The Museum of American Finance was faced with an awkward situation recently: some of the corporate sponsors of the museum — dedicated to glories of free markets — had, well, failed.Lee Kjelleren, the museum president, said the purpose of the exhibit was to illustrate the “forces that affected everybody’s lives.”
Rather than fretting, the museum tapped its own entrepreneurial spirit and mounted an exhibit — “Tracking the Credit Crisis” — that reveals what the museum’s president, Lee Kjelleren, calls the “greed, recklessness and arrogance” of Wall Street.
Probably not what Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch or the American International Group had in mind when they donated money to the museum.
But in the wake of the financial crisis, attendance at the museum — located at 48 Wall Street, near the epicenter of last year’s market collapse — has risen to about 200 visitors a day, nearly double its tally last summer. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art averages that many visitors almost every 90 seconds.)
And where else can you buy a poster for just $12 chronicling the lowlights of the credit crisis — so many, in fact, that it’s a five-poster set?
Among the biggest attractions for visitors? The morbid curiosity of a financial train wreck.
“This is about the market crashing,” said Lizzie McNeely, 26, a high school teacher from Toronto, as she wandered around the museum one recent afternoon. “I am interested in how they are going to represent that.”
For the $8 price of admission (or free Tuesday to Saturday from 10 to 11 a.m. through October), visitors who have seen enough van Goghs at the Met and Pollocks at the Museum of Modern Art can get a detailed look at the events that brought the global economy to its knees.
The most popular sections of the exhibit, Mr. Kjelleren said, describe so-called toxic assets and how these were exported from America around the world — “As if the rest of the world didn’t already love America enough!” — as well as the dubious role of the ratings agencies in concealing the riskiness of subprime mortgages and the securities based on their values.
A film about the crisis includes a still photograph of Richard S. Fuld Jr., the vilified former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, being harangued by an angry crowd, including a person holding a sign with the word “Crook” scrawled across it.
In curating the installation, Mr. Kjelleren said one of the things he wanted to capture was how “dumb” the banks had been about investment vehicles like credit-default swaps. “It was dumb, it was more than dumb, and it was occasionally reckless and irresponsible,” he said.
He pointed significantly to a section of the exhibit that discussed the so-called Lehman weekend last September, and the government’s decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail, which Mr. Kjelleren characterized as a big mistake.
But he reminded visitors that the museum was all about learning from past mistakes.
One group striding by — five bankers from Goldman Sachs — seemed more focused on avoiding the educational experience of the exhibit devoted to the credit crisis.
John Cirincion, 60, one of the museum’s volunteer guides, beckoned to them to take a closer look, but the bankers shook their heads.
“We lived it!” one said, as the group headed instead for an exhibit titled “Women in Finance.”
The museum presents the global financial crisis employing a video and a dense timeline that catalogues what Mr. Kjelleren breathlessly describes as what may have been “the most challenging man-made calamity in modern experience,” excluding wars.
The color-coded timeline depicts crucial events from February 2007 through March 2009 in presenting an overview of the crisis, and provides definitions for important financial terms like subprime mortgage.
Mr. Kjelleren, a former banker for JPMorgan, said, “The idea was to create an awareness of the nature of the driving forces that affected everybody’s lives.”
One of the best measures of the scale of the crisis is not on display, but can be found in museum literature detailing its corporate sponsorships.
Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo generously opened their wallets here a year ago, long before they became part of Exhibit A in a display on the financial crisis.
And Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch are effectively gone, and American International Group is a shadow of its former self. The government owns nearly 80 percent of that company.
Alina Sichevaya, an 11-year-old whose father works for Credit Suisse, had just completed a weeklong finance camp for children at a Camp Millionaire program in her hometown of Cary, N.C. She strode into the gilded halls of the museum and made a beeline for the credit exhibit, staring intently at the giant panels of color-coded cards.
Though she had just learned at camp about complicated concepts like taxes and depreciating assets, Ms. Sichevaya said she found the exhibit “kind of confusing.”
“It’s a lot of information,” she added, as she and her mother, Olga, headed off to catch a sightseeing tour of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Even in the best of times, it was never going to be easy to curate an homage to high finance.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the address of the Museum of American Finance.
Source: NYTIMES
