We visit a New York City museum about once a month. Yesterday, we roamed the halls of gems and minerals at the Museum of Natural History. Over the holidays, Ian became engrossed in an article about gems in his National Geographic magazine, so we decided to show him the real things. In the dimly lit room, he pointed out topaz and gold ore. He ran his hands over chunks of granite. Jonah laughed that the displays still mentioned East Germany and Czechoslovakia.
New York City museums are a haven for families in the city and the entire metropolitan area. When Jonah was a toddler, my friend, Rachel, and her toddler daughter would find a poorly trafficked room in the Museum of Natural History and let them run back and forth. We lived in a cramped city apartment and, during the cold months, the museum was a refuge. Now that my kids are older, we go for the displays.
When we arrived at the museum, we bypassed the tourists who paid full admission to the museum and found the counter where they accepted the suggested admission fee. The suggested admission fee to the museum for our family is $78.50. Add in parking fees and the overpriced food in the cafeteria, and an afternoon in the museum can easily cost $125. For most families, $125 is too much to see exhibits that haven’t been updated since the 1970s. For families like ours, who like to pop into the museum for two-hour jaunts, $125 is plain silly.
The museums of New York were recently the subject of a class action law suit that said that the museums are not honest about their suggested admission fees. Visitors can get into the museum for one penny, but that information is not clear on their website or their signage. A judge ruled that visitors are able to visit the museums for one penny, so he dismissed the proposal to completely eliminate the suggested admission fee. The courts still need to decide if the museums are intentionally misleading visitors into paying the full amount.
Museums have two missions. They need to preserve art and history, and they need to educate. Museums, which are supported by public money, need to provide the public with access. People of all economic backgrounds should be able to stroll the hallways of the Met and see paintings by Mark Rothko and Vermeer.
The museum debate is part of a quiet war between elites and experts who want to stockpile information, ideas, and knowledge and the public who wants access in exchange for their financial support through taxes. In academia, the public is demanding access to information in academic journals, which is currently siloed up behind databases, like JSTOR. In the Internet world, we have gotten a taste for free information, and there is no turning back.
On the one side, experts say that if we give away information and access for free, then they cannot afford to stay in business. JSTOR needs to charge $50 per article, so that it can afford to scan and organize articles. The Museum of Natural History needs to bilk tourists of $125 to pay their scientists and keep the lights on in the building. They point to the world of newspapers and publishing and music, which are barely able to operate in this new world of free stuff.
On the other side, the public is supporting museums and universities and, therefore, have some ownership of the ideas and artifacts. They deserve to access. Also, an educated populace makes for a stronger democracy. Isn’t that an important goal?
As we left the museum yesterday, the line to get into the museum snaked out the door into the frigid street. The poor tourists didn’t know about the backdoor entrance, and they probably don’t know that they can enter the museum for a dollar. But it was heartening to see so many people who wanted to show their children gems and dinosaurs. We have to figure out a way to meet the demand for information and ideas for everyone, not just the wealthy. At the same time, we have to figure out how to keep the lights on in the building, nevermind updating the 1970s era displays. Any ideas?
Apt. 11d 
That’s an expensive suggestion for a museum. You can get a Carnegie museum membership for a whole family (two adults and up to four kids) for $150 a year here. That gets you complete access to four museums including two that don’t waste space with art.
LikeLike
That is very similar to what it costs for a one-day outing to a museum in my Midwestern city but they make it affordable by making a yearly family membership the same price. How much are yearly memberships to museums in New York? For a museum-rich place like New York it seems like their should be some sort of museum traveller’s club where you pay a yearly membership and get a certain amount of admissions to any participating institution. That way you’re not tied down to just one or a few places but you’re still getting some sort of discount for being a regular service user.
LikeLike
A family membership to the Museum of Natural History costs $140, according to their website. This seems well within the means of a typical suburban family. As for the tourists, anyone who can afford to fly to NYC and/or stay in a NYC hotel can certainly afford to give the museum $125, and that surely covers the overwhelming majority of the people in line. (Those few who took the bus to NYC to stay with relatives will have to find the separate line.)
LikeLike
It may well be true that the museums need that much money per visitor to keep the doors open, heat, pay curators and guards, etc. And, yow! that’s a lot of money to take my family somewhere, particularly if Surly Teen #1 is looking into space and saying he would rather be home playing video games. So if we want to make it less costly for visitors to come, how do we do it? Taxes? Hard to do – the benefits inure to middle- and upper-middle families in the three state area, and I don’t imagine Connecticut and NJ are lining up to throw money at New York for this.
That said, maybe the system of stealth prices for tourists is not so bad. I am not coming up with anything better right off the bat.
LikeLike
Membership makes a difference, especially if you visit a museum more than once. A number of museums offer reduced or free admissions to members of other museums in their associations:
https://sites.google.com/site/roammuseums/home/list-of-roam-museums
https://sites.google.com/site/northamericanreciprocalmuseums/north-american-reciprocal-museum-listing
http://www.childrensmuseums.org/index.php/component/acmmuseumsearch/searchform.html
I’m not certain which museum you’re referring to as “supported with public money.” I found the AMNH’s financial statements online, and the generous support from the City of New York is only one part of their income; returns from their endowment, and grants from other institutions and individuals, comprise the greater share. http://www.amnh.org/content/download/67839/1175003/file/AR%206-30-13%20AMNH.pdf
I agree that everyone should be able to visit museums. That is their mission. On the other hand, it costs a lot to run a museum, especially in New York. Museums outside of New York are not nearly as expensive. There are a number of museums which are free, especially museums or galleries associated with colleges or private schools.
Not enough people are making the forceful argument to potential private donors that culture matters too. The philanthropic culture seems very “results driven” these days. Is a grant to keep the lights on in a 19th centery building, or to give free admission to children, quite as glamorous as other initiatives these days?
LikeLike
If tourists plan ahead, they can get admission to multiple museums for reduced rates. Not all museums participate. http://www.astc.org/members/passlist.htm
This list of science centers and museums participating in the ASTC Passport Program is in effect November 1, 2013 – April 30, 2014. The list starting May 1, 2014 will be posted mid-March 2014.
Each institution has its own admissions policy, so call before you go to get the details. Also, reciprocity extends only to regular/general admission—it does not include free admission to additional attractions such as special exhibits, planetarium shows, simulator rides or giant-screen films. It also does not usually include museum store discounts.
Please note — two local restrictions apply:
1. Based on your science center’s/museum’s location. Science centers and museums located within 90 miles of each other are excluded from the program unless that exclusion is lifted by mutual agreement. 90 miles is measured “as the crow flies” and not by driving distance. Science centers/museums may create their own local reciprocal program. ASTC does not require or participate in these agreements, or dictate their terms.
2. Based on your residence. To receive Travel Passport Program benefits, you must live more than 90 miles away (“as the crow flies”) from the center/museum you wish to visit. Admissions staff reserve the right to request proof of residence for benefits to apply. See the PDF for details.
It may be more economical to travel more than 90 miles from home to visit a series of museums.
LikeLike
Come to Cambridge! A family of four can visit the Harvard Museum of Natural History for $40. Admission to the HMNH includes admission to the Peabody.
Our public library offers a museum pass program. Library card holders can sign up to receive discounted or free passes to local museums. We can reserve passes at our local library, or online.
LikeLike
We used to take our son to the Natural History Museum when he was little. He won’t go so much anymore and when he does he likes the dinosaurs, but when he was young, he’d love to run around and look at all the dead things taxidermied.
LikeLike
The Milwaukee Public Museum is the best museum for kids I’ve ever been to. It’s the kind of place that comes off as pretty chintzy to adults but kids love it and it is HUGE so you can waste a ton of time there. There is a science museum and children’s museum in my city that are nice but I find my children still get bored at them pretty quickly.
LikeLike
Wow, I’m really surprised at how angry you sound. I’m sure you understand that the amount that is subsidized by NYC is small. And New York City is one of the most expensive cities in the world, really. We’re not Europe, and even there some prices are similar. The Louvre is 16 Euros, 32 for the whole museum. And they are subsidized by the French government! Viennese museums (god do they have amazing museums! those Hapsburgs!) are about 11 Euros with concessions. Most of the museums in Paris are super expensive, though have free days. London does well: tons of free museums. And I live in LA where museums are all discounted in various ways (ie you pay to park at the Getty but get in free if you take a bus. LACMA is expensive but kids get in free, etc). If you are a tourist this is par for the course. I have spent tons of money at museums all over the country/world. I am rarely disappointed. Of course I want a good deal, but honestly, this is what I do when I am a tourist!
The reason the Met was subject to that lawsuit is because the land was Central Park land and the city leases it to them. That’s not the case for the AMNH to my knowledge. Washington is the big American city where the Smithsonian provides incredible free museums: a true pleasure.
If you want to go to the AMNH more than once a year, a membership is a good deal. It honestly sounds like you are angry at the people who do try to actually perform scholarship there. Did you look at the research section of their website?
How much do people spend on movie tickets? Sure some people wait until they are on Netflix, but a lot of people spend $12.50 for 2 hours of Frozen.
I do agree that if museums had a more generous policy about admissions for kids they’d be smarter in the long run: how will they raise the next generation of museum supporters.
And I agree with everyone who mentioned great local museums. Almost every city, even smaller ones have nice local, historical or natural history museums that are a lot cheaper.
LikeLike
The problem with membership in NYC is that the museums are an different systems. So, you have to buy membership at the Met AND the Natural History Museum AND the Botanical Gardens AND MOMA AND the Transit Museum. Family membership at all those places is $800-1000 for one year. Nope.
Until recently, we went to all those museums for free, because we had corporate membership through Steve’s old job. (The 1% goes for free.) Now, he works for a Canadian bank, which doesn’t support NYC arts. I’m not personally upset, because I know how to work the system so we still enjoy low priced art/museums, but I’m upset for everyone else.
Museums should be cheaper than going to the movies. Disney is a private company. I haven’t given them any money, so I don’t expect anything. Museums are subsidized with grants from the government (aka the public). Their mission is to educate the public. They should be open to everyone, all the time.
I worked in a university museum for a year or two. They couldn’t even be bothered to notify the students about their exhibits, because they didn’t care. It was all about the rich people. Actually, the director didn’t even seem to care about the art. She spent most of her time pretending to be friends with rich people, so they would give her stuff.
LikeLike
University museums are often free or very cheap and have really been changing their mission. For instance, Yale’s museum (which is wonderful!) is free and they do a lot with the classes and local schools. Not to mention their natural history museum which is also cheap and quite amazing. I would argue the university museums are doing exactly what you want. Museums in college towns are often the hub of culture there and frequently free or cheap.
We do have national museums that are free: the Smithsonian (and guess what: some exhibits just can’t be shown there or the congressman will have a coronary). Your argument is a little illogical. The AMNH is a non-profit. It is doing the best it can. probably it can do better, but it is not a national museum or even a city museum. Sure it gets tax breaks. But does that mean it should be free? I think it would be better for everyone (including them) if it was cheaper, but its not suffering from low attendance.
Now, a citywide membership network would be an awesome idea. Maybe even a 10 visit card or something. Very cool idea.
Should the Neue Galerie be free? how about the Frick? the Intrepid?
I’m sorry you had a bad experience with the AMNH during the busiest week of the year, probably, and possibly they should adjust some policies, but I think the bigger picture is more complicated.
LikeLike
Oh no, five enormous world class museums suitable for kids within driving distance! That you have to pay to get into! Separately! Truly, I’m very sympathetic to your desire to make museums affordable for the public – it’s a perfectly worthy cause – but it’s sort of hilarious to people like me who are a minimum of three hours from museums one fourth (maybe one tenth!) the size. When you talk about New York, you are like a tenured full professor talking to adjuncts.
LikeLike
I was sad because I wasn’t in walking distance of MoMa until I met a man who had no feet.
LikeLike
Yes, this was a very NYC-centered blog post that I tried to connect to the larger issues of information and access. Perhaps I failed, but this blogger’s world view is NYC and it’s a lot less NYC-centered than it used to be.
NYC has fabulous culture scene. I get a weekly subscription to a magazine that has 100 pages of listings of restaurants, movies, shows, concerts, museums, and theater. If one knows the secret ways of NYC, you can get access to all that for very cheap. That’s why people live here. That’s why people cram themselves into 300 square feet and take the subway to work.
You don’t have to be rich to live in NYC, but if you’re not, then you have to put up with a lot of stuff that most normal people wouldn’t deal with. The laundry situation alone. Ugh. You ever carry a fifty pound bag of clothes four flights down and then around the corner? It sucketh. Sitting on a subway platform with no heat for 40 minutes waiting for a train. Walking two miles to take your kid to pre-school with lugging along a newborn baby. I did all that and more. And we might do it again when the kids get out of high school. Hopefully, we won’t be quite as poor as we were before and can enjoy the culture without the back pain.
LikeLike
We have a large college-run children’s museum with a small but nice natural history wing. They also do a really splashy summer exhibit with usually about half a dozen all-day special events. It’s very nice for our size city. We have a family membership. The normal rate for a family membership that lets in 6 at a time is $75 annually, with a 20% break for faculty and staff. Before Christmas, we were visited by a family with six children and we all went to the museum together. My friend S is rather bright, so using some sort of mathematical black magic, my membership, and her husband’s military discount, she was able to bring the tab for a party of 13 to be just $15, total.
We also have a very nice, small zoo. That is also $75 a year for a family membership, but they’re less flexible as to who can enter on it.
LikeLike
We made a weekend trip to that museum and zoo and were blown away. Both are a lot nicer than anything we have down in Austin, which is several times the size by population. I’m really not sure why Austin is so deficient when it comes to museums, whether for art, history, or natural history — perhaps (like the zoo thing) museums just don’t lend themselves well to explosive growth, but are more a function of “old money”?
LikeLike
I think zoos definitely benefit from being new and having the space to really spread out and give the animals nice landscaping and plenty of room. I visited the LA city zoo in the 90s, and it was inexpressibly depressing. As I recall, the rhinoceros was just standing there banging its head on a metal fence.
New (or refurbished) is also important for children’s museums, which have a tendency to get grimy and sad very quickly.
LikeLike
Fron cranberry’s link, it seems that contributions and “auxiliary activities” (which I take to include the overpriced concessions) supply $68 million to the Museum, whereas the City only supplied $16 million. Furthermore, that $16 million came from millions of NYC residents, most of whom make a lot less than the tourists visiting the museum. It’s very nice for out-of-towners to be come and visit, but surely we, the taxpaying residents of New York City, should be the ones who vote on how much tax money the Museum gets, versus how much is recouped from tourists. On this issue, I can’t see that my elected representatives have done anything to criticize.
LikeLike
“(which I take to include the overpriced concessions)”
…and gift shops and vending machines and special evening events (Boo at the Zoo type stuff) and summer camps and classes. That’s a large category of activities.
LikeLike
I always buy memberships to museums I visit, because, as others note, the admission for a family is often close to the membership price. I also hate paying and thinking I have to see everything in one visit. I was spoiled by the free to the public, federally subsidized Smithsonian system, one of my very favorite things about DC.
Someone does have to pay for th museum. I’ve always seen the suggested donation as being something that should be used on the honor system, and these days, I’m one of the ones who should pay.
LikeLike
Oops, zb is me, bj
LikeLike
Our local college-funded museum also has free Sundays that are funded by advertisers and/or local do-gooders. That’s not a bad model.
LikeLike
On a more philosophical note (because I don’t have data, and I’m sure it exists), I think museum usage and free to the visitor museums (like the Smithsonian, or free individual visits ’cause of corporate perks) are an example of how the psychology of visits and use of services changes when one doesn’t pay per use (which can also include subscriptions or prepayment).
Folks like to talk about the negative of potential overuse with respect to medicine, but in the case of museums (and education and public transportation), I see the negatives of under use. If the family has to pay to go to the museum, but not to go to the shopping mall (at least until they are induced to buy something, which many probably do), the decision making on a moment to moment basis gets skewed, potentially in favor of the less desirable and more expensive choice.
LikeLike
There’s a really confusing correlation between free culture (in the Open Access sense) support and free on-premises access. I remember being astonished that the museums in London were so fully state funded that admission was optional, and the suggested rates were minuscule. The British Library and National Archives have free admission.
But. Access to documents which in the US would be public domain, like government census records or 19th-century school registers, are considered revenue sources by many such institutions. The National Archives auctions off monopoly digitization rights to private companies in the same way that the US auctions radio spectrum. If you want to see an 1861 census sheet from Scotland, you go through the BrightSolid-owned “ScotlandsPeople.com” and fork over 2-7GBP for a scan which you are prohibited from sharing. If you (or a volunteer group) attempt to digitize the material yourself, you’ll be prohibited by Archives staff enforcing the monopoly contract.
To some extent, this is the logic of public funding for some kinds of access–the budgetary pressures may squeeze other kinds of access out, justified by saving taxpayer money. (And it does–the National Archives estimates that 80 staff positions are paid for by its licensing scheme.)
LikeLike
My mother is a museum curator, and I worked summers at her museum through college and into graduate school. In the last 25 years, the price of admission there has risen astronomically — but so has the size of the staff, as the museum struggles to keep its advertising, PR, exhibits, programs, and online presence competitive. They have added new facilities to support the public programs and demonstrations, and instituted a series of classes (that students pay to attend). The price of new acquisitions keeps rising, and for a museum with research facilities it’s important to keep curating and nurturing the collection. For a museum with an educational mission, it’s important to promote that mission to the public instead of just hoping that they’ll wander in; and it’s necessary to stay up-to-date and attractive and to have fresh exhibits, or the public will walk right back out.
It’s kind of like the double-bind colleges are in: spend more to attract more students and charge them more to pay for the things that attracted them.
Frankly, tax dollars don’t pay for most museums. They pay for PART of the museum. And it needs some way to make up the shortfall if it’s going to continue to be a viable institution. Even the venerable Barnes has been forced to change with the times — although it had to go to court to do it!
LikeLike