Museums are sailing in very stormy weathers!

[Maurice]

Originally Posted by laEspadaAncha

Fortunately, here in the U.S., or at least here in Southern California, our regional museums have largely continued as normal, their funding requirements (AFAIK) mostly received from membership, benefactors, and through fundraising events - here at Balboa Park in San Diego, they've even maintained their rotating schedule of "Free Tuesdays" for San Diego residents. Our one casualty since the crash of 2008 has been a North County sattelite arm of one museum. It's our parks that have suffered the most, with reduced staffing and the consequential closing of park-related museums, such as the Serra Museum at the Presidio, or the San Pasqual Battlefield Museum here in San Diego County, which have both had their hours of opertion reduced to a handful a month.

The National Endowment for the Arts has a total budget of just over $150 million, a fiscal burden that doesn't even appear on the radar of the pragmatic.

I am truly sorry to hear of the closing and/or reduced operational capacity of some of your museums.

Thanks for the information about the regional museums in your neighborhood.
I must admit we have pretty much museums here in this little country, and I agree that not all can survive.
But when it's done with policy, and maybe collaboration between museums, I would have a better feeling about it.
It is necessary to take care of the collections, and keeping them together and open for public.

I know for instance that a lot of the Nijmegen museum pieces are in private hands now, after closing the museum some years ago. Some of them were for sale on the market allready and even I had an Aceh shield of this collection.
Some of the ex-Nijmegen museum pieces are placed amongst collections in other museums. In this way the whole collection had been teared up and nobody is able to trace anything anymore..