A Freethinking Idea : Dropping admission fees and reconsidering ‘elitism’ could alter museums’ market-driven mentality.

In 1989, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts was in trouble. The museum is the largest and most important encyclopedic art museum in its Upper Midwest region, with collections numbering more than 85,000 objects spanning 4,000 years of world history. But attendance was low, membership stagnant.

Founded more than 100 years before and housed in a prestigious Neoclassical building designed by McKim, Mead and White on the southeast side of the city, the museum was feeling the debilitating effects of shifting urban demographics, increased competition for funding and all the other well-documented stresses and strains faced by most arts organizations in contemporary life.

Today the picture at the Minneapolis Institute is radically different. In 10 years, attendance has doubled, to more than half a million annually. Membership has doubled, too, standing at more than 28,000 households in a metropolitan area of just 2.7 million people. Museum surveys show that repeat visits are the norm, rather than onetime attendance.

What happened? Several things; most important was that the museum took a calculated risk.

The usual effort was made to reverse the institute’s flagging fortunes, centered on the development of a major capital campaign, but in the process the board of trustees adopted an iconoclastic plan that flew in the face of conventional wisdom.

Acting on a well-considered initiative from the director, Evan Maurer, the board decided to eliminate the museum’s general admission fee.

Entrance into the permanent-collection galleries is free. And not just free to members, who elsewhere typically pay $50 and more in annual dues for the privilege, but free to anyone who shows up at the door.

The institute embraced an idea once fairly standard in the museum world but long out of fashion: As a tax-exempt public benefit corporation, one whose mandate is to collect, preserve and study on behalf of the common good our shared cultural patrimony, an art museum not only belongs to the public, it should also be freely accessible to it regardless of ability to pay.

How quaint the idea sounds today. Few art museums operate under this fundamental assumption anymore.

The national museums in Washington, D.C., do, remaining free to the public by congressional mandate. So does the city-funded St. Louis Art Museum, where a famous legend chiseled in stone at the entrance optimistically declares: “Dedicated to Art and Free to All.” And although the new museum at the Getty Center flirted with the idea of charging admission before it opened in 1997, the board pulled back from the brink, deciding instead to charge only for parking.

There are some other free art museums. But single-ticket costs of $6, $8 or more for admission to permanent collections are now commonplace. Premiums have begun to be added to the ticket price to accommodate special exhibitions, so far topping out at $20 a head. Memberships are sold as an economical way in which the public can lower the cost, by now fully expected, of walking through the art museum’s front door.

In Minneapolis and St. Louis, and at a few smaller institutions like the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, the only charge that’s made is for special traveling exhibitions. Many museums do designate a few hours a week as free admission periods to accommodate those of modest means, including students. But even so, ability to pay remains the prime consideration.

Since the late 1970s, when calls for privatization began to dominate U.S. politics, art museums have become one among many symbols of the atrophy of the public world. The emergence and widespread proliferation of the pay-as-you-go art museum represents a loss for American society.

Our idea of the art museum as something distinct from commercial culture has steadily been eroded. A demonstration of what’s already been lost is found in regular comparisons between the cost of museum admission and a typical movie ticket or between an annual museum membership and a day at Disneyland. The more apt comparison would be charging admission to go inside a public library. Imagine the uproar that would ensue!

Founded on the

Communal Principle

Like libraries, art museums began in America from an idea of communal improvement, and they were intended from the start to be pedagogical in nature. The day has long since passed (and happily so) when museums might be perceived as innocent and inherently virtuous. Still, the new idea of museums as centers for mass entertainment is fraught with crippling land mines.

Not the least of them is the market-driven populist tilt museums increasingly take, which can lead to a numbing level of sameness and repetition.

Since 1996, for example, no fewer than 20 exhibitions that slice and dice Impressionist and Postimpressionist art have toured American museums, and six new ones will open by spring. A few were great; most were not--and who could be surprised?

There’s a difference between being popular and being populist. Populism panders to popular prejudices. It’s the death of art, whose fundamental aim is to form, reform and transform vision.

It’s also the end of the art museum--if we conceive of the museum as a site for the sharpening of visual intelligence. Vision is more than simple retinal perception; it’s the phenomenon of human understanding. Populism is the opposite of the art museum enterprise, which should be unabashedly elitist.

Elitism is one of those horribly charged words that’s often mishandled and misused, so let me be clear about what I mean--and don’t mean--by saying art is an elitist activity.

I don’t mean it’s exclusive. One of the great things about democracy is the promise it holds out that anyone can be an elitist. Democratic elitism is not based on blood ancestry, inherited position, old school ties, established bank accounts or other aristocratic exclusions. In the context of art museums, democratic elitism is the self-determined commitment to refine visual intelligence to a gleaming edge.

Perception of

Public Has Changed

“Dedicated to Art and Free to All.” Earlier in American history, the ways in which those words took shape in museums were riddled with faults, but the aspiration was--and remains--a noble one.

It’s hard to see how that aspiration can possibly be met, or even remotely approached, when what used to be thought of as the museum public is now conceived as the museum consumer. To make the switch is to abandon hope for the museum as a forum--that is, a place for a discourse of ideas about art conducted among peers, where the debate and controversy that are integral to scholarly endeavors are made an exciting focal point.

At their best, art museums are wondrously charged environments where a fundamental contradiction is held in almost magical equilibrium: An agent of social cohesion and continuity (the museum) proudly displays agents of social disruption and change (works of art). When we’re offered instead the museum as a mere showroom, where displays are marketed to meet the predetermined tastes of potential customers, we might just as well go to the mall.

By contrast, when permanent-collection rooms are conceived as a truly public place, the possibilities expand for intimate connection with particular works of art. That’s how a diverse community makes its strongest bond with an otherwise faceless institution. Membership becomes not just an aggregate of bargain hunters anxious for free tickets to the next blockbuster entertainment but a method by which a constituency of museum supporters establishes itself.

In other words, a general audience transforms itself incrementally into an art audience--which is a pretty good definition of authentic museum success.

Is the free art museum a pie-in-the-sky idea in the 1990s? It hasn’t been in Minneapolis, where the Institute of Arts has made a rousing success of turning on its heel in opposition to the larger trend. Either way, one thing is certain: The market-driven entertainment model will certainly work, bringing in bodies and raising revenues--but not without decomposing the art museum’s reason to exist.