What Constitutes A Successful Museum?

From the outside, today’s American museums look prosperous and happy. “Yet all is not well in the art museum profession,” writes Maxwell Anderson. “Within the confines of their boardrooms, American art museums today are beset as never before by disagreement about their priorities. The difficulty in measuring success in art museums today stems in part from the fact that, over the last generation, art museums have shifted their focus away from collection-building and toward various kinds of attention to the public—without balancing these two imperatives and without a consensus on what constitutes best practices in the latter.” So how do you measure success at the modern American museum?