0.10 Chapter eight: facing tough choices today

Examine the following entry in the minutes, which was presented, in Decem­ber 1967, as the report of the legal committee on the subject of deaccessioning the paintings of Thomas Bryan:

For several generations we've been tryin’

To ease restrictions set by Bryan;

That is, to loosen up the strictures

Governing our use of his gorgeous pictures.

Now, though our treasury is diminished

We can report the Bryan case is finished!

With blood and tears, and a little fun,

The ghastly lawsuit is finally won!

The purpose of excerpting this entry is not to comment on the appropriate­ness of selling the Bryan pictures but rather to provide insight into the general tone of Society meetings in simpler times. When the Society's financial situation changed dramatically and abruptly in the early 1970s, circumstances demanded tough, serious, aggressive leadership. That the Society's board proved unable to provide it should not come as a surprise.

In the twenty-five years since 1970, the board has changed, but slowly. Between 1970 and 1980, there was little turnover on the board, and by 1980, the average age of its seventeen members had reached seventy. It was not until the mid 1980s that substantial changes occurred both in the makeup and the orga­nizational structure of the board. Unfortunately, the process was divisive and dis­tracting. When the Society needed leadership, it was preoccupied with issues that should have been resolved years before.

Just as the Society must compete with other New York cultural institutions for visitors, so must it compete for board members. Although the Society has been able to attract well-known and respected business and cultural leaders, too few of them have chosen to make the Society their overriding passion. Without a critical core of powerful and impassioned members, the Society's board has failed to provide either the leadership or the funding to make the Society successful. Establishing such a board remains one of the Society's chief challenges.

Options

What follows is a discussion of alternatives that could be pursued by the Society. The order of presentation is not meant to convey either the desirability or via­bility of the various options. Instead, purely for organizational purposes, the six alternatives start with the least drastic, maintenance of the Society in essen­tially its present form. Then, the most drastic alternative, a managed dissolution of the Society, is presented, followed by a series of increasingly less draconian possibilities. This list is not all-inclusive, nor could it be. There are surely options available to the Society that are not discussed here, as well as paths the Society could follow that combine aspects from several or perhaps all of the alternatives. It is hoped that these options and the associated discussion will serve to stimulate the creative thinking needed to overcome the obstacles that have consistently frus­trated efforts to maximize the impact of the Society's valuable collections.

Option 1: continue to operate as a freestanding institution at 170 central park west

Because it requires no dramatic change from the Society's traditional mode of operations, perhaps the least controversial course that the Society could follow would be to keep its collections together and remain in its present facility. Such a path carries great risk, however. The Debs administration, aware of the challenges inherent in choosing to try to keep the Society independent, launched a deter­mined effort in 1988. Even though a great deal of money was raised, and much was accomplished programmatically, the effort proved unsuccessful. As had hap­pened before, the Society's capacity for generating revenue, whether in the form of contributions, grants, earned income, or investment income, proved inadequate to address its many needs.