The Rise and Fall of Museums
Museums are a cultural staple of the world, being repositories of information and stories of our history as a species. Being able to walk around and see how the events of the past have shaped the world around us is both liberating and awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, museums have had it rough in the last few years. To compound the problems already faced by museums, the COVID-19 pandemic has made the situation go from bad to worse for museums across the world. That’s why, in this article, I will be discussing the rise and fall of museums in all of their melancholic glory.
It’s not all doom and gloom though like in any industry sector, it is possible to adapt and change to the circumstances. This is what numerous companies have been learning since the technological revolution of the 1990s and museums will be expected to learn how to adapt if they are going to continue to survive in the 21st century. We will be going into the ways in which museums can try to fix their problems and increase their revenue. It would be a shame for even more museums to close when so many are already struggling to keep their doors open.
The Rise of Museums
In the earliest days of museums, they didn’t have the same sort of set up that they do now. Back in the day, museums were just collections owned by the seriously wealthy. The first museum that is known to be similar to the ones we have today would be Ennigaldi-Nanna’s museum, constructed by Princess Ennigaldi of the Neo-Babylonian Empire in 530 BC. The oldest museum on earth that still serves its function is The Capitoline Museums in Rome, which was established in 1471 and was opened to the public in 1734. It can be seen that our fascination with human history stretches as far back as we can see.
The big flashpoint for the development of museums occurred during the Scientific Revolution that occurred between 1543 and 1687. This was a time when the thirst for knowledge and desire to learn became massively influential in Europe. These early museums were created and stocked by the rich and powerful, as both a symbol of their wealth and to satiate their curiosities. It is an unfortunate truth that the popularity and growth of museums were greatly helped along with the atrocities of the colonial powers during their occupations of African and Asian states. These colonizers brought back local items of interest and meaning, which captured the imagination of museum visitors.
The Eventual Decline
If you ask any museum worker whether they think museum attendance numbers have been decreasing, they would say yes. They would have even said yes before the COVID-19 pandemic appeared and made our lives more difficult. One proposed reason for the decline of museums is attributed to the rise of instant information and social media, which many museums have been poorly poised to exploit. Many people, especially younger people don’t see the point of going to a museum when they can find all of the information they need online. It is also expected that unless museums work hard to change their marketing strategy, their visitor numbers will decrease with subsequent generations.
The Department For Culture, Media and Sport in the UK, which is one of the most important countries for museums have found that attendance numbers dropped by 11.5% between 2014 and 2014 in the island nation, despite attendance to museums being free. One of the reasons for this given in the DCMS report was that the fear of domestic terrorism, which was on the rise due to ISIS’ aggressive movements at the time. They found that getting young people into museums has been increasingly difficult. These factors have greatly contributed to the decline of museums across the world.
The Impacts of COVID-19
Now we can get into the big elephant that has been in the room for some time. COVID-19 has had a tragic impact on the profitability and visitor numbers faced by museums. Even now that some museums are open, they are being forced to operate at a reduced capacity, which damages their ability to make up the costs incurred by COVID. If you want to get into the serious financials of it, the Alliance of American Museums estimated that US-based museums were losing $33 Million per day due to COVID closures. If that’s just in the US, think about the overall impact on revenue worldwide.
There also seems to be problems, even if the COVID-19 pandemic does slow down and eventually become a distant memory. Keeping museums open and safe for visitors is clearly a priority for the management teams of these museums, although there are major concerns about their ability to attract visitors back to the museums. In fact, 85% of museum directors had this direct concern about getting people to come back. Many museums have been trying to increase their digital presence to earn money digitally, however, the success of these initiatives has been varied.
How NFTs Can Help Museums To Make Money
With many museums operating on limited capacity and being unable to accelerate their recovery. This is where NFTs can come in to help. If you’re unfamiliar with what NFTs are, they are units of data stored on blockchain technology. This data represents a unique digital item, like a piece of artwork or a museum exhibit. As a result of this, these NFTs can be exchanged on numerous marketplaces for cryptocurrencies and the ownership of that NFT would then pass to the buyer. This is allowing many artists and creators to sell their work completely digitally. Now you can see why this would apply to museums.
By creating their own NFTs, or, allowing other people to create them on their behalf, museums will be able to charge people to receive digital copies of historical relics and pieces of art. This ultimately will allow museums to gain another revenue stream that can help them to stem the losses of cash being caused by low visitor numbers. Now someone doesn’t even need to enter the museum to get something from there. The benefit as well is that the museum does not have to sell one NFT per item, as these NFTs will be marketed as copies of the original. This ensures that they can also repeatedly sell these digital items, which will improve the sustainability of their cash flow.
Examples of Online Galleries That Sell NFTs
One of the first examples of NFTs being used for museums and galleries wasn’t actually very well received, but this was more down to the way that it was done. The perpetrators of this are a company called Global Art Museum. They have gone on to create a gallery of NFTs that are based on the artwork of prominent painters and creatives. For example, you can find NFTs of artwork from a wide range of places, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Birmingham Museums in the UK and many others. It was stated that 10% of the proceeds would go to the museums, however, this hasn’t eased the backlash.
If you’re sceptical about the potential of NFTs, then you need only look at the already growing market. For example, Beeple, an American digital artist, ended up selling his piece Everydays: The First 5000 Days for $69.3 Million at the British auction house Christie’s. This shows that there is a very real potential future for the world of digital artwork and its value as a commodity.
It should be noted that some museums are already getting involved in NFTs, with the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg already planning to conduct an NFT art exhibit. The State Hermitage Museum is the second largest art museum in the world, behind the Louvre in Paris. This is a bold statement by the Russian museum and it shows that these institutions can adapt to the changing times.
Another example of a gallery that offers NFTs can be seen in the mercurial Mark Cuban. The well-known entrepreneur and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks has also waded into the NFT marketplace. He is currently building an online gallery for NFTs where people will be able to sell digital art and collectibles. This one is called lazy.com and it’s already live at the moment. If Mark Cuban is getting involved, it shows that there’s some serious potential for the NFT market and it could be used to help save museums across the world.
If museums want to make the most effective use of NFTs, they are going to have to learn how to create them themselves. Unfortunately, this is going to require an investment that museums may be too scared to implement. The alternative is that they subsist off of the 10% from Global Art Museum and the proceeds of other similar projects. The benefit of investing in doing it in-house is that they will receive the full profits. Either way, it is blatantly clear that NFTs can be a great way for museums to begin raising more money to ride out the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conclusion
In closing, it can be seen that museums started off as the passion projects of the rich and powerful before growing in size due to the expansion of the colonial powers. Then, they eventually turned into places where the public could come and learn about history, this was the golden age of museums. Unfortunately, the rise of the internet and social media has had a detrimental effect on the profitability of museums. It sadly seems that museums may be rapidly fading from the public’s interests. This was even before COVID, which has further decimated museums across the world.
There may still be a way for museums to recover some of the losses they’ve suffered and create a sustainable revenue strategy for the future. This comes in the form of NFTs, which have already been shown to capture the public interest. Museums are already slightly benefiting from NFT projects using their artwork, but to get the full benefit, museums will need to begin operating their own NFT creation and will have to sell them without using someone else. This will allow them to reap the maximum profits from NFTs and will help them to survive their current downturn.
