Good Exhibit by the Supervisors

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, in the thick of a brutal short-term fiscal crisis, has acted with commendable long-term prudence to stabilize funding for both the Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Art. By a 3-2 vote, the supervisors have guaranteed $9.1 million per year for the Natural History Museum and slightly more for the Art Museum for the next 25 years. This is nearly 25% below pre-recession highs, but the long-term guarantee restores the predictability without which these institutions would inevitably have spiraled downward into decay.

Among the five supervisors, Edmund D. Edelman and Yvonne Brathwaite Burke favored the stabilization, while Deane Dana and Michael Antonovich opposed it. That left Gloria Molina as the swing vote. Molina entered the debate proposing that the Natural History Museum sell or give to universities the warehoused portions of its priceless collection, the second-largest in the nation. In the end, however, she chose not to hold the stabilization question hostage to the storage question. The museum will report back to the supervisors on possible storage economies, but stabilization is now secured.

What a serious museum exhibits is not just beautiful or curious things but knowledge, and knowledge rests on the close examination of many more objects than can ever be put on simultaneous display. The public does not see the warehoused research collections, but experts do, and the result--for the children who troop past the exhibits--is an answer to such questions as “What do these bones teach us?” and “Who carved this ancient statue and why?”

Even the richest universities have been handing their collections over to museums in recent years. Handing them back would amount to little more than transferring the storage bill from one account to another. It takes money, obviously, to maintain a great collection for lay and professional users. The county provides only half the funding for its museums; the rest comes from private donors. Happily, with a modest but stable funding platform back in place, private donors may begin again to rally around a pair of institutions that will have much to do with making the Los Angeles that is to come one of the world’s cultural capitals.