museums operate in the next 5-10 years?
frustrations among all parties involved. It’s often difficult to reconcile a vision for how good things could be, with the realities of budget and resource limitations. How has the landscape changed for museums in recent years, and how are you evolving to stay current? Relating to my earlier point about public funding, we must work solidly to change what would once have been seen as secondary spend, secondary priority, into a primary source of income. For example, I think perhaps museum cafes in the past might not have given much thought to food trends, the quality of the coffee they serve and indeed the environment in which visitors can sit and enjoy refreshments, whereas we now recognise
that this needs to be an area of focus for us. Our offering in terms of visitor journey must be consistent, and every area of experience must be reflective of the quality of our collections. Nowadays, we make decisions on menus in line with other destination restaurants instead of exclusively comparing with other museums and I think cross- sector benchmarking will become increasingly relevant. We absolutely should be looking at who our non-museum competitors are in the conferencing and banqueting market, for example, instead of solely pitching ourselves against other cultural organisations. What do you think will be the biggest changes to the way
I would be very surprised if we don’t see more museums taking bolder investment decisions, such as property portfolios, car parks etc – in fact, we are starting to see that already – to increase revenue beyond the three core trading areas I mentioned previously. I also think that how we evolve our digital landscape will be interesting to see, and I see it following one of two paths: either we will become so much more focussed societally around technology, with apps and smartphones growing more sophisticated by the day, that exhibitions will become even more interesting and interactive, with digital add-ons providing a higher
“it doesn’t matter whether someone is inspired by walking into a retail gallery on their local high street or one of the big national museums, as long as we – as an industry – continue to inspire.”
FINE ART COLLECTOR AUTUMN 2017 7
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