"It certainly has added another institution of considerable scale to the cultural landscape," Jack Lane, the director, says, modestly. "I think it's changed the situation in the Bay Area."
Plus, there have been all those presents.
"I think the hope of the trustee leadership and myself was that the building would stimulate gifts to the collection, and it has done so to a degree that we wouldn't have dreamed," Lane says. Among the gifts: a group of sculptures by Richard Serra, the artist whose work was to have been installed at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.
To erect the new building, Lane and his board of trustees raised $90 million from private donors. Indeed, raising money is a primary preoccupation, if not the primary occupation, of museum people.
"I always tell people I buy two pairs of pants with my suits because I wear out the knees begging," says Robert Flynn Johnson, curator of the Achenbach Collection of prints and drawings at the Fine Arts Museums. "The taxpayers take the museums for granted."
Just over one-quarter of the 1995-96 operating budget at the Fine Arts Museums came from the city of San Francisco. The money that the city gives the museums comes out of the Hotel Tax, not out of the General Fund, which means that it is actually based on tourist revenues rather than homeowner taxes. This year, San Francisco gave $4,241,144 to the museums. The city money goes to pay for guards and maintenance. The rest of the museums' $15,566,240 annual budget comes from private sources -- from income on the $44 million endowment, from bequests, from membership fees. The museums spend the money on salaries, mainly, and exhibitions.
Perhaps it seems like a lot of money, curator Johnson says, but museums in general don't have it so easy these days. "What's happened, bottom line, is that the vast majority of the public could not give a damn what we show," he says. "Even if you have a Monet show you'd have to have Elton John cut the ribbon for people to show up."
Unless, that is, you build a building so fabulous that it almost doesn't matter what kind of art you have inside.
At the meeting where Harry Parker is in the driver's seat -- in the room where the windows with their gray-trout light are turning the tabletop potato chips into panes of stained glass -- a consultant named Paul Sedway has handed out oatmeal-colored paper booklets, bound and printed. The booklets -- the result of the city's expedition to the drawing board after public objections to the idea of planting a garage beneath Golden Gate Park -- are thick, laden with maps, lists, charts, words. The words are technical, relating to physical space. The words spell out, on page after page, all of the different places in San Francisco that the de Young, the city's oldest museum, the museum that has been in the park for 101 years, could relocate to. The possibilities, it seems, are extensive: There's the lot opposite the Yerba Buena Center, just down from SFMOMA. There's the combination of Piers 27 and 29, just down from Fisherman's Wharf, which is Parker's favorite option. There's the old Army complex at Fort Mason. There's a tract of land near the Embarcadero. In a way, though, despite their site-specificity, the words don't talk about what's really at stake.
But that's OK, in a way, because Harry Parker is talking about it. Bilingually, even.
"What this means to me," the Director is saying, "is this period of discussion and thinking about the site must also involve a discussion of the mission of the institution."
"If you put the de Young on the piers, like the Sydney Opera House, you would become a more regional center," the Director says. "The de Young would become more of an exhibit site, less of a museum. That would be a change of mission for the de Young, to become an attraction."
And a change of mission begs a question, Parker says: "Do we expect the permanent collection to be the raison d'étre? Or education?"
In other words, should the museum be a repository? Or an attraction?
As it happens, the new Vision Statement for the de Young -- the same one that affirms its dedication to collecting modern art -- contains this phrase: "The de Young Museum plays a central role in making the San Francisco Bay Area a magnet for world-wide tourism."
Parker had that Vision Statement prepared, he tells the trustees. And, he says, "I really think this time around the staff will have to come to grips with the Vision Statement."
After all, the members of the Executive Committee of the museums' board of trustees already have.
"The de Young museum lends itself frankly more towards traveling exhibitions than does the Legion of Honor," Richard W. Goss II says.
"I do think we have to go forward with some further study," says Robert J. Bransten, a trustee who is also chairman of the museums' Acquisitions Committee.
"No question," Goss says.
And as the de Young trustees talk about taking their museum out of Golden Gate Park, there's only one voice in dissent. It belongs to trustee Frankie Jacobs Gillette, who says:
"If we move downtown with all that competition, maybe everybody loses, I don't know. Maybe everybody wins."
That's the $60 million question facing the de Young. And next autumn, at the voting booth, you and I will decide how it is answered.
