Josi Callan has been named interim CEO of EMP and the Science Fiction Museum, replacing Kristy Dooley, who left about a month ago. At the same time, EMP artistic director Bob Santelli, a music scholar and curator, has announced he will leave EMP in September. Callan’s contract is for one year, an EMP spokesman said.

Callan’s last job was as inaugural director of the Museum of Glass, a newborn, big-budget, flashy-architecture venue backed by a wealthy businessman that has been more of a tourist destination than a respected member of the cultural community. Sound like any other organization you know?

At the glass museum, Callan never hired another on-staff chief art curator after her first one resigned seven months after the museum opened in July 2002. Part of her job at EMP will be to determine whether to fill the position Santelli held, as artistic director, or to axe that post completely.

Is EMP moving away from curatorial? Has it ever really been very curatorial? The place has lost plenty of great staff curators, including Chris Bruce and Ann Powers. And I’m not a pop-music journalist, so it’s hard for me to seriously assess the content of most of EMP’s shows, but its first foray into fine art, DoubleTake, is badly curated and the art is insensitively presented. (To its credit, EMP has organized a few good talks around the exhibition, and is bringing Nan Goldin and Eric Fischl to town.)

The other thing Callan is known for in arts circles is the inflated salary she earned at the glass museum before she left this January: $285,894 in 2005, according to tax records. That was far more than any of her counterparts in Seattle and around the country, and it ran counter to the Internal Revenue Service’s guidelines for nonprofit compensation. Meantime, the museum spent its first years making layoffs to avoid red ink. (Again: sound like any other organization you know?)

The Museum of Glass’s new director, Timothy Close, isn’t making nearly as much as Callan did: $180,000. Mimi Gates at Seattle Art Museum made $190,000 in 2004. EMP is a nonprofit, but it defies categories, so it is hard to know what to compare it to. It’s fair to say it pays more than strict art museums. The spokesman declined to share Callan’s salary, but tax forms show that in 2004, when Santelli was deputy director, he made $267,500.

But the real question is: Does Callan represent a new type of museum, one run more like a business? If so, should those types of museums be nonprofits? What makes a nonprofit? Cultural nonprofits have become more business-like, appointing CEOs instead of directors or directors with business instead of scholarly backgrounds, but they’ve also maintained curatorial departments—although some say curators have lost some of their traditional power to marketing, PR, and education functions.

What do you think? Do you care whether EMP has an artistic director, a leader devoted to the creative side of things? Did you even know it did?