"Should art galleries & museums charge an entrance fee?" poll

Should art galleries & museums charge an entrance fee?

No...5

Yes...2

Yes, with exceptions...1

There will come a time when private, city/state/Federal support of such institutions will be severely limited or even withdrawn. Sales tax for them are difficult to pass. So I don't see why they can't charge for admission...with exceptions: Disabled, elderly, student, academic/scholars, groups. poor.

"'The man who said museums should charge for entry.'"

March 9th, 2011

Art History News

Tristram Hunt has re-opened the debate on entrance fees for museums. He says that in an age of arts cuts, particularly for regional museums, it is unfair that London-based museums such as Tate get funds for free entry, but not the Potteries Museum in his own Stoke constituency. [More below]

Hunt is going firmly against Labour policy, and his willingness to debate the issue must be applauded. For too long there has been a sort of fatwa on the subject. I used to work for Hugo Swire, who, when he was Shadow Culture Secretary, was denounced by the Daily Mail, and later others, for daring to suggest that if some museums wanted to re-introduce charges, he would consider allowing them to do so.

Personally, I think free entry is a Good Thing. But if a board of independent trustees wanted to charge because they thought it would be better for their museum, why should the government stop them? The money they receive from DCMS to supposedly make up for free entry is not nearly enough. And Hunt points out that 'when it came to broadening audiences for art and culture, free entry didn't achieve that much.'

Should British taxpayers be subsidising the over 15 million overseas visitors who benefit from free entry? If the British Museum could charge even half of its 3.7m overseas visitors the same as the Louvre, 9.5 Euros, it would raise an additional £14.4m. The equivalent figure for Tate would be £12.5m, and the National Gallery almost £7m.

I'm glad that the current government is committed to free entry, with 'no ifs and no buts' as Jeremy Hunt said. But I'll continue to be puzzled by the fact that in Paris, it's free to get into Notre Dame, but not the Louvre, while in London it's free to get into the National Gallery, but not Westminster Abbey.

Museums and visitors

I bet you have noticed this too...sort of a strangled appreciation of art to be captured by camera and viewed later. But then, some would adopt that methodology when in a museum gallery featuring the works of Balthasar Klossowski for fear of labeling and suspicion.

"At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus"

by

Michael Kimmelman

August 3rd, 2009

The New York Times

PARIS — Spending an idle morning watching people look at art is hardly a scientific experiment, but it rekindles a perennial question: What exactly are we looking for when we roam as tourists around museums? As with so many things right in front of us, the answer may be no less useful for being familiar.

At the Louvre the other day, in the Pavillon des Sessions, two young women in flowered dresses meandered through the gallery. They paused and circled around a few sculptures. They took their time. They looked slowly.

The pavilion puts some 100 immaculate objects from outside Europe on permanent view in a ground floor suite of cool, silent galleries at one end of the museum. Feathered masks from Alaska, ancient bowls from the Philippines, Mayan stone portraits and the most amazing Zulu spoon carved from wood in the abstracted S-shape of a slender young woman take no back seat, aesthetically speaking, to the great Titians and Chardins upstairs.

The young women were unusual for stopping. Most of the museum’s visitors passed through the gallery oblivious.

A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.

Almost nobody, over the course of that hour or two, paused before any object for as long as a full minute. Only a 17th-century wood sculpture of a copulating couple, from San Cristobal in the Solomon Islands, placed near an exit, caused several tourists to point, smile and snap a photo, but without really breaking stride.

Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement. Partly we seem to go to them to find something we already recognize, something that gives us our bearings: think of the scrum of tourists invariably gathered around the Mona Lisa. At one time a highly educated Westerner read perhaps 100 books, all of them closely. Today we read hundreds of books, or maybe none, but rarely any with the same intensity. Travelers who took the Grand Tour across Europe during the 18th century spent months and years learning languages, meeting politicians, philosophers and artists and bore sketchbooks in which to draw and paint — to record their memories and help them see better.

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look. It became possible to imagine that because a reproduction of an image was safely squirreled away in a camera or cell phone, or because it was eternally available on the Web, dawdling before an original was a waste of time, especially with so much ground to cover.

We could dream about covering lots of ground thanks to expanding collections and faster means of transportation. At the same time, the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have “done” the Louvre. It's self-improvement on the fly.

The art historian T. J. Clark, who during the 1970s and ’80s pioneered a kind of analysis that rejected old-school connoisseurship in favor of art in the context of social and political affairs, has lately written a book about devoting several months of his time to looking intently at two paintings by Poussin. Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.

Until then we grapple with our impatience and cultural cornucopia. Recently, I bought a couple of sketchbooks to draw with my 10-year-old in St. Peter’s and elsewhere around Rome, just for the fun of it, not because we're any good, but to help us look more slowly and carefully at what we found. Crowds occasionally gathered around us as if we were doing something totally strange and novel, as opposed to something normal, which sketching used to be. I almost hesitate to mention our sketching. It seems pretentious and old-fogeyish in a cultural moment when we can too easily feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed just to look hard.

Artists fortunately remind us that there's in fact no single, correct way to look at any work of art, save for with an open mind and patience. If you have ever gone to a museum with a good artist you probably discovered that they don't worry so much about what art history books or wall labels tell them is right or wrong, because they're selfish consumers, freed to look by their own interests.

Back to those two young women at the Louvre: aspiring artists or merely curious, they didn’t plant themselves forever in front of the sculptures but they stopped just long enough to laugh and cluck and stare, and they skipped the wall labels until afterward.

They looked, in other words. And they seemed to have a very good time.

Leaving, they caught sight of a sculptured effigy from Papua New Guinea with a feathered nose, which appeared, by virtue of its wide eyes and open hands positioned on either side of its head, as if it were taunting them.

They thought for a moment. "Nyah-nyah," they said in unison. Then blew him a raspberry.

And so the arts suffer too

And, it will get worse especially in smaller communities...the Concrete Dinosaur Museum in rural America may have to close.

"U.S. museums cutting back due to recession"

by

Christine Kearney

March 13th, 2009

Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Museums in New York and Philadelphia are cutting jobs, slashing salaries and closing stores because their endowments have been pounded by declines in donations, government aid and investment returns.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is closing 15 of its merchandising stores across the United States, leaving only eight stores open in New York. It will cut about 250 jobs, or 10 percent of its workforce, before July 1.

The museum, founded more than 130 years ago and prominently located alongside Central Park, has lost about $800 million from its endowment since mid-2008, when it was worth about $2.9 billion, spokesman Harold Holzer said. There were no plans to cut exhibits.

"It's a very strange economic climate we are in," Holzer said.

The Met is a nonprofit institution whose funding sources include its endowment, government aid, private donations and admission revenues.

Holzer said that based on endowment losses alone, the Met would have to cut $2.2 million from its $220 million operating budget in the next fiscal year. He added that cuts in the operating budget could total up to $20 million, taking in retail cutbacks and other losses.

The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia announced a hiring freeze on Friday and said it would cut salaries by 5 percent. Its endowment and other investments dropped to less than $40 million from $60 million in early 2008.

Attendance was down at both museums as art lovers tightened their belts during the global recession. The Met said foreign visitors, who are more likely to pay the suggested $20 voluntary admission fee, also dropped.

"People have less money to spend on cultural and educational experiences," the Academy of Natural Sciences said in a statement.

Other museums in the United States have laid off workers or predicted they will be forced to fire staff.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles almost had to close until billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad came up with a $30 million rescue plan in 2008.

The well-funded Getty Trust that operates museums in Southern California has frozen hiring and salaries.

In New York, the Museum of Modern Art implemented a hiring freeze in October and ordered a general operating budget cut of 10 percent. Other major museums in the city declined to discuss whether they had suffered endowment losses or had plans for layoffs or salary cuts.