trying to create cultural habits of museum attendance among first-generation college graduates. And, yes, though they may want to occasionally create exhibits that are ethnically targeted, these guardians of houses of curiosity should not assume that educated non-Anglos aren’t also curious about the wider world.

Merritt suggests that some museums’ air of clubby exclusivity and ivory-tower assumptions might be two things that are keeping people away. She’s right. And thank goodness she has the guts to tell her colleagues that they can’t afford to operate that way much longer.

grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com