This is a complicated question with a complicated answer. Key starting questions are: Does the museum have an in-house exhibitions program, or does it outsource aspects of the program? Many museums keep some curatorial/development, project management capacity in-house and job out design and production. Others have all of the aspects of exhibit creation on the payroll. Museums account for these expenses in a variety of ways, but generally speaking, if your exhibit program is busy with a lot of new exhibitions originated by your museum each year, the cost will go down if your staff handles most of the work because you won't be paying a profit margin on the work of contractors. If your program has a slow level of change, it's probably more economical to outsource some or most of the work. At a bare minimum, an active exhibit program needs someone who can manage projects and be a discerning client, and someone who can maintain exhibits at a high level of working order on the gallery floor.
One classical method for budgeting original exhibits is to do a square footage calculation. The amount of expense to make a new exhibition generally rises by exhibit complexity. Flat artwork or photography, say, is usually the cheapest per square foot; costs rise with the addition of 3D objects (costs of artifact conservation, prep and mounting, vitrines, etc.), mechanical interactives (costs of prototyping, production and repair), custom scenic environments or standardized exhibit furniture components, multimedia (wide ranging depending on whether the media is straight video, interactive, show technology, mobile app), etc., etc. The addition of each one of these exhibit techniques can add $100 to $500 per square foot, depending on how much of your project management/development/design/build capacity is carried on your operating budget and the relative ambition of the pieces. If you want to the exhibit to be innovative, expect to pay a premium and front load more costs in the design/development.
Another factor to consider is whether the backbone of the program is incoming traveling exhibitions. Rental and shipping fees for a traveling exhibit are generally less costly than originating a new exhibit, but once your program is reliant on incoming rental exhibits, the temporary nature of them (12-24 weeks is typical) makes keeping the pace on continual change costly.
There are a host of general corollaries: exhibits with a broader set of interpretive techniques will be more interesting to a broader set of public audiences, but also more expensive and, if there are failures of effective technique, all the costly whistles and bells won't redeem the effort. If you think about the process as a series of three levers: quality, cost and time, each one of those factors is chained to the other two. Quality is always an outcome of the skill of the people doing the work, not only the expertise of each, but their ability to work together as a team. If you want to increase the quality of an exhibit, you will generally need to increase the amount of time and expense involved. The old saw is "You can have it fast, cheap, or good. Pick two." This seems obvious, but I have have encountered many clients over the course of my 30+ year career who insist on all three.
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Daniel Spock
Director, MN History Center Museum
Minnesota Historical Society
Saint Paul MN
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-10-2017 09:05 AM
From: Anna Redington
Subject: Museum Budgets
I'm curious about where to find the fiscal year budget for certain museums. The Cincinnati Museum Center is undergoing a massive renovation, and we are currently trying to figure out our "peer" museum's budgets so that we can compare expenses on exhibits, etc. Our budget is currently around 10 million dollars. I've been doing some research in trying to find other Midwest regional museums' budgets in their 2015/2016 annual reports but it is hardly ever included. They provide their total revenue/expenditures, but the specific budget plan is no where to be found, or maybe I'm just reading wrong. Please let me know if you can give any advice or input! I appreciate it.
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Anna Redington
Intern
Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal
Cincinnati OH
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