Culture minister Ed Vaizey used his keynote speech at the Museums Association (MA) conference to urge museums to be more entrepreneurial.
“[Independents] know the importance of being entrepreneurial,” he said. “There is real potential here for publicly funded museums to learn from them.”
Museums should explore ways of working together, but also look beyond the sector, he added, saying: “In my view, we need much greater cultural convergence, with far closer working between museums and with the wider cultural sector, as well as with the creative industries.”
Much of Vaizey’s speech drew on the Leading Museums review, published last month by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which called for less bureaucracy and more self-supporting governance models for museums.
According to the report: “Museums, their funders and their stakeholders need to embrace real and radical change… museums will have to do more with less, and need the freedom, leadership and confidence to do this… some museums will fail; this is inevitable. The cultural economy grows and changes and museums should be a full part of that dynamic process.”
MA president Vanessa Trevelyan, who was on the Leading Museums review group, said Vaizey’s message was useful for museums strong enough to take it forward, but warned that some museums were better equipped to do so than others.
But the MA’s head of policy and communications, Maurice Davies, warned: “While there are plenty of highly successful independent museums that do not need much, if any, public subsidy, I don’t know of any examples where former publicly funded museums have made a successful transition.
“It seems a fantasy that we can turn a free-of-charge public service into some sort of self-supporting social centrepiece that will survive in the long term without continued revenue support.”
