MoMA’s new portrait: the Andrew Jackson

This being New York, where everything except a hot dog is cruelly, wildly expensive, perhaps it was inevitable that a ticket to the Museum of Modern Art would rocket to $20, making it the most expensive urban art museum to visit in the country.

Remember, this is the home of the $50 gourmet hamburger, the $100 Broadway ticket, $1-million average co-op price. So for a dose of culture, naturally, you fork over an Andrew Jackson. It used to cost $12 for an aerobic visit to MoMA’s headquarters on West 53rd Street. At least that’s how New Yorkers experience it. They drop by. They breeze right over to the Picassos and the poster of the red car, and then peruse the special exhibit, reading selective wall text and stopping, maybe, for a coffee. Then they’re out of there.

Certainly, that is the way Loella Scott has always taken in museums in her 60 years in this city of pedestrians. Quickly, passionately, she frequents them all. “It’s none of your business if I can afford the $20,” she grumbled when asked if MoMA’s higher fee will make it prohibitive to most New Yorkers. “It’s just not right.”

She had just spent an hour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Standing at the bottom of the grand pyramid of steps on Madison Avenue, she couldn’t help overhearing me interview two art students about MoMA’s new fee. After three years in temporary quarters in Queens, the museum that holds one of the world’s finest collections of contemporary art is coming home next month to a bigger, totally renovated space. And to a 67% hike at the gate.

The students, both Parsons School of Design seniors, said that while they like to pay homage to the greats by an occasional venture uptown to the Met or MoMA, there was no way they’d “ante up 20 bucks.” They wouldn’t even pay a reduced student fare. “If we have to pay for anything,” giggled the young woman in red corduroy jeans, “we don’t go.”

Here’s where Scott, she of the aquiline nose and Upper East Side diction, jumped in.

“Well, you damn well shouldn’t have to.”

Scott is no Bolshevik, mind you. She says she doesn’t worry about the masses being excluded from the culture. (“I’ve voted Republican my whole life,” she declared.) It’s just that she thinks museums are sort of like churches. Their doors should always be open to everybody, and if you can afford to pay you should, she says. “But if you can’t, you should be able to get in for almost nothing -- a penny, a quarter, a dollar, a little something.”

That’s how the city-supported museums here work -- the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Natural History, among others -- with “suggested” donations that are increasing but still run between $5 and $13.

Pulling her tweed jacket tightly around her, Scott

explained that she goes every first Tuesday of the month to a museum. “I love the Met, love, love the Modern and take in the rest when I have time. And I always pay. At the Met I pay well above the suggested price. Those young cashiers give you the eye and, well, you just

empty what you’ve got on the counter.”

Fees (a necessary evil)

Satisfying the economic needs of New York museums should only be that simple. There’s probably not a single person affiliated with New York museums, had they the resources, who would want to charge because, so they say, their common mission is to draw people, all people, the haves and have-nots. Museums teach us, thrill us about what we should value in society. Limiting this unique encounter to the rich would be abhorrent.

Which is why a stretched city like New York still uses tax dollars to cover the enormous cost involved just to heat and turn on the lights at places such as the Met and Carnegie Hall. It’s also the reason the city wrote requirements into early license agreements for many of its 35 cultural institutions, like the one that teachers would be forever admitted free.

But none of the ivory-tower concerns speaks to the realities of running private museums such as MoMA, the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and others that rely primarily on private and nonprofit donations.

Kate Levin, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s culture czarina, defended MoMA’s increase at the door as one part of a business model for surviving in a costly and competitive world.

“The bottom line is that if MoMA finds that its visitorship is materially impacted, they’ll find some other way to cover their costs,” said Levin. “But these aren’t easy businesses to run, and part of what MoMA has done is to redesign its space ... to draw more people, not fewer.”

Still, some like Thomas Hoving, the legendary former director of the Met who brought a populist sense of showmanship to the art world, believe that MoMA shouldn’t have redeveloped its old building -- for $425 million -- if it meant having to charge people more to see it. Better to stay small and reasonable than become big and costly.

“This is a sign of startling cynicism on the part of MoMA,” Hoving said in a phone interview from his upstate New York home. “They have no regard for people who can’t afford it and they think the great unwashed won’t come anyway, so who needs their 20 bucks? Sure, the trendy will come. But running a museum like a cash cow is disgusting.”

Museum directors mostly reject the “staying small” solution preferred by Hoving, who last ran a museum in 1977. They say that isn’t the answer when you have great works of art to preserve and protect, not to mention competition for customers who could also choose to spend their money on movies and glitzy theme parks.

“We didn’t take this lightly because we are citizens of this city,” said James Gara, MoMA’s chief operating officer. “We’d love to be the most inexpensive museum around, but I just don’t think it’s realistic when admissions barely cover the cost of security and utilities.”

Those and other costs shot up post-Sept. 11 at the same time philanthropy and tourism dollars -- the mainstay of MoMA’s budget -- leveled off. The result was a huge budget deficit.

With 40,000 square feet of extra exhibition space, higher ceilings in the contemporary galleries, a larger place for student tours to assemble in the lobby and additional coffee bars and areas to take a rest, Gara said MoMA will be a vastly more attractive place for a long, leisurely visit -- one that might even be worth $20. He said MoMA officials spent nine months debating different ways to make up the shortfall. “We could have come up with a $15 fee, but if you want to see a movie or go to a lecture, you’d have to pay extra. Instead, we decided once you’re in the door you can do anything you want -- go to 14 movies, stay all day.”

Real New Yorkers will figure out how to get around this velvet rope the way they do all others. If the price of clothes is through the roof, they find the sample sales. If they want to try a hot new restaurant, they wait until the week of the $20.04 lunch special. So if a $20 museum ticket seems too steep, they’ll buy a $75 annual membership and drop by as often as they like. (Plus take the tax write-off.)

And for those who can’t meet that price, there will be free Friday afternoons and breaks for students that no other museum in the city offers. Also, unlike almost any other cultural institution in the city, MoMA defines “children” as 16 or under. They will get in free too.

Leave it to the tourists to pay full price.

Foaming over the lattes

Back on the steps at the Met, after Loella Scott had motored off to lunch and the students were loping down Madison to get to class, Marcus Hall, a 45-year-old nurse on his lunch break, demanded his say. (There really is no such thing as a private conversation in a city where every intersection is London’s Speaker’s Corner.) “Those students you were talking to, didn’t they say they go to Parsons?”

Yup.

“Well, I happen to know that MoMA is free to Parsons kids and a couple of the other city colleges.”

Yup.

“Did you notice they were both drinking a big Starbucks?”

Yup.

“Isn’t a day in a museum worth a couple of lattes? I mean, grant me that, wontcha?”

Yup.