Why Pay to See Our Own Art?

In August 1978, facing a drastic cut in its budget in the wake of passage of the tax-slashing Jarvis-Gann Initiative, Proposition 13, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art began charging a general admission fee. Before, LACMA had been free. Now it would begin to charge $1.50 for an adult to come through the door.

Within a month, attendance slid by 44%. Early the next year, The Times reported LACMA figures showing that the average number of daily visitors to the museum’s galleries had plummeted from 1,400 to 370. Fourteen hundred daily visitors had meant an annual attendance of just under a half-million--a pretty healthy number in a county with a far-flung population then at 7.5 million. Initiating a general admission fee plainly had a devastating effect.

Today, more than two decades later, the county’s population has swelled to nearly 10 million. Where did attendance at LACMA stand for the year 2001? According to a museum spokesman, it hovered just below a half-million--roughly the same as it was 25 years ago, before the general admission fee was put into place.

Something is wrong with this picture. When you frame it with the fact that LACMA today earns a trifling 3% of its annual operating budget from general admissions, charging the fee seems just plain dumb. As the region’s population has exploded, the county’s art museum has made enormous strides in establishing its international reputation through acquisitions, building expansion, exhibitions and scholarship. But the number of people going through the door now isn’t much greater than it was when Jimmy Carter was in the White House and “Annie Hall” copped the best picture Oscar.

Any museum professional will tell you that attendance figures are notoriously slippery. Counting heads is an inexact science. One-time visitors are different from repeat visitors. Attendance can be artificially spiked.

An example: In the months before Proposition 13, “Treasures of King Tutankhamun,” which launched the modern phenomenon of blockbuster art museum shows, was so popular at LACMA that scalpers were hawking special admission tickets on the sidewalk in front of the Wilshire Boulevard museum.

Other exhibitions with marquee value, like 1999’s nearly back-to-back Picasso and Van Gogh presentations, pushed LACMA’s attendance toward the 1-million mark. When the dust settled and the program schedule returned to normal, so did attendance, which hovered around half that 1999 peak in each of the next two years.

Statistics are dodgy. And the quality of a museum experience trumps quantity at any rate. Artistically, the Picasso and Van Gogh exhibitions were undistinguished. Neither measured up to last year’s surprising “Purism in Paris, 1918-1925” or the first-ever survey of Neapolitan Baroque painter Luca Giordano, which didn’t have the general public beating down the doors. Measuring success by attendance figures is the art museum version of Nielsen ratings. Commercial entertainment is mistaken for aesthetic value.

Still, what happened a generation ago in the wake of Proposition 13 should not be forgotten. LACMA today is in the midst of pondering the complicated launch of a massive capital campaign, whose goal is expected to be at least $300 million. The money will be used to raze the existing dysfunctional campus, construct an exciting new building with the potential to be a civic landmark and enhance the rather small endowment for operations and acquisitions by $100 million. As the plan proceeds, one thing is clear: The general admission charge has got to go.

There might have been good reason for it in the fiscally uncertain period after Proposition 13. Beyond force of habit, though, what justification could be advanced now?

It may seem shocking--even heretical--to assert that LACMA’s list of top priorities should include elimination of its general admission fee. I would submit, though, that the sense of shock is itself a sign of what has been lost.

The gap between rich and poor has grown into a chasm in the United States during the past 20 years, and much of L.A.’s population growth since then has been at the poorest end of the economic spectrum. No one should underestimate the barrier erected by general admission fees.

Yet the issue isn’t just a matter of affordability. It also concerns a more fundamental relationship with art. Once upon a time public art museums were regarded as a civic service, whose closest kin was a public library. Creating admission fees and hawking membership categories that provide “free” visits changes the tenor of the place. It becomes “their” museum, which “we” are invited to join.

The nearly 130,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and other works in LACMA’s collection are actually like the books and periodicals stored at the public library. They’re not owned by the museum’s board of trustees or professional staff. The collection is owned by the people of Los Angeles County--you and me--and currently we are charged a fee to see the art we own.

It’s one thing to charge admission to see a special, temporary exhibition. It’s quite another to impose a fee on visiting the museum’s permanent collection. Imagine the pandemonium if the library started to charge admission. Yet we’ve come to expect to pay to get into the museum’s galleries, just as we expect to pay for a movie, a baseball game or another commercial entertainment.

When adjusted for inflation, LACMA’s original admission fee of $1.50 translates into about $4.25 today. But LACMA now charges adults $7 each. That’s in line with many other large art museums around the country and in Southern California, where the tariff ranges from $6 to $10. The cost of a ticket to a movie theater seems to be the approximate benchmark.

But do we have to pay? Is there really a critical need? Have general admission fees to visit an art museum’s permanent collection galleries, as opposed to special exhibitions, simply become an essential feature of civic life in the United States?

The answer is no--at least, not everywhere. Many of America’s art museums are free to enter, and not just billionaire museums like the Getty.

There’s Washington’s National Gallery, of course, where admission fees are forbidden by its federal charter. Ohio’s great Cleveland Museum of Art is also free, as is the exceptional Toledo Museum of Art across the state. In Texas, the Contemporary Arts Museum and the Menil Collection in Houston have no admission charge, and neither do Fort Worth’s Kimbell, Amon Carter and Modern Art museums. The Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and the Saint Louis Art Museum are free.

The Saint Louis Museum’s famous motto is even chiseled in stone above the front door: “Dedicated to Art and Free to All.”

Last June, the San Jose Museum of Art abolished its admission fee. Attendance doubled immediately--and has stayed that way.

According to a San Jose spokesman, the change in entry status had some unexpected consequences. The museum did expect membership in lower-priced categories to dip--probably because they’re often taken out by museum regulars with tight incomes who want to avoid repeated admission charges. And dip they did. But, surprisingly, memberships in upper categories actually increased.

How to explain it? The museum no longer just promotes membership as a cost-effective discount plan to gain entry, but as a way to keep admission free for everyone--an appeal that strengthens the social fabric. Committed members stepped up to the plate. Total revenue from memberships, which accounts for about 6% of the museum’s annual budget, remained steady.

The San Jose museum also found corporate sponsors to help underwrite free admission. The Packard Foundation offered a one-to-one challenge grant of $100,000; in 24 hours, it had been matched--three to one. Underwriting proved to be an attractive corporate gesture, even in a region experiencing significant economic difficulty in its battered high-tech sector.

In Great Britain last fall, after four years of legislative maneuvering, entrance fees were abolished at all national museums. In five months, attendance nationwide rose 75%. The BBC reported that in London alone, an extra 1.4 million visitors had poured through the doors of the city’s museums.

When London’s Tate Modern opened in May 2000 following a blaze of international publicity, it became the most-visited art museum in the world. With 5.25 million visitors in its first year, it had three times the attendance of its nearest European rival, the newly refurbished Pompidou Center in Paris. Admission to the Pompidou is $9.25; Tate Modern is free.

No two art museums are alike, of course. The San Jose Museum of Art is a small, community-oriented facility with 5,000 members and a $5-million budget. LACMA is a big, internationally recognized, encyclopedic museum with 80,000 members and a $40.5-million annual operating budget. The needs and aspirations of different museums vary widely, and so do the range of enticing activities in different cities.

Still, anyone who has visited free art museums in Washington, London, Toledo or St. Louis knows that the experience one has with the permanent collection is qualitatively different. Looking at art becomes more casual, less event-oriented. As museum-going is integrated into daily life, a quiet thrill accompanies stepping across the threshold. The ineffable sense of communal ownership of cultural patrimony, which is essential to civilized society, blossoms. It gets short-circuited by ticket sales.

When LACMA unveils a remarkable 18th century Spanish sculpture of a Pieta that is the only one like it in any American museum, as it did in March, you’re more inclined to drive over for a look if there’s no admission fee. If there is--well, odds are you’ll wait until the next blockbuster before dipping into the permanent collection galleries, or until you can spend a few hours to justify the expense.

That is, if you go at all. Art’s pleasure dissolves when it gets entangled with logistical hassles.

Art museums might be nonprofit institutions, but every museum has a bottom line. And that might be the most remarkable fact of all: We are talking here about a relatively small amount of money.

According to a LACMA spokesman, the scant 3 percent of its $40.5 million annual budget that derives from general admission fees fluctuates slightly from year to year, but in 2001 it produced just $1.2 million in revenue.

LACMA officials have discussed the possibility of dropping the fee, but no plan is presently in the works.

If a cost-benefit analysis was to be performed on what has been gained and lost in the last 25 years, surely LACMA would abolish general admission tomorrow.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.