Art Museums Provide a Public Service by Contributing to a Nation's

Art museums provide a public service by contributing to a nation's cultural capital. Australian art museums have been mounting major art exhibitions by borrowing major artworks from international collection. Exhibitions with the largest attendances are known as "blockbusters" and by definition attract more than 300,000 visitors. Australian audiences have an ongoing love affair with works by the impressionists,
post- impressionists and of course, anything by Picasso and it is these works that tend to form the basis of blockbusters. Blockbuster exhibitions are important for their local economies since they tend to generate considerable tourist activity by attracting visitors overseas, especially New Zealand and Asia, as well as interstate and intrastate. As competition between art museums in different Australian states intensifies, there has been a tendency for art museums to focus on the impressionists-guaranteed to become blockbusters-while they neglect lesser known artists of merit. These developments have led to a situation where, museums have come to measure their performance exclusively in terms of the visitor numbers. Apart from the number of visitors attracted, what other measures can be used by art museums to evaluate their performance?