Dual-management in art museums - Towards an artistic and commercial balance

Art museums are complex cultural organizations in which a duality is always present, the artistic against the commercial vales. As a knowledge-based institution, the museum is expected to deliver a quality program while being economically sustainable. A way of tackling this conflict is by having a dual-management structure: an artistic director in charge of the knowledge-based tasks, and a business director responsible of the economic well-being of the organization (Reid & Karambayya, 2009). This managerial structure has rarely been analysed by scholars in the environment of an art museum, only in performance art organizations where this practiced is much more extended. This thesis aims (1) at exploring the dual-management structure in art museums, while assessing another duality found in managerial theory: managerial orientation, towards learning goals or towards performance goals (Paunova & Svejenova, 2016). And (2) to understand this theory’s contribution to the aforementioned art against commerce duality. This will be analysed by investigating directors and museums with dual-management structure in the Netherlands. The findings suggest that a deeper and more complex analysis should be done to these theories’ applications in museum directors and art museums in order to understand the implications between them.