#Moca museum free thursday for free
It is likely, she noted, that just as Dallas Museum of Art and some other museums, visitors will be able to come through the doors for free but still need to purchase tickets to see special exhibitions. “That’s a big chunk of change,” she said, adding that Carolyn Clark Powers’ $10 million gift will certainly soften the blow.
Stifler stated that at MOCA, the loss of admissions revenues amounted to $1.3 million annually, which rises to $2 million if memberships are added, since many people purchase memberships in order to avoid having to pay every time they go to a museum. Before 2006, admissions revenues accounted for only two percent of the Walters Art Gallery budget, whereas at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where admissions are $23-33 (depending upon whether the adult visitor sees none, one or all of the special exhibitions), the percentage is approximately 27 percent. That same AAMD survey found that admissions account for only seven percent of the average institution’s overall revenues, although the range can be wide.
(The math of that involves the cost of maintaining a large building, with round-the-clock security and climate controls for the permanent collection, as well as salaries, divided by the total number of visitors.) According to a survey of members conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), “on average, most visitors spend under $8 per museum visit, including the cost of admission and any ancillary purchases in museum shops and restaurants,” while the per-unit cost of a visitor is $53.17, suggesting that each institution loses money on everyone who comes through the door. This all gets into a question of numbers. The more you charge, the more you cut off access.” He added that there is a “correlation between what’s charged at the front door and what the CEO of the museum makes.” “Admissions place a barrier between the public and those assets. “The assets of the museum are for the public,” said Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, which eliminated admissions in 2006. A family of four could spend $80 or more just on admissions, though many of these institutions also have their version of a regularly occurring free or pay-what-you-wish admission window.īut still, the steep prices strike some others in the museum community as wrong. It is no less expensive to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York ($25), the Guggenheim ($25), the Whitney ($25), the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia ($25), the Art Institute of Chicago ($25), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ($25) or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ($15). Adults pay $25 at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and $27 at the nearby Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. That gut feeling exists throughout the museum world, and the value of the art museum experience would seem to be high. She noted that museum officials have talked about eliminating admissions altogether and not just on Sundays, “but we haven’t done any research on that,” and added that among senior staff, “there is more of a gut feeling that people value things more when they have to pay for it.”Ĭarolyn Clark Powers, whose gift of $10 million will allow LA MOCA to stop charging for admission. You don’t want the price of admissions to museums to keep people away,” Giordano said. Knight Foundation and Heckscher Foundation for Children has created free days at the Perez Art Museum in Miami every second Saturday of the month. du Pont de Nemours and Company that will cover the revenues lost through making Sundays admissions-free, and financial support from Publix Supermarket Charities, the John S. In late December, the Delaware Art Museum announced a $1 million gift by E.I. Others have moved in this direction, although in a more limited way. Stephan Jost, director and chief executive officer at the Art Gallery of Ontario, claimed that the decision to make entry free for anyone under the age of 25 was motivated by the desire “to make art as accessible as possible, to make visiting as simple as possible, and to make museum-going a habit for the next generation.” He added that this program is “risky, and we project a $2 million revenue gap in the pilot year.”
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