Smithsonian Struggles to Stay Afloat
While we celebrate the reopening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery as classic examples of what museum care and innovation should be, the Smithsonian Institution at large may be slowly losing its grasp on the rest of its constituency. D.C.-based art critic and blogger Tyler Green has some critical words in a Los Angeles Times op-ed about the dilapidated conditions the other Smithsonian museums are suffering due to Congress' underfunding of the Institution, and the questionable sources to which it is turning as a result.
Green writes that while the Reynolds Center renovations cost just over $200 million, Smithsonian needs over $2 billion to plug the leaking holes and even turn the hot water back on at its other venues. The worst case scenarios are already starting to come true, with the Air and Space Museum finding some of its exhibits water damaged—some irreparably—last year.
This certainly isn’t a new problem—the Smithsonian’s guardians have been begging Congress for more funds for years—but it's certainly starting to reach a breaking point. The New York Times reported in detail last fall about the state of disrepair from which the Institution suffers: leaking pipes at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; dangerous enclosures at the National Zoo; falling metal panels at the Arts and Industries building. The list goes on, but the current federal funding barely keeps the problems from escalating out of control.
The solution is easy to say: more Congressional funding. But while the Smithsonian stands with its hands out waiting for the next penny, it looks to other sources to supplement its coffers. We've discussed the proposed entrance fees, which would be, ultimately, inadquate. The result, as Green notes, is the kind of capitalism that keeps us constantly changing the signs on the MCI Verizon Center, except instead of merely annoying, paid-for advertising on popular spaces, this corporate funding is downright ominous.
The keepers of our national storybook should be more wary than they seem to be about letting private interests have continued influence in the way the pages are written. When you take your children to see an exhibit titled “The Brain: The World Inside Your Head” and emblazoned underneath is “Paid for by the Pfizer Corporation,” will you wonder if Pfizer’s idea about the way the brain works is influenced by their corporate responsibility to advertise the benefits of pharmaceuticals?
Green’s example is one we reported on last month, when we simply had to ask, was General Motors—major donor to the Smithsonian—behind the removal of the EV-1 from the National Museum of American History? Maybe not, but how can we know for sure? How do we know corporate ties won’t whitewash the walls of inconvenient history?
Congress—and we, the taxpayers—should do what needs to be done: hand over the money needed for at least basic repairs, if not the whole sha-bang required to truly update the Institution and safeguard the Wright brothers’ airplane, Old Glory, and even four-year-old Kandula and her family, for generations to come.
Photo by Flickr user jat1974.