Museums and financial autonomy, is the 2.3 million euro cut decided by the government a wake-up call?

There was very little discussion about it, but among the measures contained in the 2019 Budget Law, there was also a cut of 2.35 million euros to autonomous museums, established in paragraph 804 of Article 1: “the institutes and museums endowed with special autonomy [...] shall put in place processes to ensure a more effective realization of the institutional objectives pursued, aimed at ensuring higher own revenues as of the year 2019; to this end, the expenditure containment rules provided for in current legislation shall not apply to them. Consequently, the appropriations for operating expenses of the relevant centers of responsibility to be allocated to the aforementioned institutes and museums are reduced by 2,350,000 euros, as of the same year.” Translated from bureaucratic language, it means that the government expects that the autonomy of “special” museum institutes will lead to increased revenues, such that a reduction in the grants given by the state is justified.

This measure opens up some interesting food for thought. It is necessary, meanwhile, to ask how much the cuts sanctioned by the budget law may affect the activities of museums. If we consider that in 2017 (the last year for which surveys are available) autonomous museums generated gross revenue of 150 million euros from ticketing alone (which, however, is reduced to a net of 130 if we consider the shares due to the concessionaires of ticketing services), the figure may not seem so high, since it is a decrease of less than 2%. But it is still a cut (and let’s consider that close to us, in Spain, the government has, on the contrary, decided to invest substantially in museums), which, moreover, must be placed in its context, that of thefinancial autonomy of museums. Specifically, the question should be asked whether Italy can afford to grant more and more financial autonomy to museums (because the cut decided by the government explicitly pushes in this direction), or whether it is not indeed more appropriate to reason about, on the one hand, how much museums still depend on the state, and on the other hand, what effects the financial autonomy of the large ones can produce on the smaller museums.

Starting from this last point, about a year ago, in the weeks in which Dario Franceschini ’s experience at the head of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage was coming to an end, a list of priorities for the minister who would take his place at the Collegio Romano was proposed on these pages: among the ten points, we indicated the need to take care of small museums, which were registering declines in visitors compared to the pre-reform period. And that’s because the reform concentrated resources in the hands of the independent institutes: in 2016, independent museums had generated 54 percent of visitors out of the total audience of state museums, and 77 percent of revenue. With the reform (specifically the ministerial decree of October 19, 2015), a measure was introduced that required autonomous museums to allocate 20 percent of ticketing revenue to a national solidarity fund established to enable smaller and less visited museums to survive. However, even when the 20 percent is taken away, in 2016 autonomous museums were guaranteed 62 percent of the revenue from 54 percent of visitors, and in 2017 the inequality widened slightly since autonomous museums recorded 53 percent of total visitors, but still still accounted for 77 percent (still corresponding to 62 percent when taking into account the separation of 20 percent for the solidarity fund). The fact that ticketing revenue is concentrated mainly on large museums should not be surprising: they typically have much higher ticket prices (and several small museums, by contrast, often have free admission), and sometimes charge surcharges in the case of temporary exhibitions.

However, even if we let autonomous museums have their full income, it would not be sufficient at the moment to grant them full financial autonomy. It is interesting, in this regard, to cite a recent research by Stefano Consiglio and Marco D’Isanto, entitled I modelli di business delle strutture museali italiane: fondazioni e musei autonomi a confronto and included in the Rapporto Federculture 2018: it is a survey that analyzed, among the various aspects related to the management of autonomous museums created by the Franceschini reform, also the degree of dependence on public contributions of seven institutions examined. What emerged was a reality that is obvious and taken for granted to insiders: namely, there are no autonomous museums in Italy (at least among those surveyed) that manage to totally untie themselves from public funding.

In Consiglio and D’Isanto’s contribution, museums were not directly mentioned in the tables (acronyms appeared instead), but the names are easily obtained by cross-referencing the data with statistics provided by MiBAC. The best result was sealed by the Uffizi Galleries, 89 percent independent (and thus 11 percent tied to public grants), followed, tied, by the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice and the Reggia di Caserta, both 16 percent dependent on the state. Next come the Archaeological Museum of Naples (19 percent) and the Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria, which requires public contributions corresponding to a quarter of its income for its operation. Much more detached are the Pinacoteca di Brera (tied to the state for 59 percent of its budget) and the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, which even depends on the state for 92 percent. And it certainly cannot be said that the National Gallery of Umbria or the Pinacoteca di Brera have serious inefficiency problems, since, for the Perugia museum, the average revenue per visitor (4 euros: the index is calculated on the ratio of receipts from direct sales, thus excluding state subsidies, to the number of visitors) is higher than that of the Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria (3 euros) and slightly lower than that of the Reggia di Caserta (6 euros), while for the Pinacoteca di Brera the average revenue is the second highest (10 euros), right after the Uffizi (11 euros). The Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice and the Archaeological Museum in Reggio Calabria both totaled the figure of 7 euros per visitor.

A room at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice. Ph. Credit Windows on Art

These are indices that almost slavishly follow the cost of tickets to enter individual museums: the National Gallery of Umbria and the Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria have the lowest whole tickets (8 euros), while the Uffizi is the most expensive museum (the cumulative to visit all the museums in the complex costs 38 euros in high season, 18 in low season). If we relate the revenue/visitor ratio to the cost of the ticket, it follows that the Pinacoteca di Brera turns out to be the most efficient museum since with a full ticket of 12 euros (the same cost as the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice or the Reggia di Caserta) it arrives at an index of 10. But we are still far from an autonomy based solely on direct revenues. And for the museums managed with the foundation model (also the subject of Council and D’Isanto’s survey) the situation is not so different: taking out the Musei Civici in Venice, which is 96 percent autonomous, we go down in the ranking passing, for example, through the Museo Egizio (tied to the state for 23 percent of its revenues) and arriving as far as the Museion in Bolzano, which is 97 percent dependent on public contributions.

To cope with possible cuts in public contributions, autonomous museums have but two options: the first is to increase their direct revenues, a goal that can be achieved in only two ways, namely by trying to reach more visitors, or by raising prices. In the first case, this is a desirable path for many, less feasible for others (think of the Uffizi, which could aim for a higher number of admissions in the winter months, but which are already saturated in spring and summer), complicated for still others (for example, for lesser-known museums, which would need major investments in modernizing routes or in communication: difficult in a situation of reduced contributions). In the second case, tweaking prices (whether for entrance fees, which for many are already high, or for royalties or concession fees) could have negative effects since an increase in fees could lead to a contraction in demand (without considering the effects that an increase in tickets could have on public perception of the museum’s image). The second possibility is to put in place cost-saving policies, but the consequences could be nefarious: the recent example of Turin, where a very important library risked closure because of cuts inflicted on the local Museums Foundation, is worth mentioning. It is obvious that if an entity has to apply cuts, it will do so on the branches of its activity that are considered less productive: which means closures of services (a library is hardly productive, speaking of course according to a pure logic of profitability) or, at best, reductions in hours that could affect the weaker subjects of a museum complex (the museums that are less visited, those that less attract the public).

The assumption must apply that the ultimate goal of the museum is not the production of profits, but the creation of a “social dividend that can improve a community’s overall ability to enjoy cultural products,” to use Council and D’Isanto’s own words. The discussion, then, should not be centered on how to make museums totally autonomous, a resolution that is difficult to achieve: rather, one should focus on how to make their management more efficient and their business models more profitable, also in light of the fact that alongside a few museums that can afford to approach close to 100 percent autonomy, there is a vast plethora of smaller museums that, on the contrary, can only dream of depending solely on their own revenues. Yet, it is precisely the smaller museums that are almost always left out of the discussion, despite the fact that as a whole (and just talking about state museums) they guarantee more than half of the visitors. And without calculating the fact that the smaller museums, in the face of their perhaps minimal income value, do not fail in their assumption of producing a cultural value of extreme importance for a city or a community: this is the basic summary from which any analysis should begin.

This is certainly not meant to suggest an improbable return to the past, or to hurl accusations against the autonomy of museums, which in several cases has produced tangible benefits: let us not forget that autonomy also entails the streamlining of decision-making processes, and when we speak of “autonomy” in a broad sense, we also mean the cultural and scientific autonomy of a museum. However, one cannot help but note how the reform has left the field open to some glaring contradictions, one of which was well highlighted by Francesco Zammartino in his article La riforma dei musei statali italiani al vaglio dei criteri di efficienza e semplificazione, published in the scientific journal Dirittifondamentali.it: “think of the classification of museums that,” Zammartino wrote, “distinguished into ’museums of relevant national interest’ and therefore endowed with special autonomy, and ’smaller museums,’ determines an obvious danger for the latter to remain without adequate financial resources, also noted that the reform says nothing about how the same will be structured and financed, nor how it is intended to relaunch them.” The issue of small museums is, in short, a crucial node that must be addressed in the broader framework of a discussion on the autonomy of museums that also takes these aspects into account.

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