Denver Art Museum

The news coming out of the Denver Art Museum over the past few weeks has been shocking. More than 200 staff members spread across every department were offered modest buyouts in exchange for their resigning from their jobs. As of Monday, April 9, thirty had complied. These include some fairly important players, such as deputy director Cindy Ford Abramson, who had already left for another job, as well as Gretchen DeSciose, from the education department, David Kennedy in exhibitions, and marketing head Janet Meredith, who will become a consultant for the museum.

Another well-known DAM figure who resigned is Blake Milteer, an assistant curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. He was already leaving to become the fine-art curator at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, however, so his departure doesn't count among the casualties.

The institution planned no ceremony for those who were leaving, even though some of them had given their entire careers to the DAM. But in an act of decency, chief curator Margaret Young-Sanchez, head of the pre-Columbian department, had the curators step up and stage their own going-away party.

The problem is deficit spending, with the museum's projected shortfall for the year estimated at anywhere from $4 million to $10 million. That's a lot of scratch. Part of the reason -- but only one small part -- is salaries, since the museum hired more than sixty new staffers to open the Frederic C. Hamilton Building last fall. The extra staff was brought on in anticipation of a million visitors to the now-world-famous Daniel Libeskind building. This projection was wildly optimistic -- and not just in retrospect. Nearly all of the potential audience for the Hamilton comes from the state of Colorado, which has a population of roughly 4 million -- and did anyone really believe that one out of every four people were going to show up?

Well, at the DAM, they did believe it, and hiring decisions were made based on those inflated projections. Because the DAM has been hoisted on its own demographic petard, it is widely believed that attendance has been low or even dismal. But that's not entirely true, since 380,000 people have already gone through the place, and it's well on target to post the largest number of annual visitors in the institution's more than 100-year history. It's already surpassed every year but a few when blockbusters ruled the DAM. It should also be mentioned that the blizzard in December and bad weather in January definitely had a negative effect on attendance. According to the museum, upwards of 50,000 people were kept away -- and I don't doubt it.

But attendance shortfall is only part of the problem. Worse are the tremendous maintenance costs associated with the complicated building, and with its serious structural problems. The most obvious of these is the problem with the atrium's roof. (That's why there is scaffolding where the monumental sculpture "Spider," by Louise Bourgeois, used to be.) If you look closely, you'll notice that the raised box beams, which are purely decorative, have been removed from around the skylights because they were identified as a primary cause of the roof problems. Plus, the condensation on the inside of the exterior walls on levels three and four may require a heating-and-cooling system between the skin and the interior. Unlike the roof, however, that fix won't be covered by insurance, as it was anticipated but not budgeted.

The bare-bones construction budget is itself another problem -- though I do think it was the right decision. To bring in a $500 million building, which is what the Hamilton looks like, for the $110 million that it actually cost, museum decision-makers went for cheap. Good money was spent on the exterior, but the inside was filled with low-cost materials. I remember being shocked when I first entered the finished building and took in the vacant-looking lobby with its plain-Jane walls and Home Depot-quality granite floors.

And I think this brings us back to the attendance problem, because although the outside of the museum has a big "wow" factor, the interior --aside from the atrium -- absolutely doesn't. I'm confident that word of mouth has made many people happy to drive by but willing to skip going inside.

From my point of view, this lobby problem can be solved by properly furnishing it and bringing in some more art. It may have been an unhappy circumstance that brought the Bourgeois inside, but that space really needed something. Now that the museum has gotten real about attendance -- you don't want a lobby cluttered with furniture and sculpture when there are a million people coming through -- it's time to make the area into something smashing.