The Trump Guide to Museum Management

Shallow people don't appreciate the genius of the leader of the free world. Can we in the museum world learn from the great man? I have taken, what has clearly been a labour of love by the good people at Marie Claire* to pull together quotes. Many of the quotes are beyond belief, never mind beyond parody. But let us see if I can apply them to the museum sector. If he can use them and get elected president of the US, surely I can adapt them to keep my job in the museum.

TRUMP
”Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.”

MUSEUM

"Any reports of a drop in visitor numbers to the new exhibition are fake, British Museum 6.7 million visitor figures are laughable. Sorry, people want reduced opening hours and extreme entrance fees"


TRUMP
“Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly.”

MUSEUM

"Watched people protesting at our new Jimmy Saville exhibition that we have just opened! Why didn't they see it before objecting to it. Celebs exhibitions hurt museum visitors badly."


TRUMP
“We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars. All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”

MUSEUM
"We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting visitor numbers for the new exhibition, and there will be plenty of tea and cake. I won't turn up as all the charity shops appear to have sold out of 56" regular trousers. I am not going to the opening undressed." 

TRUMP “Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t know what to do. Love!”

MUSEUM
"Happy New Year to all, including to my many enemies in senior management who have ignored me and lost my emails asking for a pay rises, they just don't recognise genius. Love!" 


TRUMP
 “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud”

MUSEUM

"An 'extremely credible source' has called my manager and told him I was really off sick and was not spotted on TV putting on a bet at the Cheltenham Festival." Thanks mum.


TRUMP
“Robert Pattinson should not take back Kristen Stewart. She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again – just watch. He can do much better!”

MUSEUM

"The V&A should not take on Tristram Hunt. Mark my words he will create new exhibition on dogs - just watch. I can do much better!"


TRUIMP
 “Ariana Huffington is unattractive, both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.”

MUSEUM

"Female curators that are more successful than me are unattractive, both inside and out. I now fully understand why I am not married - they made a good decision"

TRUMP
 “I will build a great wall – and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me – and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” 

MUSEUM
"I will curate a great exhibition - and nobody creates exhibitions better than me, believe me - and I do it as cheaply as possible. I will curate a great, great exhibition in our southern display room, and I will make the London borough of Croydon pay for that exhibition. Mark my words."


TRUMP
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best. They’re not sending you, they’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists… And some, I assume, are good people.”

MUSEUM
"When people visit the museum from Croydon, they're not sending the best. They're not sending people like me, they're sending people that have lots of complaints about the service  and they're bringing those children with them. They're bringing their own packed lunches. They bring grime. They're Papists...and some I assume will spend money in the shop.


TRUMP

“Our great African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”

MUSEUM

"Our great chair of trustees hasn't exactly had a positive impact on stopping visitors who are so happily and openly disturbing my sleep during office hours."


TRUMP
“All of the women on The Apprentice flirted with me – consciously or unconsciously. That’s to be expected.”

MUSEUM

"All of the women who visit the museum try to avoid me - consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."


TRUMP

“One of they key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government.”

MUSEUM

"One of the key problems today is that museums are such a disgrace. Good people don't go into the museum profession."

TRUMP
“It’s freezing and snowing in New York – we need global warming!”

MUSEUM

"It's freezing and snowing in my office - we need to be able to afford to turn on the museum heating!"


TRUMP
“I’ve said if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

MUSEUM
"I've said if I had a daughter, perhaps that would mean I actually had a girlfriend in my past.'


TRUMP

“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.”

MUSEUM

"I have never seen anyone fat or thin drinking anything in the museum cafe."

TRUMP
“I think the only difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my women are more beautiful.”

MUSEUM

"I think the only difference between me and the other museum curators is that I'm more honest about the artefacts I've dropped and the women who avoid me are more beautiful."

TRUMP
“My Twitter has become so powerful that I can actually make my enemies tell the truth.”

MUSEUM

"My exhibitons have become so powerful that I cannot actually tell what the truth is anymore."


TRUMP
“My IQ is one of the highest — and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure; it’s not your fault.”

MUSEUM

"My IQ is one of the highest - and I know it! Its just the visitors that are stupid or insecure. It's not their fault."

*Many thanks to Marie Claire http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/entertainment/people/donald-trump-quotes-57213

What if....Donald Trump became Director of the Museums Association?

Unexpected things happen.

Leicester City wins the Premier League, Richard III is found in a car park and the X Factor winner didn't get the Christmas number 1 this year. Weird things occasionally happen.

Arguably the most unexpected occurrence recently was the election of a wealthy reality TV star in the USA. Given that he seems to be making a bit of a hash of it, he might leave his post early. He may even be run out of the country by an angry mob. If this did happen where will he go? As he told the great Piers Piers Morgan himself,

“I love Scotland. One of the biggest problems I have in winning, I won’t be able to get back there so often. I would love to go there. As you know, before this happened, I would be there a lot."

So once there he needs to have a hobby, I confidently predict he will establish his Trump Museum purely out of revenge for the Guggenheim having refused to lend him a Van Gogh. But given the slightly scattershot nature to his bilious vendettas he will get his own back on us.

“If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.”

My guess, he will go for the most ancient and august museum body in Britain...the Museums Association. There is a director at the moment, the fine and distinctly northern Sharon Heal. She would clearly make a better President of the USA than Donald, let alone of the Museums Association. But she has a fatal flaw. She lacks a strong connection to the Russian mafia. Thus, a bit of fake news here, a little vote rigging there, and 'lock her up' chants will be ringing around Clerkenwell Close before you can say museums change lives.

So what is Donald Trump's perspective on museums. The clever money suggests he doesn't know what one is let alone visited one. Therefore we can expect fresh thinking and fresh action.

Will he learn about museums? He will do so, and very quickly, if his confidence about getting to grips with missiles was not misplaced.

“It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. … I think I know most of it anyway.”

He will be confident. When the MA lobbies government,

"We're going to have so many victories, you will be bored of winning."

In his Art of the Deal, he may have already come painfully close to the truth about museums

"You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don't deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on."

Also,

"You need energy.In [museums]*, you need energy as well as brains. Brains is always number one, but you need energy."

This is all potentially positive, but I suspect his support for museums may come at a price.

"I'm interested in protecting none of them unless they pay"

So you can expect your MA membership subscription will go up somewhat alarmingly.

Also we may be faced with:

• A big, beautiful new museum that Mexico will pay for
• 50,000 new jobs in the National Mining Museum
• A ban on Muslims entering all museums
• Arming 20% of curators
• Tariffs on object loans from overseas museums
• The claim that the Eden Project is a Chinese hoax
• The next MA conference to be held at Mar-a-Lago

So on reflection, we should keep Sharon Heal for the time being.  So, in order to save our museums
lets hope DT manages to make America great again.

*authors addition - replacing 'life'

Hail to the Advective and the return of the LY

With the liberal world wringing its hands and barely able to digest its falafel, parsley, mint and cilantro wrap at the unfolding Brexit/Trump populist tragedy. I have been able to rise above it all and have already identified the likely legacy of the Trump Administration - a new form of grammar. Satirists have latched onto BIGLY as part of the absurdity in communication that the leader of the free world indulges in. SAD!!

He has apparently said it on a number of occasions,

"I'm going to cut taxes bigly, and you're going to raise taxes bigly."
"We're going to win bigly"
"..they're taking it over bigly" 

History is now being re-written as Trump having said 'big league'. If that is the case I will be disappointed as bigly has a noble tradition as an adverb. Thomas Hardy used it in Far From The Madding Crowd,

"I don't see that I deserve to be put upon and stormed at for nothing!" concluded the small woman, bigly." (Chapter 30)

Trump is clearly paying homage to the British bucolic miserabilist poet, I suspect not fully intentionally, but a diet of Fox News and Breitbart may lead one into an English fantasist reverie that spawned the like of Hardy's Overlooking the River Stour (1916) when being oppressed by fake news from all sides

The swallows flew in the curves of an eight
Above the river-gleam
In the wet June's last beam
Like little crossbows animate
The swallows flew in the curves of an eight
Above the river-gleam

Actually I think that is just me. It is my safe space whenever I accidentally come across Sean Hannity (the US equivalent of Piers Morgan). Incidentally they are the possessors of the two most punchable faces in  the Western hemisphere.

Anyway I digress. I don't think Trump uses bigly as an adverb, and definitely not as an adjective, but as a curious new grammatical term - the advective. Part adverb, part adjective, part invective, part adenoid. Yet again one of the many unique innovations bestowed upon humanity by the great man.

He has brought to a screeching halt the dropping of the 'ly' in everyday English speech patterns. Have you quietly fumed when a football pundit opines that, 'the lad played exceptional'. Or bitten on your hand so hard that you drew blood when sitting on the Clapham omnibus and you overhear a young lady state confidently that she had applied her, 'lip gloss perfect'.

Trump has not only given us lies, he has given us LYs. All hail to the chief. He has reclaimed the endangered two letters lost to modern speech. Not only that he has repealed, reworked and reinterpreted it - just like Obamacare.

I hope he takes it further, perhaps all his future lies are told 'tallly', his Syrian options aren't taken 'nuclearly' , and his presidency is prematurely 'curtailedly'.

ALL HAIL TO THE CHIEFLY

Trumped I May be for a happy retirement

You've missed me haven't you. Exhausted after the Summer Olympics I went on a blogging sabbatical while I contemplated retirement. Luckily for you I'm still here and will return to the regular blogging business shortly. I still feel the need to tell you what to think and why I am right more than ever. That approach seemed so quaint a year ago, but I've found politicians have begun to take me seriously and are operating with my patented 'unreason' agenda. I need to take credit for this or at least correct their occasional misinterpretation of my philosophy. Better still gain power myself and show people how its really done.

I've realised that my retirement offers the potential of a more interesting life than I had previously envisioned. As the age of 70 approaches I've realised that being the president of the USA is not beyond me. Previously I thought you had to be a politician, but no! All you have to be is unreasonable. I thought you had to be an American, but then I realised all you had to do was lie. Apparently the previous president was from Kenya and the current one is from a different planet.
As the British have shown you can even become Prime Minister without even having to fight an election. Simple - my retirement is now sorted out. I will run a small to medium sized country for a few years.

OK so how to do it? I've been studying May and Trump closely and come up with a 5 point plan.

1. You need an enemy.
Should it be Poles, Mexicans or Muslims? No, they're all taken. In downtown Unreason, shouting about the danger of a massive influx of a pair of quantity surveyors from Cricklewood has not worked. I need a bigger population for everyone to fear. The Normans is the answer. They're basically French and they are everywhere, and they are MAL HOMMES. The French ddin't send us their best people William the Bastard anyone? Repatriate the Normans, block the Channel Tunnel and dig a moat (we already have one, but we just need to make it a bit deeper).

2. You need leather trousers and or a mail order bride.
I am still chafing after a misguided 10 minutes in the changing rooms at Top Shop after tussling with a pair of leather trousers. It gave the term rawhide a whole new meaning. So an advert in Autocar Magazine for a low mileage wife, recent model, preferably white should do the trick.

3. You need to disparage anybody who has a sensible opinion.
In our museum I have even taken to calling the visitors our 'so called public'.

5. Rig the election
I've started practising by looking for obituaries in the Unreason Bugle and signing the names I find into our museum visitor book to inflate the numbers. Next step I will register them as electors and when I stand in the local by election it will be the Day of the Living Dead all over again. I've set a target of 3 million. That should be enough (population of Unreason 15,874).

5. Come up with a catchy slogan
I've got 2. 'Lets make Unreasonableness great again' and 'UNREASON MEANS UNREASON'

My future is assured, lets hope there is still a world for me to run when my plan comes together.

Improve your museum productivity with advice from business, hollywood and history

In early blogs I have advocated an inactive approach to management, but that is a specific strategy that I believe is helpful to museums, not to capitalism in general. Sadly it appears that the worldwide influence of my blog and the inevitable misinterpretation of my message has had its consequences for commercial productivity in general. In the USA their Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported a full point drop in productivity for the first quarter of 2015*.

We all have distractions as Conservative MP Nigel Mills highlighted by being spotted playing Candy Crush during a Parliamentary Commons Committee debate at the end of last year. ** All motivation is internal. We can have bosses shouting at us, customers complaining, families disowning us and police investigating your museum accounts, but all that is meaningless unless you find the motivation within yourself to get on with things.

Fortunately for us Harold Bloom the Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale University compiled a brief list of what he called “thought productivity nuggets” from history.

1. “Think not long, but do; do not long, but think.” --Confucius

2. “There is nothing wrong with complaining about work; but do the work first, and then the complaints will be all the more worthy to be heeded.” --Socrates

3. “Never hitch a pig to a plough or expect an ox to provide bacon.” --Virgil


Confucius and Socrates are clearly sensible productive men. Virgil was clearly an idiot and I will never look at his 'Aeneid' again in the same light.


In a more modern context Ofir Sahar is the chief digital strategist of Cogniview, (apparently the company converts PDF files to Excel - who would have thought that as a job 30 years ago). He has also collected productivity quotes from the less intellectual figures that show-biz provides:

4. “You may catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but you’ll get them to work harder if you use a flyswatter.” --Jerry Lewis

5. “Measure twice; cut once.” --Harrison Ford

6. “Measure results, not hours.” --Emma Thompson


It seems Jerry Lewis deserved his 'hard task master' reputation, Mr. Ford is betraying his background as a carpenter and/or his wooden acting technique, whereas Emma Thompson's attitude explains the large budgets needed to make feature films.

Now a couple of heavyweights, Tim Cook is CEO of Apple and the young tyro Donald Trump is now a prospective US President.

7. “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” --Tim Cook

8. “I use my brain as a playground, not as a calendar.” --Donald Trump (does that explain his hairstyle?)

Apparently Cook will not hold a staff meeting longer than 10 minutes (it takes that long to argue over the biscuits in my organisation) and Donald Trump doesn't spend more than 10 minutes combing his wig which is why they are both very productive individuals.


So what have we learnt from all this? How can I be more productive? Well you can you can think about complaining whilst eating a curiously tasting bacon butty - that's how the ancients did it apparently. Or you can take forever whilst beating people with a stick, which is the Hollywood method. Or never spend more than 10 minutes doing anything to be more productive in business. The choice is yours.



*http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity - it has subsequently recovered so I might not be to blame after all.

**http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/6162232/VIDEO-Tory-MP-Nigel-Mills-caught-playing-Candy-Crush-during-key-Commons-meeting.html