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September 4, 2008
Should Museums be Free?
Waldemar Januszczak is having second thoughts. He goes to the Imperial War Museum in London and finds a paid admission special exhibition on, of all things, James Bond.
So, I hope the question I want to ask here is predictable. It should be. It’s a damned obvious question: why is the Imperial War Museum celebrating James Bond, when Bond and his Aston Martin and his girls and his gadgets have nothing to do with the terrible realities of war, and when our young men are having their legs blown away in Afghanistan and Iraq? If the question is obvious, so, alas, is the answer. We all know exactly why the Imperial War Museum has put on a Bond show. It’s as clear as a vodka martini. Bond is popular and, by devoting a display to him, the organisers hope to attract wagonloads of fee-paying visitors to their museum. He’ll bring a younger crowd. The kidults will love him. Seats are sure to be settled with bums.. . .
There are, in fact, two tragedies being enacted here. One is the continuing collapse of cultural values that leaves us unable to tell the difference between Kylie’s dresses and the rightful terrain of a museum. The other is an unfortunate side effect of a well-meaning gesture - the abolition of museum charges. Making entry to national museums free, thereby reversing the policy of charging brought in by Margaret Thatcher’s government, is the biggest feather in new Labour’s cultural cap. Having marched outside the V&A in the 1980s, protesting against museum charges, I was as delighted as anyone by the Blair government’s determination to push through free entry.
Seven years on from the abolition of charges, however, things are no longer so clear. When that dreadful old Etonian, the then shadow culture secretary Hugo Swire, popped up in the papers last year suggesting that the Conservatives might reexamine the free-admissions policy, large barrels of ordure came down on his head, persuading him to beat a hasty retreat. Yet the cruel truth is that free museum entry has turned out to be a mixed blessing. Yes, the number of visitors going to galleries has increased dramatically, but the figures are not what they seem. A Mori poll conducted in 2002 discovered that, although numbers had increased, the make-up of the typical museumgoer had remained unchanged. What was actually happening was that the same people were going more often. And those people were, as before, the middle-class, the educated, the culturally involved.
. . .
The most serious effect, however, of the scrapping of entrance fees has been the impact it has had on exhibition policy. Unable to charge visitors for entry, museums have had to rely on special exhibitions for large chunks of their income. The talented among them have duly found ways of putting on shows that are both popular and proper. The British Museum’s tribute to the Terracotta Army is a perfect example: the most successful show of the year, but ambitious, thoughtful, enlightening. Yet it takes a rare museum talent to pull off that approach. Which is why the Imperial War Museum has resorted to waving [Halle] Berry’s bikini at us.
[my emphasis]
Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 4, 2008 9:11 AM
Comments
Unequivocally, yes.
Ok, so maybe you end up getting 'popular' displays, but they bring in the punters. And once you've gone in, you see other things to see. Free museum entry means a lot of accidental discovery, I think. And it allows for much more appreciation of a collection, because there's no pressure to get though the entire museum in one visit. One of the things I love about going to DC or London is that, if I don't have a lot of time, I can just go see one part of a museum, and just enough of what else is there to plan my next visit. And I think there is also something to be said for democratization -- I think all people who go and enjoy themselves are enriched, and (depending on the museum) can feel that they have some ownership. If the cost is Halle Berry's bikini, that's ok.
.....but W.J.'s point is they DON'T bring in the punters - and they've got some polling numbers to explain it. The same people just come more often. So it's a hidden benefit to the museum-going middle class AND it dumbs down the museum. Now I hate it that museums charge so much (and Rome is an insane example of that - 6 euros is about the minimum admission charge, and there are places it can go to 12), but experience shows that charging NOTHING may not help, either. --MCT
Posted by: Another Damned Medievalist 
at September 5, 2008 12:46 AM
In the case of the Imperial War Museum, I wonder how much is that it's down by the Elephant, not the best of neighborhoods. There seemed to be a fair range of (non-tourist) people when I was at the V&A this summer, and that was even more true for the Natural History Museum.
Even if we're just talking about middle-class punters, museum charges can add up for a family. There's a huge difference between being able to take the kids to a museum for a couple of hours for free, and paying maybe £20-40. One of the other things I've noticed is that huge numbers of school groups attend. Here where I am, most of my students have taken school trips to at least one of the big public and free museums -- something that their peers in other cities seem to do less often.
.....School groups are, in fact, eternal, involuntary, and not part of the WJ's argument; at many museums in America school groups are not charged for admission but for guides and docents. I'm even willing to argue that much of what we do with school children is wasted or even counterproductive, and actually better served by free admission for the under 18 or something.
.....But why *should* middle class punters get in for free? Because we think it's better for them and their children than movies or theme parks? --MCT
Posted by: Another Damned Medievalist at September 5, 2008 12:02 PM
I'm not surprised that free admission hasn't brought in all the people Labour had hoped to enlighten. Nonetheless, it was a worthwhile effort, and should not be judged too harshly in hindsight. Nor is it a trivial benefit that free admission allowed the existing museum-going population to visit more often.
That said, I'm not totally against admission charges. Flexible payment such as is found at the MMA seems to be a good solution. Fixed and high admission charges strongly dissuade short visits and visits with children (or non-museumgoing friends!) who may lack the patience or stamina for the full thing.
Posted by: David Nishimura at September 6, 2008 10:53 PM