Museum Association juggles numbers. (Why all our museums are doing great)

Things are going well for museums in the Netherlands. Today, the Museum Association came out with a kind of annual report in which this was made abundantly clear in tables and graphs. Visits are on the rise. Between 2015 and 2016, the sector counted 2.5 million more visits. Mainly by foreign tourists. At the same time, more and more museums are running at a loss. According to the Museums Association, this negative balance now also affects larger museums for the first time.

The tone of the press release is remarkably positive, especially since less than a year ago the association was sounding the alarm. Daily newspaper Trouw noted as recently as 16 August 2016 that smaller museums in the Netherlands were on the brink of collapse. The report released by the industry now covers that period. So where are those alarming figures now? The answer is as simple as it is disheartening: they are still there, but they are being brushed away. Probably for the same reason that also leads Performing Arts directors to bringing bad news positively: it would be good for business.

Media orchestration

In marketing terms, it's called 'Media orchestration': playing the media by a well-timed press release and presenting figures in the right way so that a journalist with a full agenda does not take the time to find out further. The Museum Association does it very cleverly. One presents the figures not by museum or by city, but by province. That way, it creates a pleasantly moderate average, from which the worst lows and highs are filtered out.

Thus, in a positive sense, you can indeed refer to Zeeland as the province with the highest density of museums. After all, the province counts scarcely 400,000 inhabitants, so with a single shed full of old jam jars, you already have great density. And the fact that the province of North Holland, with 15 million museum visits, is the best in terms of visitation is of course logical. Whether it Zijper Museum benefit from that as much as the Rijksmuseum is, of course, the question.

Insipid

In this way, the presentation of figures actually says very little. What it mostly says is that people are very eager to bring good news. Logical, after all these years of bad news. And of course it is great that museum visits are increasing, and that the subsidy per visitor is decreasing. But in doing so, you also sweep a lot of misery under the carpet. Misery that is still being felt in smaller museums in smaller cities. Misery that puts increasing pressure on the 'vulnerable', less popular art, in favour of the big blockbusters in the suburbs and provincial capitals.

Very cautiously, the Museum Association states that some attention is needed here and there. Thus, the sector is running at an increasing loss: 'At €1.02 billion, museum turnover in 2016 remains at the level of 2015. Costs rise by €38 million to €1.05 billion.' With decreasing government subsidy and increasing share of own income, a picture emerges of a sector trying damn hard to meet the draconian cuts of an arts-unfriendly government. So the fact that the number of employees on permanent contracts is also on the rise is to be welcomed, although I wonder if this applies to existing museums, or if more museums have opened where people have therefore been hired for the first time. The figures are inconclusive on that.

Unpaid

However, it is clear that paid work in a museum is mainly something you do in the Randstad. The proportion of unpaid FTEs may be 28 per cent nationwide, but in North and South Holland it is 20 per cent on average, while in the rest of the country it is 39 per cent. Almost double.

Figures look exact, in short, but you can do amazing magic with them. This has earned the Museum Association a spot-on nomination for the Fred Kaps award for Figure Magicians.

Oh, yes: because the Museum card, it will soon become considerably more expensive again.

Oh, yes (2): when outlining (positive) trends in the development of attendance figures, 2011 is always chosen as the starting date, and fairly direct lines are drawn between then and 2016. However: in 2011, Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk were closed. The real growth only took off in 2013, when both museums opened after years of closure and immediately attracted huge crowds. The lines don't really incorporate that break in trend.

See the tricks here in operation.