The Five Rules For A Thriving Museum

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RULE 3: MULTIMEDIA IS NOT OPTIONAL
Some museums are turning to television to create buzz. Coming up at Tate Britain to help promote the Turner Prize — an annual, highly publicized (and often controversial) award open to artists younger than 50 — is a reality talent show for commercial network Channel 4 that will discover a new on-air art critic. High technology has proved helpful in wooing the digital generation as well. The new Clore Interactive Gallery at Manchester Art Gallery has more than 20 activities that encourage visits to other parts of the museum. The Louvre now offers audio tours based on The Da Vinci Code, downloadable from iTunes. Tate Modern, meanwhile, asked eight musical acts each to compose a song inspired by one of the museum's works of their choosing. For a month, the songs can be heard only at listening posts around the museum; then they'll be available for downloading at Tate Modern's website.

RULE 4: ARCHITECTURE MATTERS
The Guggenheim Bilbao kicked off the craze in 1997. The gritty, regional Spanish port city became an international art mecca virtually overnight when it unveiled Frank Gehry's amazing curvy, titanium-clad structure. Last year it attracted nearly a million visitors and the economic payoff for the region's gdp totaled $238 million. The pull of the museum's building appears to be as strong as the lure of the art inside, and there is little doubt that Tate Modern's iconic edifice and plum location are similarly among its best assets. The Bilbao Effect has cities worldwide scrambling to build new museums with attention-getting designs, dreamed up by top-flight architects, in hopes of generating urban renewal. The Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, nicknamed the Mudam, opened in July in Luxembourg. Designed by I.M. Pei, it's an angular, three-story building of French limestone and glass. The bubble-shaped Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria — designed by British architects Peter Cook and Colin Fournier — opened in 2003.

RULE 5: CONTENT IS STILL KING
clever marketing, multimillion-dollar investments and breakthrough architecture still don't guarantee success. The National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield, northern England, a steel-covered building shaped like a cluster of four kettle drums, expected 400,000 visitors a year when it opened in 1999. But only around 100,000 showed up. So pop went the music museum. It's the rare museum today that can avoid upping its marketing game, but they do exist. Florence's Uffizi Gallery, for example, with works by Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Caravaggio, does little to promote itself yet draws 1.5 million visitors annually. Museums that fail, or lag more successful ones, often have problems that no sales job can fix: lack of content, bad locations, unrealistic business plans, poor leadership. But when a museum strikes the right chord in the right market, and follows the Tate Rules, the effects can be artfully crowd pleasing.