18 ms·

> 700k paintings This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussi

> 700k paintings This figure immediately reminded me of a very interesting EconTalk episode[0] on the management of art museums. The premises from the discussion (as I recall): - Art museums have more than 10x the number of pieces in their archives as they do on display. Some of this art will never be seen by the pubic. - When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything. - The purpose of art is to be enjoyed. The above two points make this goal much harder. The conclusions: - Museums should be free admission and funded by selling pieces from the archive (really interesting discussion on how this is taboo for curators) The second-order effects: - Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later - More people get to see fine art - Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums) I think it's worth a listen. [0]: https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/ https://www.econtalk.org/michael-ohare-on-art-museums/

trianglem 6y ago
But how does the first tier museum acquire stuff for its archives and where does the money for that come from?
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
  To a certain degree, it's not impossible that museums are either competent enough to recognise talented artists early, or so powerful that their buying itself is the signal that makes an artist. Either way, it's at least theoretically possible that they could finance themselves by, essentially, savvy investment in artworks.
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  Often it's a donation from an estate. I believe they discuss this in the podcast episode (though it has been years since I listened to it).
- dmitriid 6y ago
  Many museums started in the times of yore, and became first tier through donations by powerful and rich patrons (and/or by the state).
legitster 6y ago
> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local Museum more if it had more Dutch masters! This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions? That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.
prox 6y ago
Reminds me of the time that I read in a book about the Louvre it would take 3 days to see it all. So I booked for 3 days and it’s true : together with the book it took me exactly three days. It’s important you always choose what to see, otherwise it becomes a blur.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I'd probably still hit overload even if I had 3 days to devote to seeing the Louvre. I find I can handle 3 or 4 hours of a museum and I have to get out and do something else. Of course, it really helps if you've been to a place before and will probably go back again. When I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I basically have a mental plan for what I'm going to see. A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a lot. At a time when I was visiting NYC frequently and MOMA had just reopened after a major renovation and tickets were hard to get, I bought a membership. It was really nice to be able to pop in for an hour when I was in town and see some things I especially liked.
  - madhadron 6y ago
    > A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a lot. This. One of the reasons to live in a major city is regular access to first tier museums. I used to go hang out in the scholars court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an escape from the city for a while, then take a stroll through a gallery on my way back out as a use for my lunchtime.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      That doesn't immediately ring a bell but I'm sure I've been there. I lean towards the American Wing courtyard.
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >This. One of the reasons to live in a major city is regular access to first tier museums. Absolutely. Having grown up in NYC and spending a lot of time in Central Park as a child, my brother and I would often go to the Metropolitan Museum on rainy days. Their admissions policy is the same now (pay what you wish, but you must pay something) as it was back in the 1970s, but they don't really make that clear any more. As 9/10 year old kids by ourselves, we didn't have much money, so we'd pay a nickel or a quarter and go and wander around the museum. It was (and still is) glorious! Having those experiences as a child was amazing, and I heartily recommend visiting museums to everyone. I've been to the Rijksmuseum too, and it's pretty amazing. In Amsterdam, I do like the Van Gogh Museum more, but that's more personal preference than anything else. The Rijksmuseum has a much more extensive collection too. That they're putting this stuff online is wonderful, but there's no substitute for actually being there. These days, I always give the recommended donation (I think it's $25 for non-members), but
njharman 6y ago
> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever into private hands. > More people get to see fine art until it's all been sold. > Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums) There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money. This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more than when they have to share public services with the "dirty" masses.
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  Why don't you take some time to listen to the podcast before getting angry about the market or someone else's privilege? Also, maybe you missed the part where there is 10x-100x the amount of art sitting in the archive than on display? Bringing lots of new supply of art onto the market would necessarily lower prices. This would make it less profitable to buy up art privately in the hope that it appreciates. It would also make it more affordable for other museums. At the same time, there's nothing preventing a first-tier museum from only selling to other museums rather than to private collectors. They might even stipulate terms of the sale that the art must stay with the new owner for a minimum time frame.
  - andrepd 6y ago
    Why must everything be mercantilised? Why must everything fit the logic of The Market? Increase supply, lower prices, etc. Is it a good thing that so much art is in the hands of private individuals? Shouldn't the legacy and heritage of past generations by rights belong to everybody?
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      One problem with storing it all in one basement is what if the basement burns or catches fire? All gone. Distributing it widely means enormously lowering the risk of it all being lost.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Museums should be free admission Museums are free in the UK (apart from special events). They are funded by the state.
- erk__ 6y ago
  *Mostly free. Most larger museums are free admission, and many smaller museums are not.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    And (I find this annoying) the big museums are "free"--it often says so in big letters on the outside--but you're very clearly expected to "donate" an amount when you enter.
    - comprev 6y ago
      That is aimed at those who don't pay UK tax like tourists from abroad.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        As a visitor, I happily paid to enjoy a day at the London Science Museum. I could have enjoyed two or three more full days there.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      They might expect you to but they won't force you. You can just walk in.
- bobby_bob 6y ago
  Likewise in Australia, there's some great collections which you are free to wander through at your leisure. Pretty much any publicly funded gallery has free admission.
jacquesm 6y ago
The basement of the Rijks Museum is nothing short of incredible. There is so much precious art there that I don't even want to think about what damage a fire could do. There are so many works that that had not seen the light of day in 50 years or more that they had serious storage issues, never mind cataloguing what they actually had. I've been in there twice, once to look at a painting that had been damaged to help analyze the paint with a for the time very high tech chromatograph, once on invitation of the guy that ran the place. Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some patience.
- zemvpferreira 6y ago
  I'm a bit of a philistine so please don't take this as more than cheap provocation, but would Rijks Museum basement burning down to cinders be such a loss if no one sees the collection anyway? Is art that's filed away (even for good reasons like future restorability) for lifetimes that precious?
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    There's a TV prog in the UK that finds treasures in the archives of museums. There have been some impressive discoveries.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Well a painting that nobody ever sees is functionally no different from a painting that's been burned down. However only one of those 2 is reversible, so in that sense it's still a loss.
    - mauritzio 6y ago
      As it is also a bit narrow minded to assume 'nobody' will ever see it will be true for ever... At least now, thanks to modern technology , more can see the art then ever before :-)
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I find this to be such an arbitrary standard. It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it. They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this. In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit? There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old. Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.
- toshk 6y ago
  In the Netherlands many of the musea are semi public, and especially the Rijks get a lot of tax money and also a lot of donations. The Rijksmusem is actually the national museum, Rijk is another word for State or maybe closer to empire. It's entire collection is the heritage of the Dutch state. So in this case it's not a bad argument to make that it shouldn't be hidden in a basement but shared with the public. Although since the nineties the Rijks is officially an independent foundation.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    I know. I am merely asking why the state owns a museum and not a cinema or strip club. I find that some draw an arbitrary distinction between “art” and “entertainment” with endless semantics debates of what constitutes “art”, but typically fueled by “whatever the party that decides it feels is sufficiently associated with the intellectual elite rather than the bourgeois common man.”. I find this distinction to be bereft of merit and yet another example of trying to create a line between the rich and the poor. If the poor man showed an interest in Rembrandt, it would be called entertainment; if the rich man were more fond of 50 Cent, it would be called art.
- hetspookjee 6y ago
  That's an interesting remark indeed. Though I do see some differences that might explain it. For example, the cinemas and museums differ vastly on the medium they serve. A copy of a painting bears little value. A singer is unique in its persona for the live ecperience but can serve a large crowd in one sitting, saturating the market. Whereas a painting can only be viewed by a small crowd at any single time, given you want to see the original and not a display. So it will take ages to extract value when based on a reasonable ticket price. This stands in contrast with the prices often paid for high profile pieces, giving reason to subsidized content. Which in general is best served to a non profit. Or to put it more bluntly, art is an archaic medium of entertainment that has little chance of survival against modern media and society wishes to keep it.
dmitriid 6y ago
In the USSR central museums (think The Hermitage or The Pushkin Museum) would distribute a lot of art from their archives to regional museums, even to museums in small villages. So you wouldn't be surprised to see good quality art (sometimes by famous artists) even in small towns. This is something that can be encouraged more, especially across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say, Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...
- comprev 6y ago
  Perhaps the Brits could lend some marble stone to the Greeks...
- andrepd 6y ago
  Funny, an MP in my country suggested this some time ago, lend or donate art pieces to the former colonies. Cue the reactions calling her an "unpatriotic traitor".
andrepd 6y ago
Perhaps one should also consider changing the way we look at art. Is it a good thing that it is privatised? The legacy and heritage of past generations should by rights belong to all.
ylem 6y ago
I remember listening to this episode! I often actually disagree with the host fairly often, but find him worth listening to. I think it doesn't happen because other art museums will refuse to loan works of art to you on visiting exhibits if you sell any of your artwork. The Baltimore Museum of Art (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/baltimore-museum-of-art-deaccession-called-off-sothebys-1234575295/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/baltimore-museum-of-ar...) faced a huge backlash when they decided to sell art. Being in the DC area, I do find that I use museums differently when they are free. I can just stop in to see a single exhibit.
mauritzio 6y ago
The conclusions are a bit too simplistic. A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused. A museum preserves cultural heritage. The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years. Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now. So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage. Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It makes me wonder; why not build a massive multi-story museum complex with the wall space to show all of them. Make it more like a library than a museum. I guess conservation, security and cost would be the biggest issues there.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Or issue one-week tickets. I've been to a couple of places that do that - amazing if you have kids and they go off on one (ie have a bad day/meltdown), you can leave and not lose out. Depends a lot on the venue, but some places that won't increase visitor stays, it might even reduce them. I'll bet it makes them nicer places to be too. I imagine it wouldn't work for them Louvre!
yason 6y ago
"- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything." Where I live there's an annual subscription that's valid for the majority of museums countrywide. The museums get the money in some proportion to how they were visited but the annual cost is fixed for one citizen. So, if you want, you can visit the same (or a different!) museum every day and look at just one painting or piece at a time. This has both increased the income for museums but also number of visits. Sounds like a good model for financing the upkeep of museums.
- eythian 6y ago
  FWIW this also exists in the Netherlands, it's very handy when I have visitors as I can go along to most of the places they go without having to pay, or just when I have an afternoon free and want to go do something.
room271 6y ago
In the UK museums are publicly funded and free (people also donate and there are special time-limited exhibits that they can charge for). This works really well and doesn't involve selling the family silver.
_Understated_ 6y ago
Fyi, in Scotland, museum access is free... Something I'm grateful for and happy to contribute my taxes towards
- arp242 6y ago
  Isn't that the case in all of the UK? I never paid for a museum in England either anyway (other than voluntary donations). In New Zealand it's free too. In the Netherlands it's pretty expensive, but a number of museums have a "free day" once a month. My biggest problem is actually not so much the price, but rather the opening times, which tend to be during office hours: when people are working. I would love it if more museums would be open until 21:00 or 22:00.
rvanlaar 6y ago
Regarding the "get their money's worth": In the Netherlands we have the museumkaart[0], costs are €60 per year. Which give you unlimited access to most museums here. Resulting in a lot of people going multiple times to the same museum. [0] https://www.museum.nl/nl/museumkaart https://www.museum.nl/nl/museumkaart

trianglem 6y ago

But how does the first tier museum acquire stuff for its archives and where does the money for that come from?

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
To a certain degree, it's not impossible that museums are either competent enough to recognise talented artists early, or so powerful that their buying itself is the signal that makes an artist. Either way, it's at least theoretically possible that they could finance themselves by, essentially, savvy investment in artworks.
clarkmoody 6y ago
Often it's a donation from an estate. I believe they discuss this in the podcast episode (though it has been years since I listened to it).
dmitriid 6y ago
Many museums started in the times of yore, and became first tier through donations by powerful and rich patrons (and/or by the state).

legitster 6y ago

> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later I think this is interesting, but doesn't work when you are visiting from out of town. We did this very thing when we visited Rijksmuseum -we had half a day and wanted to see everything we could. But the point is taken that smaller museums would get nicer collections. We could enjoy our local Museum more if it had more Dutch masters! This is definitely true about visiting a local zoo or museum when you have a membership. Our son just want so see the lions? That's fine! We'll come back some other time and see the rest.

prox 6y ago

Reminds me of the time that I read in a book about the Louvre it would take 3 days to see it all. So I booked for 3 days and it’s true : together with the book it took me exactly three days. It’s important you always choose what to see, otherwise it becomes a blur.

ghaff 6y ago
I'd probably still hit overload even if I had 3 days to devote to seeing the Louvre. I find I can handle 3 or 4 hours of a museum and I have to get out and do something else. Of course, it really helps if you've been to a place before and will probably go back again. When I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art I basically have a mental plan for what I'm going to see. A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a lot. At a time when I was visiting NYC frequently and MOMA had just reopened after a major renovation and tickets were hard to get, I bought a membership. It was really nice to be able to pop in for an hour when I was in town and see some things I especially liked.
- madhadron 6y ago
  > A museum membership is really nice if you're in a place a lot. This. One of the reasons to live in a major city is regular access to first tier museums. I used to go hang out in the scholars court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an escape from the city for a while, then take a stroll through a gallery on my way back out as a use for my lunchtime.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    That doesn't immediately ring a bell but I'm sure I've been there. I lean towards the American Wing courtyard.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >This. One of the reasons to live in a major city is regular access to first tier museums. Absolutely. Having grown up in NYC and spending a lot of time in Central Park as a child, my brother and I would often go to the Metropolitan Museum on rainy days. Their admissions policy is the same now (pay what you wish, but you must pay something) as it was back in the 1970s, but they don't really make that clear any more. As 9/10 year old kids by ourselves, we didn't have much money, so we'd pay a nickel or a quarter and go and wander around the museum. It was (and still is) glorious! Having those experiences as a child was amazing, and I heartily recommend visiting museums to everyone. I've been to the Rijksmuseum too, and it's pretty amazing. In Amsterdam, I do like the Van Gogh Museum more, but that's more personal preference than anything else. The Rijksmuseum has a much more extensive collection too. That they're putting this stuff online is wonderful, but there's no substitute for actually being there. These days, I always give the recommended donation (I think it's $25 for non-members), but

njharman 6y ago

> Patrons can sit and enjoy a very small section of the museum instead of rushing through, since they can simply come back for more later They can do this now. But if museum sells collection the can't "simply come back for more later" cause it will be gone forever into private hands. > More people get to see fine art until it's all been sold. > Second- and third-tier museums start to gain access to better art, since they can simply buy it instead of waiting for estate donations (which go to larger museums) There is no way 2nd and 3rd teir museums are going to be able to compete with private buyers on price. Also where will they get money to buy this if they have to sell art to raise money. This sounds like typical "privatize everything cause free markets!" privileged people spew because they'll benefit more than when they have to share public services with the "dirty" masses.

clarkmoody 6y ago
Why don't you take some time to listen to the podcast before getting angry about the market or someone else's privilege? Also, maybe you missed the part where there is 10x-100x the amount of art sitting in the archive than on display? Bringing lots of new supply of art onto the market would necessarily lower prices. This would make it less profitable to buy up art privately in the hope that it appreciates. It would also make it more affordable for other museums. At the same time, there's nothing preventing a first-tier museum from only selling to other museums rather than to private collectors. They might even stipulate terms of the sale that the art must stay with the new owner for a minimum time frame.
- andrepd 6y ago
  Why must everything be mercantilised? Why must everything fit the logic of The Market? Increase supply, lower prices, etc. Is it a good thing that so much art is in the hands of private individuals? Shouldn't the legacy and heritage of past generations by rights belong to everybody?
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    One problem with storing it all in one basement is what if the basement burns or catches fire? All gone. Distributing it widely means enormously lowering the risk of it all being lost.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago

Museums should be free admission Museums are free in the UK (apart from special events). They are funded by the state.

erk__ 6y ago
*Mostly free. Most larger museums are free admission, and many smaller museums are not.
- ghaff 6y ago
  And (I find this annoying) the big museums are "free"--it often says so in big letters on the outside--but you're very clearly expected to "donate" an amount when you enter.
  - comprev 6y ago
    That is aimed at those who don't pay UK tax like tourists from abroad.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      As a visitor, I happily paid to enjoy a day at the London Science Museum. I could have enjoyed two or three more full days there.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    They might expect you to but they won't force you. You can just walk in.
bobby_bob 6y ago
Likewise in Australia, there's some great collections which you are free to wander through at your leisure. Pretty much any publicly funded gallery has free admission.

jacquesm 6y ago

The basement of the Rijks Museum is nothing short of incredible. There is so much precious art there that I don't even want to think about what damage a fire could do. There are so many works that that had not seen the light of day in 50 years or more that they had serious storage issues, never mind cataloguing what they actually had. I've been in there twice, once to look at a painting that had been damaged to help analyze the paint with a for the time very high tech chromatograph, once on invitation of the guy that ran the place. Super happy to see this effort resulting in such an amazing collection free for the world to enjoy. Your typical tourist in Amsterdam will visit the Rijks for one or maybe two paintings and they won't care about the rest (your guess which two), but there is a lot more there that is worth you time and some patience.

zemvpferreira 6y ago
I'm a bit of a philistine so please don't take this as more than cheap provocation, but would Rijks Museum basement burning down to cinders be such a loss if no one sees the collection anyway? Is art that's filed away (even for good reasons like future restorability) for lifetimes that precious?
- gerdesj 6y ago
  There's a TV prog in the UK that finds treasures in the archives of museums. There have been some impressive discoveries.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Well a painting that nobody ever sees is functionally no different from a painting that's been burned down. However only one of those 2 is reversible, so in that sense it's still a loss.
  - mauritzio 6y ago
    As it is also a bit narrow minded to assume 'nobody' will ever see it will be true for ever... At least now, thanks to modern technology , more can see the art then ever before :-)

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

I find this to be such an arbitrary standard. It's a form of visual entertainment no different from visiting the cinema or a theatre; of course one is to pay for it. They make expenses housing these paintings just as a cinema does, and have the right to charge to recuperate this. In fact, I see no reason why musea should even be allowed to be non-profit. — is a cinema ever non profit? There seems to be a rather arbitrary mentality that some entertainment should be free, in particular whatever entertainment “the cultural establishment” has arbitrarily declared to be “intellectual”, often for no other reason than that it's old. Wishing to see a famous painting with one's own eyes is no different from wanting to see a famous singer perform live. — a man should pay for it if he wish to do so.

toshk 6y ago
In the Netherlands many of the musea are semi public, and especially the Rijks get a lot of tax money and also a lot of donations. The Rijksmusem is actually the national museum, Rijk is another word for State or maybe closer to empire. It's entire collection is the heritage of the Dutch state. So in this case it's not a bad argument to make that it shouldn't be hidden in a basement but shared with the public. Although since the nineties the Rijks is officially an independent foundation.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  I know. I am merely asking why the state owns a museum and not a cinema or strip club. I find that some draw an arbitrary distinction between “art” and “entertainment” with endless semantics debates of what constitutes “art”, but typically fueled by “whatever the party that decides it feels is sufficiently associated with the intellectual elite rather than the bourgeois common man.”. I find this distinction to be bereft of merit and yet another example of trying to create a line between the rich and the poor. If the poor man showed an interest in Rembrandt, it would be called entertainment; if the rich man were more fond of 50 Cent, it would be called art.
hetspookjee 6y ago
That's an interesting remark indeed. Though I do see some differences that might explain it. For example, the cinemas and museums differ vastly on the medium they serve. A copy of a painting bears little value. A singer is unique in its persona for the live ecperience but can serve a large crowd in one sitting, saturating the market. Whereas a painting can only be viewed by a small crowd at any single time, given you want to see the original and not a display. So it will take ages to extract value when based on a reasonable ticket price. This stands in contrast with the prices often paid for high profile pieces, giving reason to subsidized content. Which in general is best served to a non profit. Or to put it more bluntly, art is an archaic medium of entertainment that has little chance of survival against modern media and society wishes to keep it.

dmitriid 6y ago

In the USSR central museums (think The Hermitage or The Pushkin Museum) would distribute a lot of art from their archives to regional museums, even to museums in small villages. So you wouldn't be surprised to see good quality art (sometimes by famous artists) even in small towns. This is something that can be encouraged more, especially across borders. For example, British museums definitely don't know what to do with their vast caverns filled with plunder .... ahem, vast archives of art, but even a small fraction of a fraction of that would be a great addition to a museum in, say, Moldova (my country), or Serbia, or ...

comprev 6y ago
Perhaps the Brits could lend some marble stone to the Greeks...
andrepd 6y ago
Funny, an MP in my country suggested this some time ago, lend or donate art pieces to the former colonies. Cue the reactions calling her an "unpatriotic traitor".

andrepd 6y ago

Perhaps one should also consider changing the way we look at art. Is it a good thing that it is privatised? The legacy and heritage of past generations should by rights belong to all.

ylem 6y ago

I remember listening to this episode! I often actually disagree with the host fairly often, but find him worth listening to. I think it doesn't happen because other art museums will refuse to loan works of art to you on visiting exhibits if you sell any of your artwork. The Baltimore Museum of Art (https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/baltimore-museum-of-art-deaccession-called-off-sothebys-1234575295/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/baltimore-museum-of-ar...) faced a huge backlash when they decided to sell art. Being in the DC area, I do find that I use museums differently when they are free. I can just stop in to see a single exhibit.

mauritzio 6y ago

The conclusions are a bit too simplistic. A museum is not just an amusement park. If you want to see less art be more selective in what to see or go to the advertised shows and be amused. A museum preserves cultural heritage. The roman books about the greeks hidden in monasteries, sculptures buried in the earth that inspired the renaissance where not seen by the public for hundreds of years. Until some start reading them again,a fire, a hope for a different way of thinking was born, accumulating to democracy land of the free etc. and probably your way of life as it is now. So do not underestimate the value of currently unseen cultural heritage. Selling it of now to a rich dump head showing it around until it rots in a basement as it is not envogue anymore is a filter but will put it on high risk.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

It makes me wonder; why not build a massive multi-story museum complex with the wall space to show all of them. Make it more like a library than a museum. I guess conservation, security and cost would be the biggest issues there.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Or issue one-week tickets. I've been to a couple of places that do that - amazing if you have kids and they go off on one (ie have a bad day/meltdown), you can leave and not lose out. Depends a lot on the venue, but some places that won't increase visitor stays, it might even reduce them. I'll bet it makes them nicer places to be too. I imagine it wouldn't work for them Louvre!

yason 6y ago

"- When art galleries charge admission, patrons feel the need to "get their money's worth" so they rush to see as much of the exhibits as possible, without taking time to thoroughly enjoy anything." Where I live there's an annual subscription that's valid for the majority of museums countrywide. The museums get the money in some proportion to how they were visited but the annual cost is fixed for one citizen. So, if you want, you can visit the same (or a different!) museum every day and look at just one painting or piece at a time. This has both increased the income for museums but also number of visits. Sounds like a good model for financing the upkeep of museums.

eythian 6y ago
FWIW this also exists in the Netherlands, it's very handy when I have visitors as I can go along to most of the places they go without having to pay, or just when I have an afternoon free and want to go do something.

room271 6y ago

In the UK museums are publicly funded and free (people also donate and there are special time-limited exhibits that they can charge for). This works really well and doesn't involve selling the family silver.

_Understated_ 6y ago

Fyi, in Scotland, museum access is free... Something I'm grateful for and happy to contribute my taxes towards

arp242 6y ago
Isn't that the case in all of the UK? I never paid for a museum in England either anyway (other than voluntary donations). In New Zealand it's free too. In the Netherlands it's pretty expensive, but a number of museums have a "free day" once a month. My biggest problem is actually not so much the price, but rather the opening times, which tend to be during office hours: when people are working. I would love it if more museums would be open until 21:00 or 22:00.

rvanlaar 6y ago

Regarding the "get their money's worth": In the Netherlands we have the museumkaart[0], costs are €60 per year. Which give you unlimited access to most museums here. Resulting in a lot of people going multiple times to the same museum. [0] https://www.museum.nl/nl/museumkaart https://www.museum.nl/nl/museumkaart