N.Y. Museums Paint Impressive Picture of Their Value--in Green

NEW YORK — Nancy Bolduc, a 38-year-old Texan who lived awhile in Paris and loves the works of Henri Matisse, took a long weekend off from her veterinary practice this past winter and boarded a plane for New York City to see the French Impressionist’s retrospective.

Not just the Matisse art show at the Museum of Modern Art, but lunch in Soho, shopping on Fifth Avenue, dinner at the popular--and very expensive--Union Square Cafe. No telling how much she spent.

Art museums in New York City not only nourish the soul and educate the mind, they generate huge amounts of revenue for the city’s economy. The Metropolitan Museum of Art estimates it alone accounts for as much as $1 billion a year.

There was no question last fall that New York City was the country’s unrivaled mecca for the visual arts.

Three major art exhibitions brought 1.6 million viewers to three museums over four months. There was the prolific art work of Matisse at the Modern, the surreal weirdness of Rene Magritte at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a survey of early 20th-Century Russian avant-garde at the Guggenheim Museum.

As a rough yardstick, that’s 600,000 more people looking at art than the combined home attendance over that time for the four professional sports teams that play in the city--the Mets, Yankees, Rangers and Knicks.

And of those visiting the shows, several hundred thousand were from out of town, spending money on lodging, transportation, food and entertainment.

Annually, the city’s major art museums--the Met, the Modern, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum--attract about 7 million visitors.

That adds up to a lot of money being spent in the city.

“We are really cash cows,” said William Luers, president of the Metropolitan. “We are really part of the moneymaking side of the city. This is a middle-to-upscale audience that stays in hotels. They don’t stay in campers outside of the city. They spend money. They go to restaurants and buy.”

Some estimates put the arts’ share of New York City’s economy today as high as 7%. A 1983 study by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the arts accounted then for 2% of the gross regional product--or $5.6 billion.

That means that the arts are bigger than advertising, management consulting and public relations, hotels, computer and data processing services and engineering and architectural services, according to the Port Authority.

The problem is the city and state, as well as the business community, “don’t think of us as an industry,” Luers said. “They think of us as a leisure-time luxury.”

So, in hard economic times, government funding has been drastically cut and corporate money has dried up.

Two years ago, the Met lost $3.8 million in annual funding--$3.5 million from the city and $340,000 from the state--or 5% of its $78-million operating budget. The world-renowned museum was forced to close galleries because it had to cut back on guards.

“It infuriates people who come across the Atlantic and have one morning to spend and half the galleries are closed,” Luers said. “If we continue to do this, we’ll damage the confidence people have in coming to New York.”

The Met almost had to cancel its Magritte show last year because no corporate sponsor could be found for it. Although it turned out to be the fifth most popular show in the museum’s history, it did little more than break even.

The Matisse show, which cost about $5 million to mount, slightly less than half of which was covered by a donation from the Philip Morris company, “made money but not anything near what people think,” said Richard Oldenburg, the Modern’s director.

The city and the business community are trying to do more for the arts, their representatives say. Gov. Mario Cuomo would like to do more but has been forced to make cuts in arts funding because of the national economic downturn, said Chuck Porcari, a spokesman for the governor.

In the 1980s, business perhaps did consider the arts a leisure activity, said Sandy Bayer, vice president for economic development for the New York City Partnership and New York Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

That has changed, he said, because the arts community, spurred by big cuts in funding, has become more vocal and the city has stepped up its efforts to keep and attract foreign investors and businesses.

The city’s cultural affairs chief, Luis Cancel, said the city’s support of the arts is “respectable” and noted that the mayor’s preliminary budget plan for next year slashes funding for almost all city agencies except police, libraries and cultural affairs.

But his department has suffered deep cuts in the last several years, and he is worried that New York City’s preeminence in the arts could slip as other urban centers develop their museums and cultural centers.

“This city really is not investing sufficiently in its cultural infrastructure to ensure that it stays at the front of the pack and at the top of the heap, so to speak,” Cancel said.

His department’s capital budget has been reduced since 1989 by about 20%, to $77 million. In 1990, its operating budget was almost $93 million; today it is $80 million. That’s less than 1% of the city’s current $30-billion budget but a lot more than the state’s current funding for the arts.

Cuomo’s proposed $59-billion budget for next year allocates $23.3 million for the arts, down from $26 million this year. But Porcari, his spokesman, points out that New York still allocates more money for the arts than any other state.

With the state and city struggling desperately to balance their budgets, Bayer said the arts funding dilemma could be helped if the city instituted a tax incentive to encourage companies in the private sector to give to the arts.

If art is the draw, it gets comparatively little of the purse.

Marie LaCroce, a retired New York City schoolteacher who lives in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., was among the 900,000 people who saw the Matisse show. She came to see art but was thinking about shopping.

“If we had time, I’d love to do some gift-shopping,” she said as she walked by a painting of a table laden with carafes, plates and glasses.

As Bolduc, the Matisse fan from Texas, waited in the block-long line outside the Modern to get into the show, she said: “We’ve been shopping. We went to lunch yesterday at Zoe in Soho and we’ll go out for dinner tonight at the Union Square Cafe.”

A Chicago couple in line--Victor Elting, a lawyer, and his wife, Jean, a physical therapist--were staying at the elegant Carlyle Hotel. “Everyone who talks about the show at home says it’s a must,” explained Jean Elting.

A survey last fall of a four-month-long Georges Seurat exhibit at the Met found that two-thirds of the 642,000 people who visited the show were from out of town and spent about $313 million on shopping, travel, hotels and restaurants.

Thirty percent of the out-of-towners reported earnings of $100,000 or more per year and 55% reported earning more than $65,000 per year, according to the survey.

One reason the arts’ share of the city’s economy has become so significant is because other industries--such as manufacturing and shipping--are on the decline or have left the city.

In addition, the role museums play in the city’s economy has grown because attendance is on the upswing, except for a recent dip that arts professionals say is temporary and related to the recession.

The current annual attendance at American museums is 600 million visits per year, up from 390 million in 1979, said Ed Abel, executive director of the Washington-based American Assn. of Museums.

“Museums have been making a major, major effort to make themselves more accessible to a broader population,” he said.

The Met, the Modern and the Guggenheim are conducting a joint survey, to be completed later this spring, on the economic impact of the Matisse, Magritte and Russian avant-garde exhibits. The museums are eager to learn from the study just how much money the exhibits generated, because their efforts to lobby the city, state and private sector for money have been hindered, they say, by the absence of supporting data.

“We are putting together the money story,” Luers said.