Back in November of last year, we made note of the grand opening of the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi.
So how’s the museum doing? The NYT tells us: not so great. As in “almost out of cash” not so great. Major problems:
- Insurance, “which is exceptionally expensive for a building that houses irreplaceable art just yards from the Gulf of Mexico”. Gee, that sounds like a problem someone should have thought about.
- Climate control. “Simply trying to keep the galleries below 30 percent humidity to protect art in a climate where the humidity can reach 90 percent costs thousands of dollars every month.” Ditto.
- The museum apparently isn’t getting the level of “support” (that is, money) from the city that they expected. The city says, in so many words, “We don’t have any extra money to give to the museum. We’re broke.”
- The cost of building the museum went from $15 million to $45 million. You know, when it went up to, say, about $20 million from $15 million, I think I would have said, “Whoa! Let’s scale back a little here.”
- Oddly enough, it seems that there just aren’t that many people interested in visiting a museum mostly devoted to the work of “the self-described ‘mad potter of Biloxi’ who died in 1918 and is regarded as a forerunner of the American modern art movement.”