The Met’s not free. How do other museums do it?

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art started charging out-of-state visitors this month. Some museums, however, make free admission work. 

|
Courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts
Students visit the Rivera Court at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art started charging out-of-state visitors this month. Met chief executive officer Daniel Weiss says the high-profile tweak to a decades-old pay-as-you-wish policy was a matter of ensuring financial stability. 

Some museums, however, make free admission work. When museums go free, they hope to reach a larger, more varied audience. They fall back on public and philanthropic funds to fill the gap. Directors like Kaywin Feldman at the Minneapolis Institute of Art talk about not just those numbers, but about connections to their communities. “I used to always subscribe to the idea that people pay for what they value,” said Ms. Feldman. The MIA went admission-free in 1989. Now Feldman believes that “if you’re free, people can weave the museum into their daily lives.”

In 2012, voters raised property taxes to fund the Detroit Institute of Arts after it offered to eliminate entrance fees for visitors from three Detroit-area counties. Campaigning for the tax increase “forced the museum to articulate its mission and values to the broader community,” said museum consultant Susie Wilkening, who estimates admission typically makes up 5 percent of art museums’ budgets. Dave Flynn, public affairs director at the Detroit Institute of Arts, said his museum is intent on being “relevant to what the community wants.”

Dropping admission can attract donors and inform a broader approach. Free bus transportation for student and senior museumgoers came along with free admission in Detroit. Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum, for example, offers gallery meditation sessions. Walters executive director Julia Marciari-Alexander says running a ticketing system and other costs make charging admission only minimally profitable. Visitors freed from fees, as they have been at the Walters since 2006, can engage in art without “a transaction,” she said. Instead, “it’s a conversation. It’s a relationship.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to The Met’s not free. How do other museums do it?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2018/0313/The-Met-s-not-free.-How-do-other-museums-do-it
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe