What criteria should be used to determine budget subsidies for museums, galleries and collections?
MúzeumCafé 35.
János Halász, minister of state for culture at the ministry of human resources, emphasises that for the first time the budgetary law of 2013 set apart resources of a normative nature for the operation of museums maintained by local authorities. During preparation of the 2013 budget the State Secretariat for Culture was able to ensure the budget for museums. Given that a major part of the art object stock remains in state ownership, it is obvious that financing is partly allocated according to its volume. The other component involves the average number of visitors in the past four years. These two indicators can be supplemented with a subsidy reflecting local conditions.
According to Márton Kálnoki-Gyöngyössy, director of the Ferenczy Museum and president of the Federation of Hungarian Rural Museums, these days the professional work of a museum and its benefit for society as a cliché is usually measured by its annual number of visitors. Without challenging the significance of visitor numbers, he would still like to draw attention to several measures that would be worth employing when judging achievement. It is difficult to develop a really fair museum financing and assessment system. The simple solution – despite otherwise promising approaches – involves strictly adhering to visitor numbers as an indicator of absolute validity.
Art historian Bernadett Grászli, director of the Rómer Flóris Museum of Art and History in Győr, thinks the average number of visitors and the number of museum pieces entered in the inventory is not the best benchmark when state subsidy is being determined, since it does not reflect the extent and quality of professional work done in a museum. Nevertheless, it aims to resolve without much ado the direction of the subsidy.