If Mozart were a curator?

On Sunday I spent a rainy afternoon watching Amadeus for the first time. On Monday I attended a brown bag lunch where a museum director spoke quite candidly about strategies in difficult financial times. He mentioned a theme that we'd heard about the week before - dealing with boards of trustees. It's true; rich people run museums and make them possible. If you want to keep the doors open and the climate control running and the curators fed, you need wealthy people to make generous donations and a few of them to serve on the board of directors/trustees. The same is true for universities.

So really, the patronage system is not dead. Like Mozart and Salieri, museums depend on the upper classes to fund our creative endeavors. We schmooze with them, and in return they give us staging equipment, rent money, and maybe a little fame. If you are lucky you find some forward thinking trustees who will permit crazy stuff like comic operas in German or scrapping tired school tours for something new. Otherwise you are stuck pawning gold snuff boxes. Oh wait, you can't de-accession artifacts for quick cash. Maybe I should switch to composing.