Is it OK to Smash That? The Complications of Living Art Museums

Every day for the past two months, a man has entered the largest gallery in my museum. He takes a crowbar out of a Swiss Army backpack. He smashes a sculpture of an animal.

This is not a crime.

The man is artist Rocky Lewycky, whose work is part of a group show of visual artists who have won a prestigious regional fellowship. His project, Is It Necessary?, blends sculpture, repetition, and ritual performance in a political statement about the genocide of animals in factory farms.

Sometimes, Rocky lets visitors join in on the smashing. It's a powerful experience for those who participate. It also complicates the question of what is acceptable in a museum. If an artist can come into a museum and smash stuff, what does that tell visitors? If visitors can smash stuff when anointed to do so by an artist, but not otherwise, how do they understand that action?

I thought about all of this when reading about the recent incident at the Perez Art Museum Miami, where artist Maximo Carminero smashed a vase by Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in an unauthorized act of visitor participation. The vase was itself an appropriated/ritually-vandalized object: a centuries-old vase that Wei Wei had dipped in commercial paint. One of Ai Wei Wei's most well-known pieces was a performance in which he dropped a Han Dynasty urn, smashing it to pieces.

While some in the art world are heralding Carminero's act as expanding the role of art to disrupt and make political statements, I feel that this is a pretty straightforward issue of a criminal act. It is not acceptable to walk into a museum and destroy another artist's work of art. Period.

But does the fact that Ai Wei Wei smashes work himself complicate the issue? Definitely. Do I worry that a visitor might see what's happening in Rocky Lewycky's project at my museum and be confused about our museum's approach to protecting artwork? Absolutely. Is all of this confusion worth it? Yes.

These performances and incidents are artifacts of a shift in art museums towards being "living" institutions. Art museums have often been criticized by some for being mausoleums for art, with conservators serving as unctuous morticians. A practice-based artist once colorfully described art museums to me as "places where art goes to die."

But art museums are coming back from the dead. They are hosting performances, exhibitions that morph over time, artists who work in practice-based media, who break the fourth wall with the audience, who invite participation, and who deliberately disrupt museum conventions.

All of these developments are exciting to me. But these shifts come with necessary questions about how to scaffold the visitor experience in a "living" space so people understand what the heck is happening, how they can participate, and what is out-of-bounds. Whether it's a "please touch" label or a gallery host who invites you in and sets the ground rules, the scaffolding is essential. I've seen participatory artworks that lay untouched by visitors because the invitation to participate is not explicit enough. I've seen other projects that are so hemmed in by fear of "what visitors will do" that they can't bloom.

Unfortunately, instead of clear scaffolding, what I often see are institutions shirking their responsibility, closing their eyes and letting visitors figure it out. It's unreasonable to imagine that visitors will intuitively understand which rules apply to which areas and artworks. The rules of museum-going are already opaque. Throw in a few participatory elements, and suddenly you have visitors trying to arbitrate amongst themselves. I've seen visitors yell at each other for participating in exhibitions in ways that the institution was actually trying to encourage. I've seen visitors watch each other participate with confusion, wondering if that other person was "getting away" with something they too would like to try.

All of this confusion is harmful and unnecessary. Scaffolding can both clarify new opportunities for engagement AND define the limits of that engagement. It doesn't have to be complicated or involve release forms. It just needs to be clear. I know I could do a better job of making sure we scaffold the more unorthodox projects at our museum. Some of my biggest mistakes have come when we didn't scaffold and contextualize enough. We keep thinking about what we can do to help people understand what is happening and what is possible with clarity and confidence.

In the best cases, art museums are able to "live" in ways that honor the diversity of creative expression and ways that artists engage with their artwork and their audiences. This requires acknowledging and engaging with the messiness of the work, anticipating the challenges, and communicating new opportunities. This kind of scaffolding won't eradicate destructive criminal acts. But it will open up the possibility for participation and experimental work with less fear.

What Tools Do You Use to Organize Your Work?

One of the benefits of being Jewish is the opportunity to work over the Christmas week in peace. It is the most focused time of the year for me--a great time to close out projects and prepare for the new year. For me, the end of 2013 coincided with a clear need to improve my general approach to list-making, task-recording, and note-taking. In 2013, I found myself constantly shaking my notebook and hoping that the needed bit of information would drop out. Until I figure out how to turn a notebook into a magic deck of cards--or at least embed a Command-F function into it--I need a better system.

There's a whole industry of tools and tips for getting things done, and I don't intend to add this blog to that empire. But I figure that we all have come up with tools that help us, both individually and in teams, to organize our work. I wanted to open up this post to your favorite approaches, especially simple things that don't require specialized software etc.

Here are five things I've started doing in 2014 that seem to be working:

1. Added a Today list to my to-dos. I've always had a long task list on my desktop. I used to separate the list into two parts: "This Week" and specific projects. I almost exclusively worked from the This Week list, but it rarely got shorter and it became clear over time that some things on This Week were actually more like This Century. So I've added just one simple component to this list system: a list at the top called "Today." In the morning, first thing when I come in, I move things from This Week to Today and also add other things. I try to truly only include things I think I can accomplish that day, being mindful of my calendar. My rule of thumb is that I should be able to close out the Today list by noon. This means that most days, I finish the Today list, feel good about that accomplishment, and feel ready to "pull up" something from This Week to work on later in the day. I'm amazed at how This Week is getting smaller, even as new projects continue to come up.
2. Blocking time on my calendar to work on projects. My calendar tends to be quite open a few weeks out, but totally packed within the next fourteen days. If it doesn't get calendared, it will get squeezed out. I had blocked time for grant proposals in the past but now have expanded this practice to other work that requires concentrated blocks of time.
3. Separated Tasks from Notes. My notebook used to have both tasks and notes, which made it a mix of big ideas and time-limited, potentially trivial activities. Now, I use the notebook strictly for notes, and I use a mixture of my digital task list and scrap paper for task lists.
4. Added a Table of Contents to my new notebook. This meant doing two things: numbering the pages and leaving a few blank in the front for the Table of Contents. I'm sure I could do this better, but for now, I just put a couple of big ongoing project headings in the Table of Contents and started marking pages on which notes for those projects occur.
5. Started using Follow Up Then. OK, this is a piece of software, but it's free and super-easy to use. FollowUpThen is a system that allows you to forward any email to yourself at a time in the future ("monday" or "march2" or "2pm"). The email will pop up in your inbox at the designated time. I use this tool to clear my inbox of things that I need to follow up on eventually but not now. I get a couple hundred emails each day, and this allows me to focus on what I need to do and not waste time scanning my inbox and re-acquainting myself with things I guiltily feel that I should do. When something pops up from FollowUpThen, I know it's something I should consider to be on my "Today" list.

What do you use to lasso your tasks, goals, and dreams?

Arts Assessment: Let's Stop "Proving" and Start Improving

Research and assessment is rare in the arts, and it tends to focus on "proving" our value. Economic impact studies. Studies of how arts participation affects student test scores. This kind of research has two big problems:

1. It puts most of our assessment capacity into research for someone else, on someone else's terms. It is rarely at the heart of what we do best or are most passionate about. As Ben Cameron recently said, "I don't know any artist who started a theater company saying, 'let's go out and improve some test scores!'"
2. It prevents us from focusing on research that could transform our own work. Instead, we use research to try to convince someone else to change their work. And given what I've seen on micro and macro-levels in arts funding and power, I don't think this strategy is working. 

I'd love to see an increase in the arts' commitment to research. But we should stop using it to prove that our work is valuable and start using it to improve the work that we do.

Consider the recent research at the University of Arkansas about the value of school field trips to cultural institutions. Educational reform researchers did a rigorous study of school groups that experienced a single one-hour guided tour of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. They found that students who received the tour--compared against a control group of students who did not visit the museum--retained content, increased their critical thinking skills, increased their "historical empathy" for people who lived in different places and times, increased their tolerance for diverse points of view, and increased their interest in visiting museums. The study was extensive and methodologically robust, and the results are making the rounds of museum and art publications and blogs.

But what is the value of a study that tells us that museum visits make a difference? My sense in reading the reports is that this research was intended partly to "prove" the value of a museum school field trip to policymakers. The "Policy Implications" section of the overview report focuses almost entirely on implications outside the museum, encouraging school administrators to provide resources for tours of cultural institutions and philanthropists to fund them.

In my conversations with administrators about field trips, the educational value of the trips never comes up. That is a given. Everyone would like more field trips. Everyone thinks they are valuable. The conversation is always about resources; money for buses, parents to chaperone, time to get away. When the Crystal Bridges research was published on EducationNext, a teacher wrote in, effusive about the impact of museums on her students. She didn't need data to believe in the value of museums. She needed money. I am very, very skeptical that this research could move the needle on her ability to pay for the bus to get to the museum.

Instead of focusing on policy implications for someone outside our sphere of control, I'd love to see this kind of research used to change policy inside the museum. Reading the Crystal Bridges report, I was struck by several questions:

• All of these test subjects received a docent tour. How do their outcomes differ from school groups who visit but do not have a facilitated experience? Should museums put more resources into docent programs, or fewer?
• The outcomes were significantly higher for students from "less-advantaged backgrounds." In fact, the impact for advantaged students (larger towns, wealthier schools) was "smaller or null." Does this mean we should prioritize offering docent tours to school groups from rural and poorer schools? Should we put resources into those offerings at the expense of offerings to school groups from wealthier schools? 
• If a museum cared about one of these outcomes specifically (i.e. content retention vs. historical empathy vs. tolerance), what could they do to their tour program to "dial up" that outcome?

I'm most interested in measurement that moves an organization forward. There are occasionally instances when measurement can move a funder, or an elected official, or a community. But that movement, especially when it comes to proving the value of the arts, has been slow. I believe that our ability to "prove" our value is most correlated not to our economic impact and test score inflation but to our ability to do what we do best. And to do it most powerfully, we need research that can guide us to better choices and approaches. When we improve our own work, we prove our value. 

At least, that's my hypothesis. I guess we'll have to test it.

Do You Empower People to Take Action? Thoughts on Zoos and Charity:Water

Last week, I learned that ninety-six elephants are killed every day in Africa.

I learned this at a conference for directors of American zoos and aquaria (I was there to give a talk). I was blown away by these zoo directors' collective focus on a singular mission: ensuring the survival of animal species worldwide. The whole day was spent in passionate discussion about research projects, international crises, and serious, cost-intensive efforts for zoos and aquaria to take action to improve the fate of elephants and other species at risk.

I would guess that most people have no idea that this work is happening at zoos. I certainly didn't. I had a vague sense of how conservation fit into their educational missions, but I didn't realize the extent of the direct advocacy and activism happening every day.

And so, rather than talking about community participation in the context of zoo visits, I asked these directors: how can you involve your 180 million visitors in this important conservation work? How can you invite them to participate alongside you to save species?

In museums (and zoos), we frequently stop the conversation with visitors when it comes to action--especially political action. We give people content and then we say, "you decide." This may make sense in strictly education institutions, but it is ridiculous to stop there in organizations that are already engaged in activist work. If you are taking action to save species, why not invite visitors to join you?

We often stop at the educational message out of a sense that it gives visitors agency to do what they want with the information provided. But that means we also stop ourselves from inviting visitors to join us in the work that matters most. It devalues their potential contribution. It robs them of the opportunity to make a difference--and robs us of the opportunity for increased impact and change.

A clear example of this can be found in the difference between the 96Elephants campaign and that of charity: water.

The 96Elephants website is a dramatic educational site created by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the zoos and aquaria in NYC. The site provides a powerful statement about the slaughter of elephants in Africa, supported with rich media and educational text. But when you get to the part with the call to action, there are two things you can do:

1. "explore the crisis" by reading more about elephants and humans on the site
2. sign a pledge to avoid ivory products and encourage a moratorium on ivory products

These are not exactly life-changing actions.

In contrast, check out charity: water, a non-profit that works to ensure safe drinking water for people around the world. The homepage has three prominent options: 

1. sponsor a water project (which involves making donations of $6,000 - $20,000)
2. start a fundraising campaign 
3. learn about the water crisis

It's no accident that only one of these three is a "learn" box. The first two are opportunities to immediately get involved, either by donating money or raising it. charity: water is incredible at empowering regular people to make a difference. You can donate your birthday to raise funds for clean water. You can track exactly where what projects your money supports. Paul Young, the Director of Digital at charity: water, explains: “We are trying to build a movement of passionate people who are going to form a relationship with us for years…. We want our donors to be advocates. We want them to share content, we want them to feel really connected to their impact and we want them to represent that to all their friends and family.”

A lot has been written about how charity: water stands out online. Just surf through their beautiful site and you'll see how they empower people as participants in raising serious funds for their cause.

Zoos have an entry point that charity: water lacks: the visit. Zoos have millions of visitors--millions of people who care about animals, who are interested in them, and who show up to learn more about them. Some of those visitors, looking at the majestic African elephants, are ready to take action to ensure their survival. They are ready to do more than learn about the crisis and sign a petition. If charity: water can do it for drinking water, surely zoos and aquaria can do it for animals.

Fundraisers often say that "it's an honor to be asked." This can sound disingenuous. But it's true. When we invite people to share our greatest passions, when we invite them to support our most important work, we empower them to be meaningful, powerful participants. That's what building a movement is all about.

Quick Hit: Upcoming Talks on Leading Change

Let's say you want to transform an organization. What's more effective: drastic change with incremental progress towards that new vision, or incremental change that builds a new vision?

I'm prepping for a week of talks to museum, zoo, and library folk, and this is the question that is driving some of what I plan to share. Note: if you are in NYC area or Toronto, I have FREE talks in each - see bottom of this post for details. Preparing talks is always a great opportunity to reframe my thinking about what's going on in my work and how it might be relevant to others. And this time, since a couple of the talks I'm giving are explicitly for directors, I'm thinking about leadership and institutional change.

In thinking about some of the changes that have happened at our museum in Santa Cruz, I've realized that they were predicated on setting a clear, big vision first, and then incrementally moving towards that goal. When I write it down, that sounds like a pretty obvious approach. But change doesn't always happen that way. Sometimes there's a new direction but not a known destination. Sometimes an organization noodles with change in many areas and finds itself wobbling into a new place entirely.

Here's my hypothesis: while a top-down approach may seem autocratic, it can be incredibly inclusive and democratic in implementation. When there is a very clear, explicit vision and goals, many people across an organization can become leaders in the change. When the vision is clouded or the goals uncertain, you are stuck with a "I know it when I see it" approach to change that may leave people frustrated or mystified as to how they can make a difference.

I'm struggling with this now as we embark on our next phase as an organization--one with more distributed leadership. That distribution hopefully means more collective ownership. But if we don't do it right, it could also possibly mean more confusion, and, paradoxically, less participation.

I remember talking with a director of a large public radio station about many innovative things happening at his organization. "But you know," he said, "when I'm really honest, I realize that most of these ideas ultimately come from my desk." When I heard that, I wondered if everyone in his organization knew what his vision was for tremendous work. I wondered if he was articulating it clearly enough for others to bring brilliant ideas forward. I wondered what I could do to avoid that kind of feeling.

When I see projects at my museum that I'm proud of, more often than not they are things I have very little to do with directly. They are projects led by staff members, volunteers, and collaborators who are infused with our vision. They can make magic and scale up our impact because they know what we are trying to achieve and they want to be part of it.

So I'm planning to use these talks to encourage people--especially directors--to articulate clear, powerful visions. To fight for those visions, support people who want to further them, and protect those people from detractors. I'm not sure this is the best way to lead institutional change. But it's a way that has allowed our work to get out into our community quickly and powerfully, often without having to touch my desk at all.


If you happen to be in New York/New Jersey or Toronto, I will be speaking:

• JERSEY: Monday January 27 at Seton Hall at 7pm in the Walsh Library, Beck Rooms. I don't really know where that is, but I'm sure we can all figure it out. No RSVP required.
• TORONTO: Thursday January 30 at the Textile Museum from 4-6pm. This is a more informal talk/dialogue. They can only fit 70 people, so you must RSVP to programs@textilemuseum.ca

I look forward to traveling, speaking, and learning with you in the next week.

Teenagers, Space-Makers, and Scaling Up to Change the World

This week, my colleague Emily Hope Dobkin has a beautiful guest post on the Incluseum blog about the Subjects to Change teen program that Emily runs at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

Subjects to Change is an unusual museum program in that it explicitly focuses on empowering teens as community leaders. While art, history, creativity, and culture are the vehicles for that empowerment, the teens involved spend a lot of their time with activists, civic leaders, and social psychologists. They describe themselves as "a group of chronic doodlers who dig music, embrace creativity of all kinds, and are determined to not only make our community better, but want to get other teens involved."

Emily's post shares three things Subjects to Change has taught her about youth and community leadership. I want to return the favor with three things this project brings up for me.

Community-building/engagement is related to but not identical to content engagement. Subjects to Change isn't an art club or a history group. It's about empowerment and community leadership through art and history. One of the reasons Emily took this approach was based on what we saw in the ecology of teen programs. We heard from youth program leaders at museums who struggle to keep teens engaged despite a huge amount of committed resources. We saw a lot of intense hand-holding and not a lot of youth ownership. In contrast, when we looked at the programs we admire most locally, they all are fundamentally focused on youth as leaders and changemakers in their own lives and community. Whether they are using skateboarding to grind out child hunger or changing their own fate through farming, we saw teens taking agency and being leaders in ways we hadn't seen in arts organizations.

This meant really stripping back to our mission in developing this program and being willing to let the teens lead us in some unexpected directions. For example, they are planning a series of teen nights at the museum, complete with art activities, history exploration, youth bands, etc., but themed around community issues like "public safety" and "gender representation."

I'm completely curious as to whether their peers will actually want to come to a museum on a Friday night about public safety. I'm a little amazed that this is happening at the museum at all. It's hard to imagine a staff member pitching a public safety-themed event and everyone feeling like it is a good idea. But every step of the way these teens have shown that the issues they care about are compelling to lots of people (of all ages) in our community, and that they are ready to do meaningful work to engage people around those issues.

Scale is still a challenge for co-creative work. Subjects to Change engages fifteen teenagers. Many are having a life-changing experience, but still, it's fifteen people. How do we scale this impact to reach more people? This is a chronic problem of in-depth co-creative projects. In many museums, these tend to be youth-focused projects. In lean years, it's hard to justify focusing so many resources on a small group.

Watching these teens do their work has expanded my thinking on the issue of scale. If these teens truly become community leaders through their work with us, they will extend their impact beyond themselves. They are forming partnerships in the community, developing events to reach more teens, and developing content for general museum events. We are already seeing a difference in the makeup of our audience on the nights that these teens are involved because of their attendant communities.

This makes me realize that a leadership-focused program is fundamentally different than one that focuses inward. A city council, for example, is necessarily small and consumes a ton of resources. If outreach and community leadership is the meat of the program, maybe the scale problem isn't as big an issue as I had previously thought.

Space-making is magic. I've written before about Beck Tench's beautiful framing of how "every risk-taker needs a space-maker" to clear the path for experimentation. Emily's generous first line of her blog post makes me realize that this concept of "space-making" is bigger than just supporting risk-taking. It's about making space for real change to happen, and to grow, throughout an organization and a community. I am starting to wonder how we could take this lens to more of the work we do, both as managers internally and as facilitators of community experiences externally. Space-making may be the ultimate strategy for scaling up.

The Most Popular Part of our Weekly Museum E-Newsletter

It's not what you think.

It's not a great photo of people enjoying the museum. It's not a witty description of an upcoming event. It's the wishlist.

At any given time, we are on a hunter/gatherer mission for an upcoming project at our museum. Right now, we're looking for wood chips for a creature-making workshop. Last month it was cardboard boxes for a collaborative opera. Last summer it was beach chairs for a history exhibit.

When one of these needs arises, we approach it in a simple way: we ask people. About once a month, our weekly e-newsletter includes a request for humble items. It's not uncommon for someone to bring in a trash can full of wine corks or to load up a bike trailer with cardboard (OK, his blog post about it was a special touch).

The wishlist is the most responded-to part of our e-newsletter. On one level, this seems kind of preposterous. We provide plenty of intriguing content about exhibitions and events and the thing people click on most is the request for bottle caps.

But on another level, the wishlist is the most participatory part of the newsletter. It's the one part that begs a response.

One woman came up to me last Friday night at the museum to say: "I love reading the wishlist. I am always curious to see if I have some junk that could be useful, and then I like wondering what you guys are going to do with it."

When she said this, I realized that what we thought of as a thrifty practicality is actually a great symbol of our participatory, inclusive ethos. Being a participatory museum means looking at every person who walks in our doors as someone who can contribute meaningfully to the institution. It means making the path to participation clear, easy, and fun. It means turning their contributions into magic.

Join us for Museum Camp 2014 on Social Impact Assessment

What is the change you hope your work effects in your community? Igniting compassion? Building a more creative workforce? Bridging cultural differences?

We all have aspirational social impact goals for our organizations. These goals are expressed in mission and vision statements. They are hinted at in fundraising letters. They are stewing in our guts when we wake up to get to work.

But how do we measure them? How do we know if our work leads to an increase in compassion, or unity, or creativity? How can we learn from our successes and failures and adapt our work to increase impact?

These are the questions that underpin Museum Camp 2014, a professional development experience in which diverse people from the arts, community activism, and social services will measure the immeasurable together. Our focus is on social impact in communities, and we will encourage teams to look at complex outcomes--like safety, cohesion, compassion, and identity--that are not commonly covered in our standard evaluative practices. We will do this by defining impacts of interest, identifying indicators of those impacts, developing creative ways to measure the indicators, actually doing the measurements, and reporting on the results. And we'll do this all in three days on July 30-August 2, 2014 in Santa Cruz, CA.

This is the second year that the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History (MAH) is hosting Museum Camp. Last year, the focus was on risk-taking in exhibition design. This year, the focus is social impact assessment. While the topics and the participants are entirely different, the core format is the same: three days, small teams of people from diverse backgrounds, intense learning, doing, and playing in a collaborative environment. It's summer camp for adults, 'smores included.

Because we at the MAH are not experts in this social impact assessment, we are working with smart researchers and evaluators from the arts, social services, academia, and social justice organizations to make this camp happen. We are co-presenting Museum Camp with Fractured Atlas, an organization that inspires me for their thoughtful approach to making art measurable and meaningful. Ian David Moss, Fractured Atlas's Research Director (and the rockstar behind the Createquity blog) and I are working together to develop the camp content and recruit brilliant counselors to support the process. This is the beginning of a couple partnerships between Fractured Atlas and the MAH, and I am PSYCHED to work with and learn from Ian and their crew. We also have some great counselors onboard from United Way, WolfBrown, and Animating Democracy@Americans for the Arts (and more to come).

If you are interested in applying to attend camp, please check out the site and fill out an application today. We will accept applications through February 28 and inform people of our selections in early March. Space is extremely limited, so I encourage you to apply soon.

We are particularly interested in applications from people who are NOT in the arts or museums. Last year, many campers felt that the best part of the experience was the diversity of people in the camp. The strength of our experience together is partly based on the opportunity to come together across different disciplines and perspectives, and we want to continue pushing for that. So please, spread the word--and if you have a friend who you think would love this, encourage them to apply.

My Favorite Fundraising Email

Tis the season for end of the year fundraising letters. Now that I run a museum, I read this mail with particular interest. I'm always curious how organizations represent themselves, what they ask of me, and what they assume.

This is also the season for grappling with where to make donations and how to rationalize those choices. I loved this article by Talia Gibas about effective altruism and the relative value of giving to cultural organizations versus other causes. It is sparking conversation in the arts blogosphere and my own kitchen. Rather than retread the issue, I recommend you just read Talia's post.

I thought about "effective altruism" in a new light today when I received a fundraising email from Machine Project, an amazing experimental art space in LA, entitled "Another Year, Another (Even Larger) Hole in the Floor."

Here is the body of that email:

Dear Friends, 

Mark Allen here, Machine Project founder. As you probably saw, we just did this absurd project where we turned the gallery into a 99 cent store, which led to a disgusting bathroom, which led to a cave, which led to a secret door in the wall, which led to stairs in the middle of the floor, which led to a secret underground theatre. I raised the money to cut the giant hole in our floor and that was great, but I kind of forgot I also needed to fundraise to pay our rent. That wasn't so great!  

So, I'm taking this moment to hypnotize you into becoming a member, or renewing your membership, or making a donation of any amount of money, gold, yachts, or airplanes. Stare deeply into the eyes of the below image...1...2...3....

Excellent. You are completely under the power of this email. Now, without hesitation go directly here and join us for whatever wonders 2014 shall hold. 

best,
Mark and the rest of the elves at Machine Project

This email reminds me that in addition to all the serious work we do to demonstrate the value of the arts to society, it's worth acknowledging the value in providing pleasure, provocation, and joy. This email is a mini-art experience that I felt inspired to pay for. Was that a philanthropic or a discretionary spending choice? Does it matter?

You don't have to argue your way into being apples if you can celebrate being oranges. And if you can do so with a letter as idiosyncratic as your organization, even better.

Happy yacht-donating.

Guest Post: A Shared Ethics for Museum Internships

Is your museum running on interns? In this guest post, CUNY lecturer and former manager of the Guggenheim Internship program Michelle Millar Fisher makes a passionate argument for the end of unpaid internships. It is a strong, museum-focused complement to an excellent three-parter on Fractured Atlas about the ethics and future of unpaid arts internships. 

One of the most poignant signs I saw waved during the Occupy Movement was held by a young woman who politely advised The System to "F**k your free internships." Free intern labor wasn't ever right, but it has become glaringly unethical in the current post-Lehman-crash era. That protest placard highlighted the unpaid internship as a simultaneous symptom and result of badly broken political and social systems.

If you're reading this at work, you're probably reading it within ten feet of an unpaid intern. It's probably a path you had to navigate too. There's a sense of "it worked for me...." And it does - it did work for me. I got my first real job in a museum (at the Guggenheim) after a life-changing internship. My supervisor was amazing, caring, and supportive. I worked so hard in those three unpaid months that I made myself indispensable and jumped ship from my home country (Scotland) and came to New York. My whole career path has been positively changed by that one internship experience.

However, my experience was an exception to the rule that internships increasingly prove: free labor contributes to the growing inequities of the non-profit labor system. Issues of class and economic status haunt the museum internship. You have to be able to afford to work for free in order to take an internship that will help you onto the career ladder. There are certainly excellent programs that try to circumvent this stereotype, and there are stipends to be had in some museums, but they are far from the norm.

My experience was exceptional for one simple reason: my internship at the Guggenheim was the only unpaid internship I ever did. It was the only one I could afford to do. It was made possible by a small, unexpected windfall. If I hadn't had the windfall, it's highly unlikely that as a first-gen college attendee I would have been exposed to the other opportunities it afforded me. (I have somewhat of a "control" in this social experiment in that my talented sister has plied a similar path to me, but was unable to afford the opportunity of one unpaid internship at a museum. Even though she worked just as hard as I did, it took her five years longer to get her foot on the arts employment ladder than it did for me.)

I have done my very fair share of perpetuating the cycle of unpaid internships. As an Associate Manager of Education, I coordinated internships at the Guggenheim museum for four years before I headed back to academia. I expanded the program from around seventy-five interns per year to over one hundred and thirty in almost every department of the museum. I loved my job, and I think many of the interns had amazing experiences at the museum because we tried to take care of them, introduce them to arts networks through a rich weekly seminar program, and encouraged supervisors to be the best mentors they could. But now, as I counsel my university students, I feel it unethical to recommend the same path I took. I have taken a firm stand. I will not forward unpaid internship postings that come my way and actively respond to the senders, even when I know them well as colleagues: “This is not ethical!”

Is unpaid participation in the life and operations of a museum always a bad thing? No. Are the worst offenders larger museums who know they can get away with asking people to work for free? Yes. Is it unethical to ask college juniors and seniors, graduate students, and recently qualified degree holders to undertake multiple free internships? Absolutely. Making small changes and offering some kind of basic compensation for interns in the arts would benefit us all. If the lowest wage on the ladder is zero, entry-level wages don't have to be much higher, and this affects the whole pay scale for the majority of those who work in non-director positions.

Would some form of universal museum internship standard mitigate this? How about a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:

1. a stipend 
2. a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship 
3. a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship 

I'm constantly surprised at how many students I speak with, even those who are working for college credit where this is meant to be regulated, do not receive any of these three components. A shared ethics on the subject of internships means a shared ethics for human resources in museum more generally. This type of shared ethics can only be a positive thing for both individuals at all levels, and the institution - and thus its visitors. Happy employees (yes, even interns!) mean greater productivity, creativity, and accountability.

 The students I teach in undergrad classrooms in New York are about a decade younger than me. They're the Internship Generation. The more I am faced with their predicament when they ask me about how to balance work experience that won't pay them with study and (especially at the city college where I teach) the jobs that are paying their tuition, or to write them letters of recommendation for unpaid labor, the more uncomfortable I have become.

How could we all better address this issue? Could museum managers agree to hire interns who need the work experience rather than those with a resume already the length of the Nile? Could they agree to put aside a small part of their yearly budget to compensate interns in some way? Could university instructors (especially those with tenure and a voice) steer their interns in the direction of paid opportunities, and campaign within their own departments to end the cycle of internships for credit? Could we all agree to a universal standard under the auspices of a body like the AAM? Are there already internship models out there that do this that we could learn from and offer as examples?

I'm truly interested in any discussion and feedback on this topic, and taking sustained action. I want to do better for my students, and to participate in the rethinking of a broken model I have helped to perpetuate.

What's your vision for the future of internships? Share your thoughts with Michelle and the Museum 2.0 community in the comments.