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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure what the difference is between something like the Guggenheim in NYC or the Tate Modern in London, but you can walk into the Tate without having to pay anything at all.

Is there lots of government funding in the UK for the museum sector that doesn’t exist in the states?

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The Guggenheim Director makes $850k.[0]

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...

Thanks for that.

All US nonprofits have to disclose financial data, and it's public. IRS form 990.

In response to my earlier comment, the answer is yes. The Tate is a non-departmental public body sponsored by DCMS (and it seems like other museums such as NHM in London have the same structure).

The Guggenheim is a private museum. Public museums in NYC are pay-as-you-wish, but began charging non-New York residents a mandatory fee in 2018.

So, the epiphany to have here, is that for many countries — but not the US! — historical cultural sites and artefacts (not just museums, but also things like monuments and land features) are a large draw for foreign tourists. People fly to Paris just to visit the Louvre; people visit Egypt just to see the pyramids; etc.

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.

I kind of disagree with your premise here, at least in some specifics. MoMA and The Met in NYC absolutely do have a draw for foreign tourists, and are full of them. Both require tourists to pay the full ticket price to get in. LA too has serious museums that attract international tourists.

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.

My argument is that the foreign tourists who visit these places would be visiting NYC either way, and are just visiting these sites while they're in NYC, with something else having drawn them there. These sites are serving as part of a portfolio of factors that make NYC an interesting place to visit, but they don't manage to draw tourists all on their own in a way where reducing the ticket price to them would make a foreign tourist more likely to book a flight to America as a whole, just to go to NYC, just to go to that site.

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.)

I see, now, it makes complete sense. I'm sure museums in France are free for French citizen under 25 and the unemployed in order to draw in more tourists which would come and pay anyway. That has absolutely nothing to do with these countries actually seeing access to culture as a public good and valuing education.

You don't seem to be seeing that those are two sides of the same coin. The article cites rising labor costs as the primary factor in needing to increase ticket prices. Well, why would labor costs in an industry rise? Because demand exceeds supply. And why would demand exceed supply? Because people only want to work there "as a job", rather than seeing working there as a cultural mission to educate others — to educate the world! — about their culture and history. (I.e. people working at the MoMA demand higher wages [relative to cost of living] than people working at the Louvre do, for essentially the same work, because the people at the MoMA value the "perks of the job" less.)

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.

No, the labor costs are mostly rising because culturally significant cities in the Anglosphere have seen their housing costs blow up to astronomical levels in the last few years.

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.

No one in Europe wants to create "hospitality-driven" cities. Who do you take us for? It's not bloody Disneyland.

> Is there lots of government funding in the UK for the museum sector that doesn’t exist in the states?

The Smithsonian museums in Washington DC are free to enter—they are great museums, and there's a lot of them.

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