White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 11cultural institutes to acquire goods andservices of various kinds, to which mustbe added the figures for the acquisitionof works and collectable items.These figures are in line with theestimates for the New York districtmade by a leading consulting society,McKinsey and Company, which in 2002carried out an important research studyon behalf of the Alliance for the Arts.Similarly a study commissioned in 1998by the Bilbao Guggenheim fromanother consulting giant, KPMG,claimed that in its first three years of lifethe Spanish museum had pushed up theGDP of the area by 0.4 7% (with anabsolute value of 140 million euros,against 85 million invested in theproject) as well as creating 3,816 jobsand increasing tourist flows to theBasque Country by 54% (these figureswere cut by more than half in a Plazasurvey from 1999 to 2000). The Spanishinstitution radically changed the imageof the city and has greatly contributedto its tourist success, attracting over 1.3million visitors per year in the first threeyears to a city of 950,000 inhabitants.The position of Bilbao in an areaincluding San Sebastian, the Europeansurf Mecca, and Pamplona, famed forits fiesta, makes it very difficult, however,to separate out the effects due to thesole influence of the museum on thelocal economy.If we analyse the number of visitorsafter the opening of the Guggenheim,however, and compare it to the historicseries of tourist flows to the Bilbao area,we can determine the extra numbersascribable to the opening of themuseum and the seasonal nature ofvisits, which enabled the Spanishresearchers to calculate relativelyaccurately the impact on thesurrounding area.The success of this approach and itsresonance in the media have convincedother institutions to follow suit. Thus in2004 a London School of Economicsstudy presented at the British NationalMuseum Directors' Conference, whichhad commissioned it, revealed that “theoverall impact of the NMDC ‘sector’,including indirect and induced effects, isin the range £1.83 billion to £2.07billion”. Similarly the Tate Modern,again in collaboration with the LSE(2005), claimed to have created in fiveyears “between 2,000 and 4,000 newjobs, about half of which are located inthe Southwark area” (Travers andGlaister,2004). According to an impactanalysis survey conducted by theAudience Research and Analysis for theMOMA, in 2006, from 2005 to 2007,the museum generated an economicimpact on the city of New York ofaround 2 billion dollars.The Metropolitan did not stand bywatching, and in concomitance with theopening of the new “Greek and RomanGalleries” in spring 2007, begansystematic studies of the economicimpact of the museum and itsexhibitions (entrusting them to theMuseum's Visitor Services Departmentin collaboration with the Office ofMarket Research). The results show thatthe re-opened galleries generated animpact of around 270 million euros insix months, compared to 250 milliongenerated by two major exhibitions –Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 andCézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard,Patron of the Avant-Garde – held the sameyear.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 267