2.5 Educational instrument
The third and final factor relating to the art program is the vocation of the Museum as an educational tool, a vehicle whereby culture is brought close to society. For this reason, its entire operation, not only the development of the educational program but all the activities of the Museum, must be controlled by this aspiration, as we believe that the museum experience must be not only pleasing but enriching too.
2.6 Client-oriented
The management model of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao—the last key factor of its operation—focuses upon the client. Its main customers, clearly, are its visitors, but its Individual and Corporate Members are also its customers, as well as society as a whole, which has certain expectations with regard to the Museum. It is for this reason that the guidelines of the operation and the key aspects of the institution are oriented precisely towards meeting the objectives relating to these groups of customers, maximising in this way, the level of income received and, therefore, its level of self-financing.
2.7 Mixed management model
This management model is of the mixed type. As mentioned above, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a very open institution to society in spite of the fact that the project had in its origins a very solid public component from the point of view of the financing of the investment, but the operating model is quite private in the sense that there are three public institutions on the Board of Trustees, but there are 37 private institutions and only a fourth of the Museum’s funds are of public origin; all of these determine that, in a certain fashion, the key features of its activity are different from what might be the case in other types of cultural institutions.
There is another key factor in the operating model of the Museum and this the fact that certain activities are carried out in a network, i.e., with a certain level of integration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, especially in those areas where advantage might be gained from the scale economies of joint activities and the consequent management efficiencies, such as education activities, the organisation of exhibitions, systems of shared information, etc.
3. Details of the Museum’s operations
We hereby provide a number of quantitative parameters relating to the Museum’s situation.
3.1 Visitors
Visitors, obviously, are a basic reference; in five years of operations, the Museum has received 5.345.000 visitors, bearing in mind that the initial estimations were set at what was considered to be an ambitious target of 500,000 visitors per year. The geographical origins of these visitors is also an important piece of data, as the Museum is truly international in its scope and approach . Around 85% of our visitors (6 out of every 7) come from outside the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country and approximately half of our visitors come from abroad. Some countries, such as. France with 12% or the U.S.A. and Canada with around 8%, Germany, Great Britain with around 6-7% have shown a strong presence from the outset.
3.2 Education
With regard to the educational program –which is a fundamental priority for the Museum– there are currently 47 programs in operation, some given within the formal education system, affecting all pre-university educational levels and others designed for society as a whole. As a whole, some 250,000 people participate in the Museum’s programs on an annual basis.
3.3 Development
The third key element, considered to be an element of development, i.e., relating to the involvement of society in the operation of the Museum, takes the form of two programs: that of the Individual Members, called Friends of the Museum (amounting to 14.500 friends, which makes this Museum the cultural institution with the highest membership of this type in Spain); and that of the Corporate Members, with 134 companies that form part of the network of permanent support and of which, 37 belong to the Trustees category, i.e., the highest level of representation.
3.4 Budget
The budget of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao amounts to 28 million Euros. Its expenses are divided into three categories, each of which represent approximately a third of the total: the art program; operating costs, maintenance and security, etc.; and salaries, cost of the articles sold and taxes. From the point of view of income, the Museum’s level of self-financing stands at 75%, i.e., three quarters of the Museum’s income comes from the generation of resources, basically from visitors, the store-book store and from corporate support and sponsorship, while 25 % comes from the public contributions of the Basque Government and the Provincial Council of Bizkaia.
3.5 The art program
Finally and very briefly, within the art program over the five years of life of the Museum there have been 27 different presentations of the Permanent Collection, starting with the first one with its general contents The Guggenheim Museums and the Art of this Century (which occupied the entire exhibition space of the Museum) and was the inaugural exhibition, and including shows of recent European art; the avant-garde artistic movements and expressionism of the twentieth century; American pop art; contemporary Basque and Spanish art of the last twenty years; modern painting and sculpture; international currents in contemporary art; in-depth analysis of contemporary photography or Post-war American and European art, among others. These presentations of the selections from the Permanent Collection have been made successively and in some cases simultaneously. In addition to these, the Museum has programmed 22 temporary exhibitions, distributed in the three categories mentioned above: overviews of long periods of the history of art (such as the large exhibition China: 5000 Years including works dating from the Neolithic to the present day; From Dürer to Rauschenberg, containing works on paper; or The Art of the Motorcycle which traces the evolution of the aesthetics and design throughout the twentieth century, seen from the viewpoint of the motorcycle as a characteristic icon). Together with these, the in-depth and wide-ranging retrospective exhibitions of contemporary artists (Robert Rauschenberg; Eduardo Chillida; Andy Warhol, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Giorgio Armani, Nam June Paik or Frank Gehry); and in addition to these, other, much more specific shows focusing on a specific period in the career of some artists or in specific collections or subjects (Helen Frankenthaler, in which her works created after the piece Mountains and Sea of the years 1956 to 1959; Cristina Iglesias; or Richard Serra).