How Much Should the Met Cost?

In my experience the impact from mandatory museum fees is that people will not make short museum visits. A single new exhibit is not worth $25, nor is a 1 hour visit after lunch or before dinner. When there's a large cost visiting the museum becomes an event, something that gets planned into the day's schedule for many hours. I'm curious to see if the fees have any impact on the number of out of town visitors.

The Minneapolis Institute of Art is free (except special exhibits). I'm a paying member, but it's great that it's free, both for those who can't pay, but also because it means you don't have to spend a huge amount of time there to feel like it justifies the ticket price. I used to live nearby and would sometimes walk over to look at one piece for 5 minutes.

Very interesting article.

I recently visited New York and spent a day at the Met. As a tech-employed American who can afford to do things like fly to New York for a week, $25 dollars seemed like an amazing deal. An unbelievable deal, really. $25 there and $25 at MOMA didn't really register against the overall expense of the trip.

They still have pay-what-you-can for people who live in New York or within a certain distance thereof.

I live near the Met, and go frequently. Other articles, but not this one, mention another huge reason: the fact that the Met is effectively free has lead to crazy overcrowding.

Tour buses line up on 5th Ave, people are pushy, lines are hours long, etc. It's an incredible place, but sometimes it feels like the fact that it's free means that people treat it like it's cheap. It turns into the default thing to do, which to me feels like it devalues one of the greatest institutions on the planet.

I'm a member at MoMA, and it's a totally different situation - it's quieter, people are more respectful, and it's a lot less crowded. I'm sure the fact that MoMA is non-negotiably $25.

Pro-tip: If you're in New York, on your first day buy a MoMA membership, and the next morning go to Member Hours (you can't buy a membership during Member Hours). Being in the Warhol room alone is a remarkable experience.

"To be ideological is to preconceive reality." Indeed! In his fervor to picture the Met as a racist, elitist, outdated bastion of high art the author does not care to spend any verbiage on the real problem: the Met's inaptitude for money. While mentioning a constant beat about money troubles he doesn't really talk about what is causing these, except mentioning number of visitors has doubled.

Leaving that aside, as one data point I wanted to compare Met's membership rates for two adults with those of Chicago's Art Institute, of which we are members: $105 for the Art Institute, $100 for the Met. And the Institute, while great, is no Met!

>or they charge a king’s ransom to see the work on their walls, like the Louvre (seventeen euros)

Partially true, European visitors under 25 years get free access.

As a not-so-rich-student this is what made me visit the Louvre. I'm not an arts student and didn't really know what to expect from an art museum, so this is what made me visit the Louvre on a recent layover. If I had to pay, I probably wouldn't have visited it, as I expected to not get the money worth in the 2-3 hours I had. I'm guessing others feel this way as well.

$25 seems like a good filter for very interested visitors though.

Even charging tourists at a mere $5 would exceed their $10m needs.

To contrast the pricing, The Vancouver Art Gallery charges $24 (membership for $90.) More often than not, I leave disappointed with the overall experience. That being said, they have expenses, and its not like I'm going several times per month.

If we could have the quality of the Met in Vancouver, I'd gladly pay $25+ per visit.

I actually find the new policy more honest in some ways. Because of the way admission was set up (you had to go up to the cashier and get a little clip-on thingie), it always felt like the donation was optional but not really. And the museum certainly didn't go out of its way to advertise that you didn't have to pay the printed amount.

London museums are also a bit guilty of trumpeting "Free" and then expecting a donation. But the suggested amount is more modest and the collection is just a box/globe so it's very low-key.

The Met is one of the world’s great museums. It is easily worth $25. As a student of art history in Southern California I simply did not understand the appeal of certain artworks until I saw them at the Met, where I was moved to tears several times. It turned out that I simply hadn’t been able to experience first-rate collections where I lived.

I was visiting Baltimore's Inner Harbor recently with my wife and our two kids. With a couple of hours available, we thought we'd checkout the aquarium. Then we learned our 4 tickets would cost $130 ($40/adult, $25/child), so we found something else to do instead.

I know an aquarium is not an art museum, but still...