Doing Their Own Thing

"Simply not doing exhibitions isn't possible for most museums today," says Gates. The Phillips needs the increased admission fees and other income that temporary shows bring in. "If you have to make the payroll every two weeks, you have to think about exhibitions, and what they do."

Of course many of Washington's great art museums are funded from old endowments and government appropriations, so "gate," in simple dollar terms, is not an issue. That doesn't seem to help their permanent collections much. Their directors still have masters they answer to -- in Congress, and on their boards -- and those bosses love to see impressive numbers.

"People through the front door" is the crucial metric for almost all museums, whether they demand an entry fee or not, according to Julian Raby. He is director of the Freer and Sackler galleries of Asian art -- which, as part of the government-funded Smithsonian Institution, never charge admission. He spoke at length about the problem from a gracious, tranquil office under his museum, proffering cups of Earl Grey tea.

"I've always reverenced the sense of calm, and just the quality of the objects, at the Freer," Raby says. That gallery's mandate allows it to show only its own holdings, which are housed in a lovely Renaissance-style building built for it in 1923. It is famous as a meditative oasis in the middle of the capital's hubbub -- but that doesn't seem to be enough these days. Raby says that even Asian art experts, now used to the "animation" and "urgency" of special exhibitions, complain that the Freer feels so much the same from visit to visit.

His institution, Raby argues, may have succeeded in addicting even its closest friends -- and also its Friends, as paying supporters are known -- to the well-respected temporary exhibitions held at the adjacent Sackler. "How they would feel if that drug is taken away, I don't know," Raby says. But he feels certain that attendance would plummet.

He very much doubts that audiences are going to "go back to a more measured, less demanding personality." Since Raby arrived in Washington in 2002 -- he had been an Oxford academic -- his response to this new reality has been to initiate an unusually aggressive exhibition program. He hopes that increasing the number of ambitious, well-researched shows will boost his museum's profile and reputation in Washington and internationally, and make it a "destination" for both laypeople and scholars. It will also help him grow his numbers, and thus guarantee adequate support. Today, he says, the very measurable quantity of visitors, rather than the ineffable quality of their experience, is what counts most.

Down the street at the Hirshhorn, Brougher feels that the current model for almost all museums, everywhere, is essentially a corporate one: Museums are treated, he says, "like a company that somehow needs to always be growing in order to appease its stockholders." It's a model that makes perfect sense to the professional managers and wealthy businesspeople who sit at the very top of the museum pyramid. But it leaves permanent collections, with their more purely artistic values, out of the picture.

Philip Conisbee, the senior curator in charge of European paintings at the National Gallery, felt "a twinge of envy" when a German colleague said she could rely on her museum's collection to draw visitors, doing without a big roster of special exhibitions -- such as the six shows launched at the National Gallery in September alone. Such extensive rosters, Conisbee says, are now the norm at major American museums (they're starting to hit Europe, too) and they put a strain on every aspect of the institution, "from the press office right down to the curatorial staff, to the art handlers, to the cleaners." As staff and budgets swell to cope with that strain -- to feed "this voracious animal of an exhibition department," as Raby puts it -- more temporary shows are needed to provide the audience to justify those budgets.

To make matters worse, soaring shipping and insurance costs are making special exhibitions more expensive. Some museums may be turning back to their permanent collections because it's all they can afford. Others hunt for guaranteed blockbusters that have a hope of paying their own way, though there are signs the public may now have Monet fatigue.

Philippe de Montebello, longtime director of the great Metropolitan Museum in New York, has written that "museums have become so hyperactive that banners furled and unfurled on museum facades do not indicate, I'm afraid, the glow of health but rather the flush of fever." To fight the influence of special exhibitions on the bottom line, as well as the public's sense that an exhibition is just one more of its entertainment options, in 1989 de Montebello stopped charging separately for them. The move has cost millions of dollars in ticket sales, but he felt the museum's mandate demanded it. The Met still mounts more special exhibitions than just about anyone: 16 are up right now, including the frothy "Clouet to Seurat: French Drawings From the British Museum." But at least there's no longer a temptation to treat them as profit centers.

One major obstacle to scaling back on exhibitions is that it's not only the public that has fallen for them -- curators love hosting temporary shows, and love seeing them as much as anyone: "I have to say that many of the great aesthetic experiences of my life have been in art exhibitions," Conisbee says.

The National Gallery's fall shows are so serious and scholarly, at times even obscure, that they're clearly not about any kind of sellout to the bean counters. There's not a Monet or mummy show in sight. Instead we get the fascinating etchings of a little-known figure from belle poque Paris called Felix Buhot, alongside a show of classic Dutch still lifes by Peter Claesz -- hardly a name to conjure with -- and a landmark survey of the first attempts at making prints in late-medieval Germany.

"What is the future of collecting, and the future of museums, and of the permanent collection?" Conisbee wonders. In an age of special exhibitions, will anyone stand up for museums as places that acquire, tend and study our greatest art, and then simply put some of it out on view for quiet contemplation? "This is an important issue that perhaps needs to be thought about more, and addressed more, by all museums," he says.

"We would much rather see more people in there looking at the Titians."