British Money Crunch : Museums Get Into the Heritage Biz

Commuters stopping at the South Kensington subway station here one recent morning were curious to find workers pasting decals, resembling giant, three-toed footprints, on the concrete platform.

When the workers finished, the footprints led up the station steps, through a quarter-mile-long pedestrian underpass, and finally to the doorstep of the British Museum of Natural History, which was promoting “Dinosaurs Live!”--a new exhibition showing links between the prehistoric behemoths and the contemporary animal world.

Billboards Block View

A few days later, motorists on Cromwell Road found their view of the famous Victoria and Albert Museum partially blocked by seven new street-side billboards. In return for footing the bill to clean the building’s ornate facade, advertisers are now allowed to hawk wares ranging from holiday loans (Lloyds Bank) to fast cars (Vauxhall--”quicker than a Porsche 944”).

Later this month, that same Victoria and Albert, once known as Britain’s stuffed and stuffy attic, plans a “new perspective” look at the nude, tracing the “complex of social, sexual and political meanings” of the art form, from the Old Masters to the latest Playboy centerfold.

It’s officially “Museums Year” here, but those examples have little to do with the celebration of Britain’s traditional love affair with its myriad galleries and collections. Rather, they reflect a transformation under which these formerly staid recipients of virtually unquestioned government support are turning into American-style, go-go promoters of almost any idea that might generate some needed cash.

“At the moment, American management consultants are crawling over almost every major museum in this country,” commented Patrick Boylan, president of Britain’s 100-year-old Museums Assn., in an interview.

Other participants in what some here call “the heritage business” are also scrambling under the more stringent, pay-as-you-go climate of Thatcherism.

The prestigious Royal Shakespeare theater company is said to be heading for a disastrous 1-million-pound ($1.7 million) deficit in 1989 with little prospect of an increase in its government grant.

The prelate of Hereford Cathedral triggered a national scandal earlier this year when he threatened to auction off one of Europe’s greatest medieval treasures--the Mappa Mundi, as the cathedral’s 708-year-old map of the world is known in Latin. Now officials are trying instead to raise needed funds by selling 1,000-pound ($1,700) shares to benefactors willing to leave the artifact in the cathedral’s hands.

But Britain’s museums and galleries are most in the spotlight, if only because everyone from the Times of London to the Duchess of York, the former Sarah Ferguson, now has declared it their year.

Boylan calls Museums Year “the biggest national festival of museums and the arts that the world has ever seen,” and it coincides with a period of explosive growth.

Two out of every three Britons now visit at least one museum annually. Including foreign tourists and natives who are more frequent patrons, museums here are expecting well over 80 million visitors in 1989, double the number a generation ago.

The country now claims more than 2,000 museums and galleries, with a new one opening, on average, every 18 days. The vast majority are small, private and narrowly specialized (one museum features artificial limbs; another, lifeboats), and they are successful enough that 1,000 new ones have appeared in the last five years alone.

But for the big national museums, like the British Museum of Natural History and the Victoria and Albert, it’s another story.

Those institutions face “an immediate crisis--and that’s not too strong a word,” because of a squeeze on government funding, Boylan said. “Within two years, they won’t be able to pay (staff) salaries, much less their electricity and telephone bills.”

Part of the problem is that while their fixed government grants for operating costs are increasing in absolute terms, they are not going up nearly so rapidly as either the country’s rate of inflation or the government-set wages of their staffs. The result is what the Museums and Galleries Commission, an official advisory body, concedes is a growing “funding gap.”

The portion of national museum grants designated to buy new treasures for their collections has been frozen for five years at a time when the prices for those treasures are skyrocketing. As a result, critics say Britain’s heritage is increasingly threatened with export to the highest overseas bidder.

Now the government is shifting responsibility for building maintenance from its own much-criticized central Property Services Agency to individual museums under separate annual grants that museum officials say are proving grossly inadequate.

Last month, trustees of the famed Tate Gallery turned down a government “gift” of their 19th-Century building because, they said, they could not afford to repair its leaking roofs, antiquated air conditioning and aged wiring. And according to Boylan, museums and galleries generally need at least an extra $340 million to overcome the damage from years of neglect by the Property Services Agency.

Thus, noted the Duchess of York as she launched the celebration in late-January: “Museums Year is not only about enhancing the public perception of our museums and galleries. It is equally about resources and about encouraging both public and private-sector investment, for no museum can hope to be imaginative or exciting without adequate resources.”

Whether the heart of the problem is a Philistine government, both unappreciative of art and ideologically opposed to subsidizing it, or a patrician arts establishment whose defense of the old order is a cover for its elitism, depends on one’s politics.

There is no question that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is a populist who believes fervently in the workings of the marketplace and who distrusts anything that shields institutions from its discipline.

“When Mrs. Thatcher offered (Arts Minister Richard) Luce the job, he is said to have protested that he was ignorant of the arts,” noted the Times of London earlier this month. “She responded: ‘Yes, but you say “No” so nicely.’ ”

On the other hand, conceded Boylan, it is also true that British museums have lagged behind those in the United States in trying to put their own financial houses in order. The current commercialization of museums and galleries here is, in that sense, “a good thing,” he said.

However, he added, while museums should be popular, that alone cannot be the measure of their success. They also have responsibilities to the broader society to maintain a high level of scholarship and promote learning.

Added a recent report by the Museums and Galleries Commission: “Another concern, which we fully share, is the extent to which the shortfall in funding has caused priorities to be distorted, with commercial achievement often ranked higher than scholarship.”

So the Museums Year debate here is over the proper mix of government support, financial controls and Madison Avenue-type marketing necessary for museums to fulfill their multiple roles.

And nowhere has that debate been angrier and more public than at the Victoria and Albert, opened in 1909 to showcase the development of design and decorative art. Today its seven miles of galleries contain 4.5 million artifacts ranging from Chinese porcelain and ornamental metalwork to postage stamps and shoes.

The row emerged earlier this year when the museum’s new director, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, announced a major reorganization aimed at increasing efficiency and cutting costs. On top of that, she asked for the resignations of nine senior curators, including five department heads famed internationally for their expertise.

“A dynasty of knowledge will be destroyed,” charged John Mallet, the former keeper of the Victoria and Albert’s ceramics collection, who was one of those forced out.

“The British are gradually coming around to the idea that museums must earn their keep,” countered Esteve-Coll. “Of course if you set out to popularize, you will always be accused by the purists of trivializing,” she added. “But we mustn’t be put off by this. Change is always resisted. But change is essential.”

Traditionally, Britain’s national museums have been free of charge to visitors. But that is one of the changes.

The Science Museum--which along with the neighboring Victoria and Albert and the Natural History Museum form what is reputed to be the greatest museum complex in Europe--imposed a two-pound ($3.40) adult admission charge late last year. The Natural History Museum started charging two pounds in 1987 and upped the fee this spring to 2.5 pounds ($4.25). Technically, the Victoria and Albert is free, although it “suggests” a two-pound admission fee for adults and actually collects an average of 1.35 pounds ($2.30).

Typically, admissions dropped by 40% or more the minute these museums started charging, and museum officials say it is expected to take at least four years for attendance to rebound.

Thus, museums like the Victoria and Albert are looking for more corporate sponsorship as well.

One way or another, it seems, the old image of the staid, musty British museum may soon be as extinct as those dinosaurs.