COST CENTRE MUSEOLOGY & NEW MUSEOLOGY

Typically, traditional museology delivered static ‘displays’ and passive programming – not to mention the elitism and exclusivity that comes with the paradigm. This paradigm is/was well enough served by the cost centre funding model – a model where income generation is only coincidental. So long as budgets are not over extended the funding method works well enough and comfortably enough. 

However, with audiences demanding more aggressive programming, even seeking more audacious programming, the calls on budgets grow accordingly. Moreover, it requires a level of risk taking that is almost untenable in the cost centre model as cost centres tend to presume a non income generative stance. 

This is well explained by the research quest. If a researcher knew the outcome of their investigation at the outset, why do the research? In the cost centre model outcomes are deliberately predetermined but the question of relevance is rarely asked. The imperative is to maintain the status quo at any cost and with little or no room for serendipitous moments – the muser’s quest. 

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Currently, the capacity to increase budgets by means of broad based punitive rates, taxes and levies is diminishing as real costs climb. Thus the competition for funds for musingplace budgets has become more intense as incomes stagnate or diminish and the call on people’s incomes diversifies. 

The consequential chain of events under a cost centre model is ever likely to lead to diminished performance and productivity levels with falling or stagnating visitor numbers – and so on. Under closer scrutiny, pressure is ever likely to be pushing for the delivery of more and more from less and less attainable levels of productivity and performance. 

The New Museology 

In the world of musingplaces there is a quiet revolution in progress and that is informed by the ‘new museology’ mode of operation. That is a paradigm where the shift is on and is moving from ‘giving it to them’ to ‘doing it, musing, with them’ – musingplaces’ Communities of Ownership & Interest that is. 

A mark of an institution's engagement with new museology would be its participatory programming.

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Opportunity dividends need to be sought in order to meet these expectations and for musingplaces to operate sustainably. There is little evidence that this might be on many agendas or that many musingplaces are trying to imagine what they might look like. 

To break this nexus it would appear that there is a need for some Govt. mechanism to be put in place to regulate musingplaces in the way charities, education facilities and not-for-profit enterprises are. 

These instrumentalities are oversighted and regulated to protect the public from their potential failings,  their possible administrative excesses and their being functionally unaccountable.

FUNDING THE MUSE

Contingent on there being a paradigm shift in regard to how musingplaces are imagined and understood in the wider community, new funding methods, indeed a whole new funding paradigm, needs to be explored. 

Once you put aside old/traditional museology models, entrepreneurial opportunities are opened up. Under the closed loop cost centre funding model it was virtually untenable for musingplaces to be income generative except for charging tokenistic entrance fees typically designed to meet peripheral costs.

Often this tactic backfired with visitor numbers falling and programs being judged more critically, more harshly even when they fell short of their mark. 

If musingplaces equip themselves to operate in the open market, and in competition with all players, there are untapped, unexplored and unimagined opportunities to be explored. This once no-go area needs to be revisited – and with gusto. Musingplaces have rich storehouses to be ‘put to work’ – not plundered – and with the 21st C new museology paradigm increasingly making it an imperative,  entrepreneurship need to be enthusiastically embraced. This might well go to standalone for-profit businesses being established to generate profits that subsidise aspects of a musingplace's non-income generative activity.

Crowdfunding is gaining favour as funding method for a diversity of projects especially those devised to kick-start an ‘enterprise’. Interestingly successful funding under this model comes with peer group assessment of a kind that government instrumentalities could not replicate. Indeed, public funding agencies are beginning to use crowdfunding as an element in their funding mechanisms and assessment procedures.

Congratulated by crowdfunding it becomes politically more palatable to fund something, or an aspect of it, but not from the ‘public purse’.

Elsewhere in the world the lottery mechanisms, rather than taxation, are used to underwrite aspects of cultural development funding. In fact the Sydney Opera House was funded by a lottery and in Western Australia Lotterywest plays a significant role in arts funding. Likewise, MYlotto has played an important role in New Zealand’s arts funding since 1987.

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Musingplaces might well imagine themselves as Community Cultural Enterprises – a version of social enterprise. While being ‘risk aware’ such enterprises offer ever expanding frontiers to be explored, interrogated, drawn upon, delved into even. Interestingly, new enterprise models seem to be emerging facilitated and/or articlated by the Internet – B corporations among them.

The binary of the unsustainable cost centre and the sustainable enterprise, survival against success, becomes somewhat compelling evidence in favour of success – just so long as the risks are mitigated – and a need for change to meet contemporary circumstances.

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Accordingly, the development of a network of musingplaces in Tasmania that are cooperating community enterprises seems to be a productive, and enriching, proposition. It is one that outshines the simple survival of the ever diminishing prospects of cost centre thinking and the counterproductive ‘cargo cult management’ mindsets. All too often this kind of folly comes with the cost centre paradigm in the time warped beliefs that nurtures these dollar-induced worldviews. Nonetheless, all this does offer us something to muse upon.