It may be safe to say that the news of the closing of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis has brought the panic barometer up a notch in the museum world. While the Rose’s news is particularly shocking, parallel announcements are also dropping jaws: word came yesterday, for example, that the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City will eliminate the positions of Chief Curator, Director of Education, Director of Planning and Director of Operations, along with other staff. Other organizations have announced similar cuts. It is rare, at this point, to find a museum that has not, at the very least, taken preventive measures, such as imposing hiring freezes or budget reductions. These announcements foreshadow a troubling landscape for venerable museums that, we once thought, would be around us forever.

The ultimate sacrilege of de-accessioning is no less shocking than drastic board decisions that, in one sweeping stroke, can erase the labor of generations of collectors, curators and philanthropists. Are these decisions inevitable? Is there another way to save a museum, without dissolving its collection or its staff?

What doesn’t seem to be discussed much is role of the government. Today, Congress is voting on a plan approved by the House Appropriations Committee which includes $50 million in supplemental funds for the National Endowment for the Arts, along with other provisions that can benefit the arts. While this would be a helpful stimulus (if it gets approved), it is still a tiny sum of money. It barely represents a quarter of the Metropolitan Museum’s annual budget.

Shouldn’t culture deserve a bailout of the kind that banks and the auto industry have enjoyed? Art has never been a major priority of this country. But just how much is it worth it to us? What would happen if five months from now the list of threatened museums expanded to the highest tiers? Will we just watch all that art go away? If we were to play this scenario out to its ultimate conclusion, we may have to picture ourselves twenty years from now, staring at American Gothic somewhere in Shanghai, or Nighthawks at a museum in Dubai. Could that be the future?

With The Minneapolis Star Tribune filing for bankruptcy protection yesterday, this is a good time to talk about what happens to the arts when newspapers go away.

I was talking to a friend who tracks journalism trends closely earlier this week and he said, “2009 is going to be a real game changer.” He listed the latest casualties, which now include some of the most venerable titles: The Los Angeles Times facing the real possibility of closing. The San Francisco Chronicle losing a billion dollars for its parent company. Seattle’s second paper shutting down. Same in Denver. Papers in cities like Detroit scaling back to publishing a few days a week. The Miami Herald up for sale, but only the building seems to be worth anything. As layoffs and heretofore unthinkable page A1 banner advertising attests, even The New York Times is in deep trouble.

Are we ready for a world in which major metro dailies don’t arrive on our doorstep every morning? Or have they already lost their relevance? After all, in most American cities, a vibrant discourse conducted by dueling critics at rival newspapers is already a distant sepia-toned memory.

My friend, the publisher of a major arts website, worries more about city hall reporting than arts coverage. “Writing about art will always be glamorous and people will do it,” he said. “But what about those unglamorous stories about city government, which nobody else wants to do, and which don’t sell ads?” With so much arts coverage being opinion based — under the fancier name of criticism — blogs have absorbed arts coverage more successfully than hard news. Moreover, many papers say they’re ready to cover newsroom expenses solely with online advertising. The extinction of dinosaur papers printed on dead trees may even leave more breathing room — i.e. ad revenues — for nimbler upstart species of news media.

All points well taken. But call me nostalgic, I still don’t feel the online world fully substitutes for coverage in big metro dailies. Where do we go from here?

Survival has replaced art fairs as the topic dealers discuss most when they meet in New York (how galleries are going to survive, or not, seems to be among the topics most on the minds of critics as well, as evidenced by recent offerings by Charlie Finch and Jerry Saltz to mention but a few). There are, of course, some universal business strategies to a downturn (cut your overhead, advertise more strategically, do more with less, etc.), but some of the responses I’ve heard dealers indicate they’re following are near opposites of each other, reflecting perhaps a personal philosophy about adversity more than any conventional wisdom to the best path to take. The following 4 categories summarize what seem to be the current thinking among the dealers I’ve spoken with in New York about how to respond to this extraordinary economic climate:

1. “Closing” (yes, in quotes)
2. Money shows instead of concept shows
3. No guts, no glory
4. Consolidation

“Closing”
Unquestionably galleries are closing in New York, but very few are reporting that the decision is related to the economy. If the outlook for the market were not so tough, I suspect the percentage of current closings might plausibly seem normal (partnerships do dissolve, dealers do move on to other interests, etc.), but given how U.S. businesses across the board are filing bankruptcy or going belly-up, it’s difficult to imagine financial difficulties haven’t contributed somewhat to the decisions to shutter their spaces.
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With one new year behind us, another one looms in a fortnight.  The Chinese Year of the Ox is supposed to be a year of hard work for limited return. Maybe if Lehman’s analysts had been looking at their Chinese horoscopes they might have seen some problems coming.

For those of you with time on your hands and no books left from your holiday reading list, we recommend a compilation of “Helguera’s Artoons: Cartoons about the Art World,” recently published by Jorge Pinto Books, with a forward by our own Andras Szanto.

With far too many pundits making comparisons to the Great Depression, perhaps a little light relief is what we need these days. Though interestingly, the effects of the doom and gloom vary widely around the globe–at least based on the holiday conversations I have had.  What is it like where you are?