Museums as an Amazon-style business.
Amid the controversy surrounding museum donors despite their codependency and the overall lack of funding for museums, what if the Guggenheim or the Louvre, each with multiple locations already, just operated like Amazon? Amazeum! In other words, if museums fully indulged in a capitalist marketplace and fought for our attention primarily for the sake of making money, the entire ecosystem would change.
When you fully expose museums to the firing squad of a market-based system, not only does it have the potential to make a lot of money, it also enters a competitive landscape where it can lose a lot of money and has to adapt quickly to stay afloat. Where we are now does not seem to generate enough clean money, but how do we draw a line that is ethically in line with the institution’s intent? For the sake of argument, why not avoid the line altogether and just Gordon Gekko the field. “Greed is good.”
In this context, you want to hire the best employees that you can afford to turn a profit, and to do that you have to actually pay them what they are worth. Thus, wages would soar – especially in upper administration. Museum directors will come from other corporations and talk about more about “Q4” and the amount of revenue per square foot of gallery space instead of the amazing restoration of the Rothko.
In earnst, I feel like I could write a full article just on the labor implications of a market-based museum. I will not, though.
Still, those tending to the collection will demand more and will have higher expectations to constantly make the collection available. Every object will have to make the institution money or else face potential removal. Why else pay to store and maintain it? Could this, however, make the museum better? How much of the resources go to maintaining objects that never see the light of day?
Further, the institution would expand in ways unimaginable now and fundamentally change the jobs of its employees in order to adapt to that expansion. Let us consider this within the structure of the Amazon flywheel.
What does this flywheel look like in practice?
The critical first step is lowering costs for the customer by creating a structure that facilitates that. If you remove entrance fees, for example, you have to make the money in other ways. Advertising is the low-hanging fruit. This already exists as donor names and logos line the walls of the museums and their special exhibitions. It would penetrate further into the institution, however. Perhaps, the wall labels also display ads “brought to you by…” as that is where the visitor eyes spend much of their time.
Museums mainly sell exhibition experiences. Instead of selling tickets to that experience, those experiences become ways to deliver other products and thus have no barriers for entry. The customer experience at a museum now fundamentally changes as the parts most in demand get monetized.
Most obviously, if the customer experience revolves around visiting exhibitions of art and artifacts, why not also sell art and artifacts. Amazon started just by selling books online. Amazeum would sell art and artifacts online through their app that would contain a sponsored audio guide to the exhibition as well as objects for sell by outside vendors that might compliment the exhibition. Like the Picasso exhibition? Buy this poster or giclée. Like the dinosaur bones? Buy your own fossils. Of course, vendors could sponsor “related products” to generate more money.
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Once you have an app, you have the option to purchase Museum Prime for $100 a year. For that you get free shipping on your purchase and entry into all their related locations.
Lowering entrance fees to drive traffic also involves lowering your overhead. Museums spend extravagantly on resources to maintain the collection. As a result, they would buy their own transportation and storage companies. In this way, they ensure constant, custom services for themselves that they can also sell to everyone else.
Think of this like the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods. Sure, they acquired a grocery store chain, but they also acquired a network of food warehouses that can distribute food sold through the existing Amazon infrastructure.
Once you increase traffic through low costs and high-quality service, more sellers will work through your platform. In addition, you will vertically integrate and acquire your own sellers: an existing gallery network like a Gagosian with many locations to create and sell original “content”. This network also serves as a storefront and small warehouse for your objects as well as those who sell through you. Now you have a huge selection which makes the customer experience, well, the Amazon of collectible sales.
Once the flywheel spins, you need an insfrastructure to make it the gyroscope that stabilizes the entire operation. Amazeum will further connect its network by acquiring an art transportation company and its warehouses to distribute and transport products between your locations and to your customers. You also sell these services to to others so that your trucks never travel empty.
Amazeum will go a step further by managing its own fleet of customized airplanes to service its locations and museum hubs worldwide as well as to transport others’ high-value objects. In this way, the shipping of collections becomes streamlined and seamless. For example, instead of forcing large-scale objects to travel from New York through Luxembourg to get to London, they will go direct to London because the carrier recognizes London as the cultural hub not Luxembourg thus reducing or eliminating dependence on the routing of cargo freighters. This increased efficiency from more direct routing between hubs will lower shipping costs by eliminating additional trucking and reduce the handling and wear on the objects making it better for their preservation.
Pulling the strings behind the logistics network is the fully-integrated database. They can acquire a database company to manage inventory and sell the service to others. If they bought, Gallery Systems, they could, with authorization, have access to user data and analyze it to better the overall services and efficiency – which is why the user will agree to it. This will drive down the cost of shipping and storage because now they know where and when most users ship and thus when to allocate resources.
Use an app to manage everything. Book your transportation from your object record. Request loans directly within the database as if shopping on, uh, Amazon. By aggregating your databases you give inestimable power to Amazeum but also get a huge amount of efficiency and cost reduction as well. The same trade-off you already make by using Google and Facebook/Meta. Using their products means a near total surrender of your online usage data in return for undeniable convenience. Similarly, like an order history, your collections’ provenance will seemlessly pass between institutions and accessioning a new object involves a simple change of ownership and not a full re-cataloging of the piece. Blockchain tech will secure it.
The app integrates with the database and also has a public interface. Now subscribers have widespread access to the collection information (information you designate) from all institutions using the database. As part of Museum Prime, you can always look up information from these collections, see other exhibitions online, buy related products, and see native ads for still more.
Other museums, galleries, and collectors will have extreme incentives to adopt the Museum Prime database for their collection. Adopting the Google model, they will offer the database free to other collections in exchange for access to their data. That data includes not only all the information about their collections but also their shipping data, conservation data, storage data, and sales data for galleries and auctions. As a result, Museum Prime can deliver more and better ads, personalized products and services, and develop popular exhibitions. You will get used to seeing native ads for the next show at the Field Museum or for eligible mountmakers in your area when you do a search for t-rex specimens in your collection.
They will also need an auction house to further marry collections and sales and compliment their gallery network. Prime members can participate in the auctions on the app and arrange for overnight delivery right within the app. This will happen because the shipping network will attain enough power to transform the field and drive innovation. Whereas now we creep toward product improvements due to the slow reaction times of industry-leading, major institutions, a museum-business institution fully capitalized wants fast turnover and reduced packing costs. Re-usable crates, less-specialized handlers, and other short-term transportation solutions will proliferate.
The company ultimately leverages its warehouse network, transportation infrastructure, and gallery storefronts to reduce the cost and grease the wheels of a purchase. It will allow vendors to sell on its platform, take a percentage of the sale, charge them to store it, and charge them to deliver it. It will print money.
Insurance companies will love this, too. Distributing risk across the world through a network of custom warehouses by means of an industry-specific, exclusive transportation and data management network will reduce premiums because everything will truly take on less risk exposure.
In the game of Risk, do the figures represent storage warehouses and transportation hubs?
Whenever Amazon confronts a distribution obstacle or major cost, it buys the company or creates its own. Amazon, resurrected the once ailing United States Postal Service by supplying it with enormous volume and subsequently negotiated rates in its favor. While Amazeum will have its own channels, it will still rely on existing companies to fill in its gaps (until it buys those, too, and becomes the “FedEx of collectibles”).
What does it take to acheive this scale of operation? Money begets money. If Museum donors became investors instead, they would fund the expansion and associate their names with the brand. It will not be “art washing” in the “traditional” sense because their donations do not go to non-profit organizations, but still they can place their name alongside an institution doing good for the public like Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller and fogged perceptions of themselves between philanthropists or robber barons.
My point in all of this is to use an extreme example to complicate the story and exemplify the fact that the most crass, capitalistic museum monopoly could also result in better care for our collections and perhaps better pay for employees. Obviously, no one wants to sully our institutional missions and many feel they already have too much financial interest baked into their DNA. Ultimately, though, what is the ideal institution and how does it run? Where do we draw the line between commercialization and public good?
