The Art World: What If…?!, Episode 2: Glenn Lowry
What if we separated who funds the museum from who runs the museum on a board level? In this episode, host Charlotte Burns welcomes Glenn Lowry, who’s been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. He's led the institution through two vast expansions and, of course, periods of profound change.
This is a frank and revealing conversation covering a lot of ground. What if competition and collaboration were the same? What if museums refused to take in so many works of art? Join us for more.
New episodes available every Thursday.
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to The Art World: What If…?! I’m your host, art journalist Charlotte Burns, and this is a series all about imagining different futures. We’ll talk about how we navigate the churn and change currently shaping culture. What are some of the biggest shifts that need to happen for art to stay relevant in a changing world?
In each episode we’ll be talking to some of the most interesting people in the art world, asking them ‘what if’?
[Audio of guests]
This episode we welcome Glenn Lowry, who’s been the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1995. He's led the institution through two vast expansions, and, of course, periods of profound change.
This is a frank, revealing conversation with Glenn, covering many ‘what ifs’. What if competition and collaboration were one in the same? What if museums refused to take on so many artworks? What if we separated who funds the museum from who runs the museum on a board level.
We started with the idea of one of the biggest ‘what ifs’ facing New York City.
Charlotte Burns:
Glenn, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
Glenn Lowry:
It's a pleasure.
Charlotte Burns:
So Glenn, here we are sitting in New York, the greatest art city in the world. We seem to sit together in New York every four years or so. And I was thinking, by the next time we do that, in four years time, New York is going to look completely different. Because the city is at the beginning of profound change. You at some stage will be leaving MoMA, Richard Armstrong is leaving the Guggenheim, the Met[tropolitan Museum of Art] is under new leadership. People are expecting changes in other big institutions like the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, perhaps the Studio Museum [in Harlem]. So there's this shifting, this changing of the guards. It's also happening in the market. There are legacy plans being drafted for galleries from Gagosian to Marian Goodman [Gallery] to Barbara Gladstone; the closure of galleries like Metro Pictures. Often these changes are staggered. This is happening kind of all at once, in a five year period. It feels momentous. What if this is truly the end of a New York era?
Glenn Lowry:
Oh, I think it's always premature to predict the end of an era. Sure, there's a lot of change out there. We've gone through a lot of change over the last 24 months, perhaps even more seismic than the change that might occur over the next five years. And, you know, I have no idea what is going to happen in the future. But my sense is that what keeps a place like New York vital is this constant influx and outflow of extraordinary talent: artists, curators, directors, gallerists, writers.
And change is actually inherently good, it's vitalizing. It's not a problem. And so, if the next five years see significant change in the leadership of museums, that just means there'll be new visions and new ideas that will propel those institutions forward. I think it's just almost a liberating idea that New York can be the kind of place that absorbs seismic change as part of its day-to-day operations.
Charlotte Burns:
I agree. I think New York can absorb the change. It is a changing city; it always has been. But it does feel sudden and does feel like we're going to see a value shift, a change in the way the institutions are run and the threat and the way that they're funded and who supports them and the kinds of visions they bring to it.
Do you feel excited by that? And who do you think of the new generation emerging you feel particularly inspired by?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, first of all, I think you have to remember that most of our institutions are actually governed by boards of trustees. And those boards are not changing with the same kind of frequency and dramatic shift in potential direction that the leadership is. And there's a reason for that, right? They provide not just governance, but the ongoing stability that long-term planning and thinking enables.
So, one can talk about the number of directors who might change over the next four or five years. But if the boards of these institutions remain stable, the values of the institutions are not likely to change. And I don't necessarily see that there's going to be a dramatic shift in funding over the next five years, at least not with the institutions that I'm familiar with.
And if Paris is any example of what can happen when several new directors come onto the scene, like Laurent Le Bon and Laurence des Cars, to name but two, it's really phenomenal, a new generation providing new leadership, but not necessarily dramatic change to the institutions in the first instance. If that happens in New York, how good is that?
Charlotte Burns:
In the time that we've done these interviews, I was looking back on our last one in 2018, and we called it ‘authority and anxiety’. And we talked about this flammable moment we were living in where, and you said it was very flammable not because of censorship, which we were discussing, but because people felt vulnerable.
And that was before Covid, before we even knew what a pandemic would feel like; the changes in the world that we've seen, geopolitically; the overturning of things that we didn't imagine possible, like Roe vs. Wade, gun laws in New York. So sitting here today, is this moment more flammable? Is it a continuation or an escalation of where we were?
Glenn Lowry:
It's differently flammable. I think what's happened, certainly since 2016, is that a number of issues that were complicated have become toxic. We've just endured two years of a pandemic that created even further gaps in social and financial inequality. We now know that our world as we thought we understood it is far more fragile, far more vulnerable to autocratic decisions. Wars that seemed inconceivable now happen. We've lived through a racial reckoning and really seismic social rethinking about race and equity in this country that is deep and profound. So all those changes, of course, impact our civic institutions in deep and profound ways.
What worries me is whether democracy itself will survive the next decade. Because it seems to me, among all the different forces at play, the intolerance of other people's opinions—the sense that if I lose, it was stolen from me, that only I can be right—presages a condition in which we lose all ability to negotiate difference. And democracies, after all, survive in their ability to do just that; to take opposing points of view and find common ground.
Charlotte Burns:
Especially in America, museums are one of the very few civic spaces where you can enact these kinds of conversations. It's perceived of as being a public entity, even if the ownership structure is very different. But definitely thinks of itself as being for the public as being a public good, a civic-minded institution. There's only really libraries that remain that way. And it feels like a lot of the issues that are happening in the world are coursing through the institutions and re-changing them because it is a space where democracy can, can take place; you can have these conversations.
Glenn Lowry:
You know, I think that one always has to be careful about the relationship between broader societal forces and what any one institution can or should do. We are collectively a network of civic spaces. We do serve a public good. We are no better or worse than the forces around us. And if we can create a space where art itself is the center of conversation, with all of the contradictory and complex issues that it raises, then we will continue to thrive.
I feel very strongly that museums should not be places that provide answers. Museums should be places that provoke questions. And that answers come later. And if you go to a museum for certitude, you will ultimately be disappointed. But if you go to the museum to discover, to learn, to question, to think, then you will be energized.
And I think that's our role, especially in a moment of complexity: to be a place where people with different questions, different concerns, can engage with works of art, and the artists who made them in ways that are deep and meaningful, and that help them locate themselves in a larger conversation. But we are not the larger conversation.
Charlotte Burns:
Who is MoMA’s public? What data do you track on the public? How do you know who's coming? Define MoMA’s audience as it currently is, and, you know, kind of look back, I guess, because it's grown enormously and shrank again during the pandemic.
Glenn Lowry:
And then grown again. So we do regular audience surveys. So we have a pretty good sense of who's coming and where they're from, and how old they are and what their gender is. And we do a regular zip code and country captures, people come in and out of the museum. So we're pretty accurate about sort of broad demographic sweeps. We’re less accurate, of course, on the more complex socio-economic questions that can only come from regular audience surveys. We only do two a year at this point.
But our audience, since we reopened in late August of 2020, has clawed its way back to something approaching 75% or 80% of where we were pre-pandemic. Our baseline was about three million. And obviously, in the year of the pandemic, our audience shrank to about 650,000. We were closed for five months. And then when we reopened, there were severe limitations on attendance.
Our hope is that this year, assuming no other catastrophic issues intervene, we’ll be very close to where we were pre-pandemic. That's the ambition.
Charlotte Burns:
You just talked about this idea of authority and anxiety and tolerance, essentially. And when I asked you your greatest anxiety in 2018, you said, “I feel a kind of closing off of possibilities across a full spectrum of political issues. So the question of authority becomes fundamental because we have to give each other license to imagine.” You said the biggest single issue was this question of how we navigate who has the right to speak, and for whom? “Is it possible for us to get out of our bodies, skins and minds and empathize with those who are different than us?”
At the beginning of the pandemic, it felt like there was a vulnerability to the conversation. So there was a painfulness to the conversations that people were having about race, gender, privilege, class, money in the art world, and we'd had a comfortable ride for a long time, kind of self perceiving as paragons of liberal democracy, but not necessarily embodying that.
There is a strong and committed push towards progress in lots of different sectors. But what we're also seeing is a kind of backlash against that. I was speaking to a critic recently, who said, “Oh, you know, everybody thinks that things have gone too far, political correctness has gone too far.”
A board member at another major museum recently, there was a big argument with the director, about, “I'm, you know, I'm not going to fund a woke museum.” And this was on a big board member call. And this is a very, very wealthy patron.
So this is money. It's also critics, you know, it's a conversation that's happening. And that sense of being open and encouraging of progress seems to have curdled a little bit in on itself as things around us have returned more to normal.
How do you grapple with that, because you, as a director of one of the museums with the largest endowments in the world, with an enormous staff, square footage, an extremely wealthy board, and huge attendance from all over the world, you're dealing with so many constituents who want very different things. How do you steer through that?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, I don't know how you steer through that. You just hope that you can read the different issues well enough that you can make a series of rational judgments, because we're in new territory, or uncharted territory.
In finance, there's a term when markets go up and or when markets crash, that there's a reversion to the mean. That ultimately, markets return to the mean average of where they were. And I think that's true about society that when we experience moments of enormous conservative thinking, ultimately, there is a moment when we move back to the center, when more liberal thinking permeates the way we live. And when we have moments of progressive thinking and progressive action, there's often a reaction to that, that pulls us back towards the center.
So I'm not surprised that in the wake of all of the actions that have followed the murder of George Floyd and so many other Black and Brown men and women, that led to all sorts of new programs, new acquisitions, new positions, that there are also people who are concerned that we as a society may have gone too far. It doesn't matter whether you agree with them or disagree with them. They feel that, and so there's a counter-pull.
And I don't even see these responses as necessarily setbacks. I see them as legitimate conversations that need to take place because people don't all agree about where we as a society should go.
And I felt back when we last talked in 2018, and I feel it today, that if we can't have these conversations—if they become so polarized that they lead to divisiveness, political alienation, even violence—then we are going to fail as a society and that we have a collective responsibility to find a way to negotiate positions, and that we have to accept that we don't all get what we want, all the time. In fact, if you can even get some of what you want, some of the time, that is an achievement.
And we have become such a polarized nation where the thinking is all or nothing. And I just don't believe that. I enjoy the give and take. I believe it produces better results that, of course, if you learn from somebody else's thinking, it's going to make your own thinking better. And in fact, the joy of living is discovering new possibilities. Then some of these threatening moments—where people feel that we've all become too politically correct, or wokeness has taken over America—diminish in importance, because it's not about wokeness. It's about doing the right thing. It's about understanding that in the ways in which you navigate that, you can help make this country better.
Charlotte Burns:
Can you give any examples of things that you found threatening as ways of thinking that you've since encompassed into your practice and the way you work?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, look, I'm a self-identified Liberal Democrat. So I find some of the thinking on the hard-Right really frightening. But I'm willing to engage it. And I'm willing to listen. And I'm willing to recognize that some people really believe those hard-Right positions, and it's not going to work if I just simply ignore that. Right? And it's not gonna work for anybody to simply ignore somebody else's feelings and positions. We're going to have to encounter them and work thoughtfully, systematically and logically through the differences that we have.
So, you know, take abortion. It's inconceivable to me that we're still stuck in this situation as a country, where you can have a Supreme Court that overturns Roe vs. Wade. It's just inconceivable. But that's not going to help, my feeling it's inconceivable. We have to go out and work, we have to go and recognize that if you believe in abortion rights, they are not God-given, they’re hard fought. And as it turns out, in this country, they're constantly under attack. We have to recognize it's not good enough to say, “they're wrong, and I'm right.” You've got to engage with reality.
Charlotte Burns:
Even if it's a reality that's distasteful to you.
Glenn Lowry:
Precisely, if it's the reality…if all we do is operate in the realities that are pleasing to us, we live in an echo chamber, and we're going to make tremendous mistakes about our life, our sense of democracy, and the things we value. So this goes back to the question of tolerance.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
I thought it was interesting you mentioned this idea of someone's emotions, because as a journalist, what I came to understand is that often what I thought was reporting the facts of a situation was actually just reporting people's feelings. Especially on things like progress, because there's so little data out there—it's not an industry that is very easily graspable.
But we’ve spoken about the data studies that Julia Halperin and I do, the Burns Halperin report. When we did them, we were shocked to see the reality of progress was so limited. Looking at those figures is really disappointing because the reality, whatever our feelings are, we haven't, as a sector been engaging fully with that reality. And I'm not sure that we still are because overall, as a cultural sector, we haven't moved things a percentage. Grappling with the reality is different than grappling with the feelings, but we're living in a moment of heightened feelings. And so how do we create progress? How do you talk to your board about that? Do you set yourself internal markers? Do you believe in quotas?
Glenn Lowry:
There are many different kinds of change. You can mandate radical change. But the problem with that is, the moment you move on to something else, or you change leadership, that change disappears. And so I think about change primarily through the lens of sustainable change; change that's irrevocable, that gets locked in.
And that it's a kind of change that happens much more slowly. Because you have to buy in everyone who's involved, not just your staff, but your board and your public. They have to believe that the changes that are being made are foundational to the future of the institution.
So, often, we want to see dramatic change, we want to see the dial suddenly go from zero to 60. But the problem with that is, it can just as easily go from 60 to zero.
And if you start to look at change over longer periods of time, which can be very frustrating to those who feel disadvantaged. But if you look at change over a longer period of time, you can make a very substantial change in, you know, a decade, in five years. Whereas if you look at it in one year or two year increments, it might not seem that much.
That's not a justification for failure to engage. How do you lock in sustainable change? What's the strategy in any one institution? Institutions are different. New York institutions operate in a very different environment than Houston institutions, which operate in yet a different environment than those in San Francisco. The public in Houston is going to be just dramatically different in makeup and in aspiration and in interest than the public in Boston.
Each institution has to hold itself accountable, has to set for itself an agenda of where it wants to be on some spectrum of change. Define what the metrics of success are. Is it Y number of staff of color? Is it Z number of female artists? Is it by percentage? Is it by feel? Right? You can set all sorts of different ways to look at how you will measure your success. But you have to at least define what the terms of success look like.
Charlotte Burns:
What does that look like for you? When, you know, looking back, because you're coming to the end of your tenure at MoMA. So you're thinking about the legacy. Has your definition of success changed? Where is it now?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, first of all, I don't think about legacy, ever. It's just not something that interests me.
And my definition of success hasn't changed that much since I arrived, which was to change the institution's way of thinking from, being the place that provided the answer to the question of “what is Modern art?,” to the place that constantly sees itself as a work in progress, asking the question, “what is Modern art or contemporary art?”
And that is a mindset change. To be a place of questioning, of querying, of uncertainty; a place that felt more like a laboratory than a temple, that was welcoming and generous in its approach to the present, and discerning in its approach to the past. And where different publics could and would feel welcome. And to the degree that one looks back at my tenure, I hope that the sense would be that the museum changed a great deal during this time. And I'd be even happier if people felt the museum changed a great deal for the better during this time. But that's for others to judge.
Charlotte Burns:
One thing that's changed so much is the internal structure of institutions and how power moves through them. When you first joined MoMA, the curators were the power force.
You initiated weekly meetings with the heads of the curatorial staff to unite a frequently fractious team, and a “frequently fractious museum”, I think the quote was. John Elderfield, the chief curator at the time had said, “It's basically the old fiefdoms but the difference is basically that all the warlords now sit down at the same table.”
You created six deputy director positions, including a deputy director for the curatorial department who was paid more than the chief curator themselves. That was a shift in the role and power of the curators.
Often when you speak to creators now, they feel further away from the curating warlords of old and much closer to the fundraising departments. Meanwhile, the museums have become so much bigger and they have real estate portfolios that need funding. And so the boards have become richer and larger, and essentially don't have accountability structures really above them.
So you've seen this shift from the power of the curators. Who has the power now? Where has that moved to?
Glenn Lowry:
So I didn't create the position of a deputy director for curatorial affairs. That was a position that existed when I arrived at the museum.
I'm not someone who looks at power as the driving force of an institution. I, you know, it's not actually something that even interests me that much. What does interest me is how do you create a vibrant conversation across a largest number of staff members about the mission and values of the institution? How do you get people to participate, and to think holistically about the institution, rather than departmentally?
And so, when I arrived at the museum and it was described as a place of fiefdoms, that's not actually what I found. The chief curators who were there then were already talking to each other, and wanting to have a conversation across disciplines, but hadn't yet figured out how to do that in a regular way.
And so if I was able to create a platform and a venue where those conversations could occur, and where we could test out different ways of working together, that was largely because that's what everybody wanted. It’s certainly what I wanted, but it wasn't successful because I wanted it. It was successful because people actually began to see that it was a lot more interesting to work with your colleague across disciplines than it was to work in some kind of isolation.
Of course, over time, things change, and you give something up in order to get something, right? So in those in the model of the museum that saw it as a series of fiefdoms, each chief had his or her domain, her galleries, his galleries. And, in a way, nobody else was responsible for them but that person. But your territory was actually quite small and limited. So, if you want to operate at scale, when you start to look at all the different trade offs, you can begin to imagine that nobody loses anything in sharing. And you actually start to gain an enormous amount by doing so.
So the ingredient that enables that to happen is trust. You have to trust your colleague, that he or she will listen to your concerns, will seek your advice when working with material that you know more about than she does or he does. It takes time to do that.
I don't see that the power structure in the museum has changed a whole lot during the course of my tenure. It is still a place that recognizes that knowledge is a currency. And, if you want to talk about power, power lies with the ability to have a place where many people across many disciplines share a set of common values.
And I still think of the museum as being curatorially driven, maybe not curatorially driven by warlords, but by a group of really interesting, thoughtful individuals who work together.
Charlotte Burns:
And obviously with the rehang, that's sort of embodied. You had this hang across media, bringing to light lots of overlooked work. And when I walk around the museum, I think it feels like a post-internet hang.
Do you think you have found now a way of working in the institution that breeds collaboration? What was the formula? How did you get there?
Glenn Lowry:
I hope we have. This goes back to thinking about this through the lens of sustainable change. We didn't do this overnight. We did this over literally two decades. We began in 2000 with an experiment, MoMA 2000, where we invited curators from every department to work together in a series of exhibitions to celebrate the millennium.
And that was praised by some and roundly criticized by others as devaluing MoMA, fracturing the clarity of departmental thinking. But its real purpose was to begin learning how to work differently, because the one thing I really believe is that if you want to be an institution devoted to the art of our time, the present, then you have to be a place that changes all the time. That's why I think of ourselves as a work in progress. We're different in kind than a historical museum that's about preserving the past. We're all about engaging the present. And learning from that. And that many of the things we learned get absorbed, and even institutionalized, by historical museums, where we're constantly—or should constantly—be moving on.
So we started with an experiment that some liked, some hated. Internally, it was controversial. Externally, it was controversial. But because we did this iteratively, and because there was a generational change of curators over this 20-year period, I think most of the curators if not all of the curators who were there today would say, this is how we want to work. Can we make it work better? Of course.
But the idea that they sit down together and plot out what the gallery's will look like, what issues they will address, what acquisitions we will make that are strategic and amplify the conversations we want to have is part of a strategy that says these galleries are like laboratories, and they change with the time. This means everybody has to sit down together and hash it out. And the reward is a rich conversation and more interesting gallery.
We’re the place that is going to give you the opportunity to think differently. And that's really important, from my perspective.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you balance that though? You're a very competitive person yourself, by nature. You're a competitive cyclist, you ski competitively. How do you balance that natural instinct with the urge to collaborate and cooperate? Where is the competition? Who do you see as your rivals, as an institution?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, I'm inherently collaborative by nature, I love working with other people. I don't see that as in any way antithetical to also being very competitive. But by competitive I don't mean about winning in relationship to someone else, I mean, competitive in the sense of always wanting to do my best, to push myself. And if you want, by extension, the institution to outperform itself. And the only way you can outperform yourself is if you work with colleagues. You can't do this on your own. I don't see collaboration and competitiveness as being contradictory at all. This is a place that recognizes and values achievement, that you can…We hope our staff will want to do outstanding work because we're driven individuals.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
Let's talk a little bit about the funding. You grew your endowment over the time, you've been there from $200 million to more than $1 billion.
Glenn Lowry:
When I arrived at the museum, the endowment was about $225 million. That's 1995. And today, it's about $1.7 billion. But to be clear, I didn't grow the endowment. An extraordinary group of people grew that endowment. First, our trustees. Second, we have a remarkable investment committee of the board that has advised our own internal investment team. Third, we have a really outstanding small group of individuals at the museum who have shaped that endowment.
The growth in that endowment came from literally dozens of people working their tail off to make smart choices about investments, and really generous trustees who kept adding to the endowment because they understood that it was the long-term protection for the institution against the ups and downs of the economy.
Charlotte Burns:
So I think there's two things there. There's the funding and investments. And then there's the trustees. There was a recent article by the former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Tom Finkelpearl, with the artist Pablo Halguerra, and they talked about a different funding structure for museums.
They said that museums should divest themselves from toxic philanthropy. The article asks what it looks like for museums to turn, and I quote “their billions towards positive good, instead of questionable investments simply for profit”. They state that seven in 10 museums don't have policies to guide investments towards environmental, social or corporate governance goals, or to ensure that the managers of those funds are themselves diverse. They suggest instead investing in local things like taxable municipal bonds, but helping build better public infrastructure, making it a priority to invest in cities. Scaling, maybe being smaller but having more sustainably invested funds.
What do you think of that? What is MoMA’s stance on ethical funding? Let’s kind of separate out board members for a second, but in terms of the investments, would you invest in oil, for instance? Are there guidelines in those senses around the investments in the endowment?
Glenn Lowry:
We use an ESG filter for our investments in our endowment. And it's not perfect. It's a set of guidelines. It's not absolute. But I think it's important that institutions invest in ways that are consistent with their values.
Charlotte Burns:
In recent years, we've seen lots of articles about toxic philanthropy. The Sackler name has been removed from institutions around the world, in some places quicker than others. In Britain, it is still not happening at the same speed as it has in America.
MoMA has had its own pressure. There was a lot of pressure from artists and other activists about the chair Leon Black's financial ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
He decided he wouldn't stand for reelection. He remains on the board. Artists were very outspoken about this. Ai Weiwei told The New York Times that he would be ashamed to be associated with MoMA unless it took a firm position. And he hoped that if it didn't, they wouldn't have his works in their collection. Michael Rachowitz was one of 150 artists who spoke out saying, you know, he believed that Mr. Black should step down from the board altogether.
So there, you're really in the middle of the constituents that we've been discussing—the people who were helping fund the institution, and then the artists saying, “we're at odds with this.”
What if there was a different way of doing it? Do you think about that? And are you working towards that?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, I'm a pragmatist, first of all. So I admire activists. I often believe in the causes that they espouse. But in the end, I'm a pragmatist. And that is just where I come out. I like to get things done. And I recognize that I don't have all the answers, and neither do the activists. Nor do the trustees. We live in a world of compromises.
And I respect the positions that many artists take and have taken, either in support or against the museum. That is their right. It doesn't mean that every one of those decisions is something we're going to do. We listen, we respond, we react, we change, when appropriate. But we live in a free world that actually values debate and discussion.
So the fact that there are groups of people who believe ardently that we shouldn't do this, or we should do that, doesn't mean we're going to do either of those things. It just means that there are groups of people who believe that. We're going to listen. Where it is appropriate and where it makes sense, we're going to adjust and act and where it isn't, we won't. And we're not perfect either.
And in the same way that, if we start to believe that trustees whose political positions are different than ours, or whose financial investments don't align with our values, are no longer welcome in our institutions, I think of that as fascism. I don't think of that as progressive liberal democracy. I think of that as fascism. “I don't like what you do. I disagree with what you do. Therefore, you are excluded.” That's a bad place for us as a society to be.
We're a heterogeneous society, made up of people who have multiple sets of interests, and that if we can align someone's financial support with the values of the institution, that's a good thing because it doesn't matter whether they're of the progressive left or the reactionary right if they're supporting the programs and artists we believe in. At least for me. I know that for some people, that's absolutely anathema. That it is viscerally difficult to imagine someone whose politics or investments you despise or dislike supporting the programs that you want. I just don't feel that way.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you feel that situation’s got worse, politics has become more extreme? And there's two questions in there really. One is the polarity that we discussed at the top of the show. Having people on boards who had slightly different political opinions from you maybe was different in that moment when everyone really believed that capitalism would encourage democracy rather than authoritarianism, in the kind of peak years of that, in the early 2000s.
But the other question is, then, the governance…So a funding is one thing. Using the funds from a supporter to increase the activities of the museum and align with museums’ values, is a different thing than the governance of the museum. And is it possible to separate that because of course, the boards run the institutions? Do you think that would be wise or unwise? It's not the model that we have.
Glenn Lowry:
The issue around governance and funding probably varies institution by institution. So the core expressions of financial support at a place like MoMA are reflected in the acquisitions we make and the exhibitions we produce. Our board has no say in the exhibitions we produce. That is really driven from the bottom up by our curatorial staff.
Acquisitions at a place like the Museum of Modern Art, because they involve assets of the museum, are ultimately board responsibilities. And so they are made through acquisition committees, which are made up of trustees and outside individuals who share an interest in a field—photography, architecture and design, painting and sculpture, and so on.
They're called trustee committees because they're chaired by a trustee. But in fact, most of those committees are made up of more outside members than they are of trustees. And curators propose acquisitions. Trustees and committee members can't propose acquisitions; curators propose acquisitions, and trustee committees then either approve them or reject them.
And I think that's a pretty healthy system. There are mechanisms that in one case, ensure that there's no trustee influence. There's oversight, like we set a budget every year, we make projections about attendance, and if we fail to meet our budget or fail to meet our projections around attendance, you know, trustees have the right to say, “are you sure you had the right program and what are you doing next year?.” But in my time, they've never interfered, never said, “Don't do this show or you must do that show.”
And on the acquisition side, it's a very balanced group of individuals who have to agree with each other to make an acquisition possible. A trustee can't override the decision of the committee as a whole.
On the governance end, we happen to have in this country a system of primarily private institutions. We can change that if we want to nationalize them. Or we can create new national institutions that are governed differently. But the structure here is one in which government has basically said culture is not going to be in our domain. That's for private individuals who think it's important to support. And so we've built an extraordinary network of private institutions across every discipline imaginable, that are governed by boards, that are self-perpetuating, because they ultimately own those institutions.
The institutions operate in the public trust. There is a source that oversees the governance of institutions, and that's the attorney general of each state. So our board does have a higher authority that can step in and say, “you have a problem and you need to fix it.” And, episodically, attorneys general do step in when called upon. So it isn't like they that the board has a free hand in everything it wants to do; it has to abide by the laws of the state, laws of the country and by the practices of good governance. And it's held accountable, rightly, by the media on the one hand, and the public on the other hand and the attorney general of each state. So, there are checks and balances, even in that largely private structure. Everything comes with its benefit and its drawback, right?
The system we came up with was to enable private individuals to create institutions that became self-supportive through the ongoing engagement of those individuals and their successors.
And that's what I mean by I'm a pragmatist. I can live with that. I see its advantages. I love working with our trustees, I love working with our staff. We encounter lots of complicated, often divisive issues that we have to work out together. But when I think about the commitment that our trustees have to the institution and its staff, I'm always amazed at how devoted they are. So that's where I come out on this.
Charlotte Burns:
There's been a lot of talk through the pandemic, about staff, about staff safety, and this idea of care and what safety means, which means physical care, obviously, but also the work environment, in so many different ways.
Of course, safety for you at MoMA became a very real thing. There was a stabbing incident and two staff were stabbed. How does that change the institution? And weirdly, we'd spoken about this on our last podcast. You said, “I know, as a director of an institution, when your staff feel threatened by physical violence, you have to take that very seriously. It's a reflection of the breakdown of our society. It's not a normal process.” That must have been an extremely shocking, very violent thing to go through, that makes you recalibrate everything.
Glenn Lowry:
That stabbing was the most horrific incident that I have ever had to live through and work on. And we like to believe that museums are places of engagement and of culture, of enlightenment, whatever that might mean. But they're places that also attract people who have really serious and difficult problems and when that crosses over into the kind of violence that unfolded, and that resulted in two remarkably young, wonderful staff members being stabbed. And a third one who was lucky enough not to be stabbed, but for all intents and purposes, lived through that as well. Plus a security officer who had to intervene as best he could, you have traumatizing experiences that are just so beyond anything any of us have ever encountered or know how to deal with.
So we've spent a lot of time healing. And it's not something that happens overnight. It may not even be something that happens over months, it may be something that happens over years. We had a lot of meetings across staff, with therapists, with, you know, with colleagues. With anyone who wanted to talk about these incidents, to just begin the process of understanding what happened. To also understand that we need to ensure it doesn't happen again. So there's training, so people know what to do. And that training has to be so routine that it's instantaneous, that you don't even think about it.
Increased security. We have returned to working with paid detail from the New York police, paid detail or off-duty police officers armed, in uniform, who report to us. We had paid detail pre-pandemic. We instituted that after the Bataclan attacks in Paris in 2016. Several of us got together and said, “Oh my God, this could happen in New York. So what do we do?” And the first thing you do is, you make sure that you have really secure perimeters.
We live in a society now where it is obvious that violence can and will occur almost anywhere. We need to make sure our public and our staff are safe when they are at the museum. I feel really strongly about that.
Does it make me happy to see the amount of security that we now have to provide? No, of course not. I still have a naive notion that anyone who comes to a museum comes there to be engaged with the art and the last thing they would ever think about was a violent act. But that's just not true anymore.
So it has become a huge preoccupation at the museum to make sure that we do the right thing. And that we can anticipate what might happen in the future.
Charlotte Burns:
It's such an experience of trauma to go through for you and all of the staff there.
Obviously to have paid New York police, in a moment where policing is such a hot topic and the relationship between, you know, the authorities and communities just seems extremely fraught. To navigate that while the museum is trying to be more open to have more people feel comfortable in that space...
Glenn Lowry:
Look, I think this is not as complicated as that. Honestly, Charlotte, if you look at it through at least the lens I use, which is one of being pragmatic, we have to run an institution, the institution is in the middle of midtown New York. It attracts millions of people a year. We don't know who those individuals are. We don't run credit checks, and we don't run security background on them. We live in an increasingly violent society. And the police are part of the civil network that protects us all. Are they perfect? Absolutely not. Should we constantly be looking at ways of reforming the police, not defunding them, but reforming the police so that they do their jobs better, of course, we should. But in the absence of any other solution, to leave our public and staff unprotected when we know that violence can and will occur is unconscionable. It's not actually a complicated choice.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
We're gonna have a slight change of conversation, I want to ask you about the volume of art. So I was we looked in our 2022 report, we found that 338,496 works, had entered the collection of the 31 museums across America that we survey in that 1- year period. And I was thinking about the sustainability of all this stuff that's in the museums? Should we carry on bringing everything into the institutions? How do you house all of that?
Glenn Lowry:
Well, I think that one of the greatest challenges for American museums, and I've been very vocal about this, is to change from being places of acquisition to being places of program. That, if the 20th century saw the dramatic growth of collections across the vast majority of American museums because America had capital—there was a lot of art out there and we were prosperous throughout most of the 20th century, and so we built enormous collections. And we trained ourselves to keep building those collections. We built endowments that can only be used to buy more art. So we perpetuate the problem.
I have been arguing for 20 years now that the 21st century should be about programming. That we should be diverting all that energy that goes into acquisitions, to doing more on the programming side. To produce more and better programs that reach larger and more diverse audiences. That's where our energy should be.
Not that we should stop buying works of art. I don't believe that for a moment, but that we should shift the balance of what we spend our discretionary funds on from acquisition to program, and that we should start thinking more collaboratively about sharing our collections. That you don't have to own everything you display. That you can in fact be far more rigorous in what you acquire, and that we should be celebrating deaccessioning, not castigating it. That deaccessioning is a process by which we should be able to lighten our load, so that we can program better. And even though the new guidelines are more generous, but still very restrictive about the use of funds, the idea that once entered, a work of art can never leave the museum, I think, doesn't really make sense at the end of the day. Any more so that once a work of art entered the church, it could never leave the church. Well, 500 years later, it did leave the church. So works of art are created. They are owned, they change ownership, they come to museums, but they can also move on. And a work of art that is never seen in storage has become invisible, even if it has a digital image online.
Charlotte Burns:
You refer to the new rules. You were on a task force of 18 museum directors that determined these new rules that hadn't changed this 1981. They've relaxed a little bit now, but there's still a lot of guardrails on them, You can use it to defray the cost of caring for the collections, but still not for staffing or infrastructure in that way, or program. How much more do you want the rules to be relaxed?
Glenn Lowry:
I believe strongly that the guidelines around deaccessioning at the AAMD [Association of Art Museum Directors] should be changed to allow for the use of funds to be directed towards program.
The way I would do that is to stipulate that any work of art deaccessioned, that wasn't used by another work of art, the funds would be put in an endowment, and the draw on the endowment would allow for program. In other words, you never burn the value. You convert the value of a work of art into an endowment that could support program, but it could also support more acquisitions. There’s nothing that would preclude it.
But I just think at the end of the day, that is going to have to happen. We are a large organization with many different points of view. We arrived at this as a next step. And I'm sure that over time, there will be further conversations and there will be further changes as the membership of the AAMD sees fit. We all had to come to a point that we could agree on. And so we did.
Charlotte Burns:
You also talked about this idea of sharing collections. Do you think that will be a thing that museums might be less rivalrous about their holdings and actually have a kind of national sharing program?
Glenn Lowry:
Many of us already collaborate with other institutions in the acquisition of works of art and in the sharing of our resources. So this is not new, I just think we need to see it done at a more elevated and regular level.
And a perfect example, the Museum of Modern Art had collection galleries and one of the unwritten rules was that only collection could be shown in the gallery. So if you needed to show something, you had to own it.
If you really step back and think about it, how many times are you going to use it? And is it truly necessary to own everything you display? That feels to me like a very old model. We want to tell new stories. We want to engage new artists, we want to take risks. And therefore we want to have a backbone, a frame, that is our collection, but we want to constantly amplify it with works of art that we don't necessarily own or perhaps could never own, because they're already owned by another institution.
Charlotte Burns:
So Glenn, you're more experienced probably than anyone I've ever interviewed about museums and running MoMA at the level you have for all these years. What if you could change the model? What if you could make it different? What would you do now with the experience you have? How could it be better?
Glenn Lowry:
I think we need to imagine ways that we can expand the expertise that are on boards. And that's not just about diversity, it's about different forms of knowledge. Because I think at the end of the day, there's a simple rule that I believe in, which is no institution can be better than its board. So we want outstanding boards at our institutions, so we can have outstanding institutions. So I think, thinking about how to make boards even better than they are.
Charlotte Burns:
How do you do that?
Glenn Lowry:
I think those are discussions that boards have to have within themselves and perhaps with leadership at institutions. And to…you said, what would I like to see? Doesn't mean that I will see it. But I'd like to see, you know, a more robust conversation across all of the boards of museums that look at how to engage new and different forms of knowledge.
I would like to see us ensure the viability of the kind of program that we've developed, which sees our collection as an ongoing series of exchanges, intellectual, programmatic, artistic. That's very hard to do. It's very labor intensive, and it's very costly. So I'd like to see that truly locked in.
I'd like to see us have the resources to continue to expand the knowledge base of our staff. We just started a program through the Ford Foundation of inviting senior scholars from different disciplines to be resident at the museum for a year, to just animate our conversations. I'd like to see how we can make that even more entrenched within the work we do so that we are truly a place of ideas.
You know, and I want to make sure, I'd like to see us have the resources to live our dreams. I mean, at the end of the day, that's what I would love all of our institutions to do, to be sufficiently well resourced that they can live their dreams.
Charlotte Burns:
So Glenn, what are your plans? Do you have a sense of when you might be thinking of stepping away from being the director of MoMA? How do you feel about that?
Glenn Lowry:
You know, I get on my bike every weekend a couple times during the week and I ride as hard as I can. And I go to work and I work as hard as I can. And that's what I think about.
Charlotte Burns:
If you could pick your successor, do you think about that?
Glenn Lowry:
It's really not up to me to pick my successor. As I told you, I don't think about legacy. I try to be focused in the day. Focused in the moment, in what I do. And I have a lot of confidence that our board will pick an outstanding person who will do an even better job, and I think that will be fabulous.
Charlotte Burns:
You began as a specialist in Islamic art, do you think you'd return to that? Do you see yourself staying in museums? Would you like to go to run another institution? Or is that just the last thing you could imagine?
Glenn Lowry:
No, look, I've had a fabulous run at one of the greatest institutions in the world. And I've loved every moment of it even…I can't say I've lived every moment of the last few years. But it has been a really thrilling time, I've learned an enormous amount. And I still learn an enormous amount from staff and our trustees and the artists I get to work with. And that's just invigorating. You know, the next…Whatever comes next will happen. And I've, I suppose, been lucky enough that that next step has appeared at the right moment. And the board will be quite clear sighted in when it feels my time is up. You know, we all have an expiration date. I probably have lived long past mine. And that's fine.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you have a sense of what you want to do next? Are you just going to get on your bike and think about that then?
Glenn Lowry:
I’m going to get on my bike and I'm going to think about that. I still am deeply interested in the Middle East, I do a lot of work on contemporary art in the Middle East. That's a field that retains a lot of interest and focus for me. But there are a lot of other things I'm interested in too. So you know, the future will bring what it does.
Charlotte Burns:
So the other thing I wanted to ask you is, how being a parent has impacted your creative practice.
Glenn Lowry:
Patience, which is not necessarily something that comes naturally to me, is truly a virtue. That if you want your children to learn and to grow, you have to understand the speed at which they can do that. This isn't your speed, it's their speed. And I think being a parent teaches you an enormous amount about humility. Which is a good lesson for all of us to have.
Charlotte Burns:
What are the things you stand for, if you were going to define them. What do you believe in?
Glenn Lowry:
The belief first and foremost that art is one of the most important human creations and that we, as a society, have a responsibility to ensure that we have a climate in which art can be made, that celebrates human creativity, that celebrates dreaming. Integrity, I hope. Community and collaboration. And above all a respect for knowledge and expertise.
Charlotte Burns:
Glenn, I think there's a perfect end to the show, thank you so much.
Glenn Lowry:
It’s a pleasure.
[Music break]
Charlotte Burns:
Thanks again to Glenn Lowry for sharing his deep insight into the art world and its futures. And for helping us think about so many ‘what ifs’.
Join us next time. We’ll be talking to Kemi Ilesanmi, community amplifier, and the extraordinary now-former executive director of The Laundromat Project, which has trained and commissioned more than 200 artists. Our conversation covers her belief in abundance, the power of everyday art and—of data.
Kemi Illesanmi:
No one has actually called me a data nerd. So I really appreciate that.
Charlotte Burns:
It's a highest compliment.
Kemi Illesanmi:
I accept. One of the things that really drove me in putting HueArts together was a dream of what it might look like for a young person of color, who wants to make a life working with culturally specific, as in people-of-color-run arts organizations.
That, in this moment, would feel like an incredibly bold statement. And it shouldn't.
Charlotte Burns:
That’s next time on The Art World: What If…?!
The podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.