The entrance fee to America’s museums keeps rising
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There are a few networks of museums such that once you join one museum in one network you get member benefits (or discounts) to the other museums in that network.
The networks break down into: Arts [0], Science [1], and Children's museums [2] [3]. Bonus network: Zoos! [4]
These can be a great value - especially for families with kids that like to do these things frequently. Our family travels between the MA, NC, and FL and the memberships have been a big help.
[0] https://narmassociation.org
[1] https://www.astc.org/membership/find-an-astc-member/passport...
[2] https://findachildrensmuseum.org/reciprocal-network/
[3] https://childrensmuseums.org
[4] https://www.aza.org/join?locale=en
Join the local institution you will frequent the most as you sometimes get better discounts/value at your "home" location.
Finally, check your local library - many have free or reduced cost tickets/passes for local museums and other institutions.
Meanwhile we still have a few entirely free outstanding ones.
Is there lots of government funding in the UK for the museum sector that doesn’t exist in the states?
The Tate Modern Director "earns between £110,000–115,000 ($148,000–155,000)"[1]
They do differ in public funding, but the philosophies between US and European museums are fundamentally different.
[0]https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/12/21/guggenheim-direct...
[1]https://news.artnet.com/art-world/tate-denies-gender-pay-ine...
All US nonprofits have to disclose financial data, and it's public. IRS form 990.
These "historied" cities have built up powerful hospitality industries around foreign visitors there to see historical cultural sites. Insofar as you can think of a municipal government as "a dozen neighbourhood business associations in a trenchcoat", hospitality-focused cities like this have strong incentives to put large amounts of public funding into museums, art galleries, etc. — both just to ensure that these things are very nice to visit and continue to draw tourists; but even more, to reduce the costs to tourists of visiting those sites in particular as much as possible... as a loss leader to draw those tourists into the rest of the city, where the hospitality-focused businesses can then capture their money!
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But, why doesn't this happen in the US? Well, it's no one single thing.
• The US is big. There's a lot of stuff in the US, but you can't see all of it on one vacation. The "draw power" of any one US city to foreign "cultural tourism" is diluted because you can't just go to one or two cities and see all the cool stuff.
• In fact, many of the most "tourist-driven" sites in the US — Niagra Falls, the Elvis museum, etc — aren't in cities that people have any other reason to visit. All there is there is the site itself, and the hospitality businesses, with no other reason to be there. Because of that, people who e.g. travel for business, can't sneakily justify a vacation to these places by holding a conference or retreat there; there's no "there" there to make that practical, let alone enjoyable. They're just tourist traps, that you have to go a long way out of your way to visit. (The one exception being Las Vegas, a tourist trap so overgrown that you can hold conferences there — but it's hard to justify a "business retreat to Vegas" for other reasons.)
• And a lot of the other well-known stuff — the Grand Canyon, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, etc — are (or are in) national parks, i.e. places excluded from capitalist build-up. Which is good insofar as it prevents a tourist trap; but bad insofar as it prevents these places becoming genuine hospitality-focused cities!
This is all very much unlike most of the rest of the world, where the big cities and the "stuff people want to see" are mostly co-located.
• Also, re: art and museums specifically — some might suggest that the US has nothing that foreign tourists want to see because "it's too young to have culture", but that's not true at all (see: e.g. MoMA; the Smithsonian.) I think the real "problem" with US museums is that they're modern in a way that means that all the coolest stuff can be seen in online catalogues; is well documented in video documentaries; etc. Meanwhile, other galleries and museums are old and crusty and not hip to technology (save for archival-science technology), in a way that means that you have to go there if you want to see it.
DC similarly has a huge number of museums that draw in foreign tourists, it's just that they're almost all Smithsonian museums, which are free to everyone.
Consider the "gap-year" 20-something who "travels Europe" by just staying in each country a few days to visit the cultural sites while staying at a hostel. To such a person, the equivalent cultural sites in the US are basically inaccessible. (Not that such a person is the sort of high-hospitality-ROI that a city would plan around; but their presence as a "keystone species" indicates that a hospitality-loss-led economy is functioning the way it should.)
The same kind of people who work in the museums, work in the municipal governments of these cities. In Europe, both groups — regardless of political affiliation! — tend to believe in the "city as cultural institution." And so both groups tend to work together to craft a city whose economy is in symbiosis with "global cultural enrichment", rather than in conflict with it.
The US does not do this. Or at least, I have never seen a majority government in any American municipality be aligned in creating a "hospitality-driven city focused around cultural tourism" in the way that municipal governments in Europe are.
Also, re: "I'm sure museums in France are free for French citizen under 25 and the unemployed" — from the article:
> The Guggenheim charges students $19 (children under 12 receive free admission) and the museum maintains a pay-what-you-wish policy for everyone on Saturdays that is expanding by one hour, from 5-8 p.m.
This is not a debate about economic barriers to access. The US is equally considerate of these. This really is just a question of how much to charge the rich foreign tourists who need to get out of town the next day and so don't have time to wait for a lazy Saturday to visit the museum. American cultural sites charge these people more; European cultural sites less. I'm offering an explanation for that, specific phenomenon.
Supply is hilariously above demand globally, people in the museum space basically make the calculation of what is the minimum I can talk myself into justifying and not live an actively unpleasant life and that minimum bar has simply skyrocketed vs 10 years ago.
The Smithsonian museums in Washington DC are free to enter—they are great museums, and there's a lot of them.
According to the BLS inflation calculator, $25 in 2015 had the same buying power as $32.64 now
Apparently museums are getting cheaper in real terms! What’s the issue?
Worth noting that The DIA has free entry for residents of three neighboring counties, which I could imagine is a contributor to attendance to pre-pandemic attendance.
Sometimes we don't even look at the art. Go in for free and hang out in the wonderful Kresge Court for food + drinks. Amble around to a particular section if we feel like it.
https://washington.org/dc-faqs-for-visitors/which-attraction...
If you haven't been, highly recommend a visit. Especially if you're brining kids - hard not to have a good time when you can walk into a water vapor tornado.
Good lord. Yup, $43/head if you want to see all the "ticketed exhibitions". (Is there sales tax too? Sometimes museums don't.)
Beyond just the prices, I really don't like the new spreading trend of charging more for "current exhibitions" separate from the rest of the museum. The Field Museum is "only" $30 for basic admission that excludes those.
And they dump a lot of resources in the marketing, fundraising and consultants, and blame 'wages' of the people who make 45k with, maybe, 2% yearly increases, when they jack up the prices.
In London, you can walk right into the V&A
It may also be due to large improvements at museums being a very sporadic occurrence. I remember growing up, my local museum (the Buffalo Museum of Science) feeling very dated, and when we visited Toronto, the Ontario Science Centre felt very new and fresh. But now the Buffalo museum has had some recent upgrades and feels new, whereas the last time I was at the Ontario Science Centre, it felt like I was seeing the same exhibits I saw as a kid 30 years earlier. Perhaps when my kids are grown, it will have reversed again.
Facilities like the Udvar-Hazy Center for Air & Space charge for parking, but admission is free. If you're in Downtown D.C., this matters much less of course.
I bet they could even lease out a fair amount of it with requirements of maintenance and some amount of public accessibility. That alone would drive down their costs at least.
There's more art of value than there is space to show it, so we rotate stuff in and out with special exhibitions and whatnot.
They're restored, conserved, and rotated in and out of the museum's public collection so it's ever-changing, which helps generate repeat business.
(They're often also available for academic purposes.)
There's some truth to helping generate repeat business, but even with a 100% yearly rotation rate that's a 17 year cycle to see everything without counting new additions. I doubt people are going to lose interest because two years prior to the new showing they could have traveled to Oklahoma City to view it.
If you're interested, see https://news.artnet.com/art-world/brauer-museum-controversia... for a recent example.
Smithsonian museums and the National Gallery have no admission fee, but private museums like the Spy or Bible museum do charge admission.