LACMA Will Be 1st U.S. Stop for Tut’s Treasures

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will present an exhibition of King Tut’s treasures in June, but visitors will have to pay up to $30 -- a record ticket price -- to see it.

LACMA is expected to announce today that “Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaoh” will open June 16 and include about 130 Egyptian artifacts, compared with about 55 that toured the country in the 1970s.

Andrea Rich, president and director of the museum, confirmed Tuesday that ticket prices for the special exhibition, which will continue through Nov. 15, will range from $15 to as much as $30 for adult weekend tickets, compared with $14 to $20 for “Renoir to Matisse: The Eye of Duncan Phillips,” which runs through Jan. 9.

The “Tut” ticket prices will be set by the exhibition’s backers, AEG -- the sports and entertainment presenter that developed Staples Center, among other venues -- and Arts and Exhibitions International. The two organizations have been working with National Geographic and Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities to bring the artifacts to the United States for the first time since their heralded visit from 1976 to 1979.

A portion of the exhibition’s proceeds will fund construction of a new museum in Cairo, as well as preservation and conservation of archeological sites in Egypt, said Timothy J. Leiweke, president and chief executive of AEG.

Rich said, “For a museum like ours, the advantage is there’s a lot less financial risk for us. If we had to fund it ourselves, it is probably something that is beyond our reach. In weighing the opportunity to have it in L.A. versus not having it, we decided it was better to have it.”

Though no definitive price statistics are available, Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of New York’s Assn. of Museum Directors, said in an interview Tuesday, “I have not heard of an admission price that high” for a special exhibition.

Gaudieri noted that the news of the “Tut” exhibition price comes on the heels of an outcry over the increase in general admission prices -- to $20 -- at the newly reopened Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Leiweke called the arrangement between the corporate backers and the county museum the “wave of the future” for funding major exhibitions. He added that he did not expect to encounter “price resistance” from an audience used to paying $10 for a movie. “It’s a very inexpensive ticket compared to a concert or a sporting event,” he said.

The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in December 2005 and Chicago’s Field Museum in May 2006.