From The Economist:
“It’s almost a moral duty that museums should be free,” said Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). That was in 2002, when a ticket to moma cost $12 (around $19 in today’s prices). In October moma started charging $30, the latest in a series of price rises.
moma is not the only museum raising the cost of admission. The Metropolitan Museum in New York ended its longstanding “pay what you will” policy for out-of-town visitors in 2018 and raised general admission for them to $30 in 2022. Last summer the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the Guggenheim Museum all followed suit, bumping a standard ticket from $25 to $30.
Museum staff complain of climbing costs and a case of “long covid”. In America only a third of museums have met or surpassed pre-pandemic visitor numbers. Higher energy and labour costs have pushed up ticket prices in Europe, too. In January the Berlin State Museums, the Louvre and the Vatican Museums, which include the Sistine Chapel, raised the price of general-admission tickets by 20%, 29% and 17%, respectively. Prices have remained stable only in Asia and the Middle East, where museums are younger and state funding is especially generous.
Ticket fees may seem high, particularly in destination cities where tourists are not likely to be dissuaded by spending a few more dollars. But “whatever museums charge, it is not covering their operating costs,” says Javier Jimenez, a director at Lord Cultural Resources, a consulting firm. The Association of Art Museum Directors reported in 2018 that ticket sales accounted on average for just 7% of total revenue at American art museums. Memberships contributed another 7%. The remainder of budgets usually come from endowments, charitable donations, grants and retail operations.
European museums are less reliant on admissions fees, because they are often heavily subsidised by governments. This can make it awkward to ask taxpayers to buy a pricey ticket and in effect pay twice. Many institutions choose to offer reductions for the young, pensioners and locals.
All national institutions in Britain offer free admission, as do most state-run museums in China. (Exceptions are made for special exhibitions.) In America some 30% are free, including big public museums like those of the Smithsonian Institution and private ones such as the Getty Centre in Los Angeles. Some observers have repeated Mr Lowry’s call for museums, especially the most well-endowed, to stop charging for admission entirely.
Ballooning prices go against museums’ goal of sharing art with a more diverse public. They could also accelerate the already steep decline in the share of Americans attending museums and galleries: between 2017 and 2022 it shrunk by 26%.
Declining public interest, particularly among young people, is a challenge for institutions that rely heavily on public support. Those who choose not to visit a museum today may be the people who vote against government subsidies or refuse to write personal cheques as patrons in a few years. Those who spend time inside museums’ galleries are more likely to grasp their richness and want to invest their own riches in them.
Yet significantly reducing costs may not actually do much to attract new audiences either. In both America and Europe, people say that price is just one of several factors when it comes to deciding what to do with their leisure time.
Link to the rest at The Economist
PG’s first job out of college was right across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago, then (and hopefully now), one of the great art museums of the world.
When he didn’t have a business lunch or a tight deadline, PG would go over to explore nooks and crannies in the Art Institute with few visitors as well as the impressive large pieces that reliably brought crowds into the building on most days.
As he recalls, he gave the museum a relatively small amount of money to acquire the right to visit any place in the Art Institute at any time the building was open.
PG was saddened by the OP and the admission fees charged to those who are less than well-off.