[Dixielandjazz] The price of "Art" increases.

[Steve barbone]

This is a very long article about the rationale of a price hike for
admission to the NYC Modern Museum of Modern Art. (MOMA) It is now $20.

Delete now if it is not of interest to you.

On the other hand, Festival Producers & Band Leaders may find the rationale
interesting. Like why are we giving our musical art away?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone



September 26, 2004 - New York Times

The Shock of the New Entry Fee By DAVID LEONHARDT

On the summer weekend two years ago when the Museum of Modern Art opened its
temporary home in Queens, the line flowed out of the building, an old
Swingline staple factory, past a check-cashing storefront and an auto body
shop. Miles from the museum's landmark building in Midtown Manhattan, which
was soon to undergo a massive expansion, the crowd was so eager to enter the
new space - for free - that some people waited on line for over an hour.

Perhaps even more encouraging than the crowd's size, to the museum officials
who had nervously wondered how many people they could woo to an outer
borough, was its makeup. It was young and, while not quite a cultural
tapestry by Queens standards, more diverse than the usual MoMA scene. Many
visitors hailed from the outer boroughs. "We felt good," James A. Gara, the
museum's chief operating officer, said. "We really did reach an audience we
had always wanted to reach."

So began MoMA's era of outreach, in which an international headquarters for
urbane cultural sophistication set up shop in a modest building in Long
Island City. When the original location reopens in late November, that brief
era - all 29 months of it - will end in ways that go much deeper than merely
the geographic. The people who run MoMA have made a calculated decision to
play to their base.

They will raise the basic price of admission an eye-opening 67 percent, to
$20, making MoMA the most expensive major art museum in the United States.
With a couple hundred thousand more square feet, a soaring new lobby and a
redesign overseen by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, MoMA has essentially
upgraded both its product and its price. The result will offer a very
different experience than the old building did - much more art on display,
and many more inducements to spend a leisurely day in its company. Each
floor, for instance, has some space where visitors can refresh themselves -
a place to buy an espresso, to talk on a cell phone or to flip through a
catalog.

Modern-art lovers who can comfortably absorb the $8 price hike are likely to
be delighted with the trade-off, as may tourists interested in exploring the
full range of the museum's resources. New Yorkers who like to spend an
occasional lunch hour at the museum and tourists who just want to see "The
Starry Night," however, may not be so happy. As Melissa Dale, a first-year
student at the Parsons School of Design who was visiting the museum's Queens
outpost last week, said: "If it cost us $20, we probably wouldn't come.
It's, like, food for three days for us."

The upscaling of MoMA is the clearest example of the ways that the nation's
top art museums are trying to change their business model. With attendance
flat in recent years and many costs, like insurance and utilities, growing,
museum directors see ticket-price increases as a way both to raise funds and
to push more visitors to become members. The cost of a MoMA membership - $75
for an individual, $150 for a family - will stay the same, turning it into a
significantly better deal than it now is. The membership rolls at MoMA and
some other museums have already grown in recent years, despite the
stagnation of overall attendance.

The directors also know that the highly educated museum-going demographic
has been on the long end of almost every economic trend of the last three
decades. It can afford to pay a few more dollars. "There is a sufficiently
large body of people for whom going to a museum is important and they're
going to do it," Glenn Lowry, MoMA's director, said, explaining that months
of study persuaded him and his colleagues that the $20 ticket would have
little effect on attendance. "I'd love it if we were free. Because I think
cultural institutions belong to the people. But we are a private
institution. We do not get public subsidies. And we're not asking for any."

Museum inflation has outpaced the price increases for nearly every other
form of entertainment in recent years. The suggested entry price for the Art
of Institute of Chicago has nearly doubled since 1999. A ticket to the
Museum of Fine Arts in Houston has more than doubled in the last five years,
to $7, while San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art has begun charging an
additional $5, equal to half the basic ticket price, for its most popular
shows. The Guggenheim Museum will charge $18, instead of the usual $15, for
four months starting in October while it plays host to a show on the Aztec
empire.

All this has come during a time of low inflation across much of the rest of
the economy. The Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park cost exactly the
same to enter as they did five years ago. Televisions, computers and CD
players are cheaper than they were. Tickets to movies and Broadway shows
have all risen, but by significantly less than tickets to many major art
museums have.

Still, museums can be a bargain in many ways. A $20 ticket to MoMA will
allow a visitor to spend from morning till evening seeing some of the
world's great works of art, sampling the temporary exhibitions, reading the
literature, exploring the vast new space, relaxing in Philip Johnson's
Sculpture Garden. The movies that play in the two theaters cost nothing
extra. A couple of hours of entertainment at the Metropolitan Opera, a
Broadway theater or Madison Square Garden, by contrast, often cost more than
$100.

"Museums are still the best value in culture today," said Eli Broad, a
philanthropist who sits on the boards of MoMA and the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art. "And they would be even if admissions were one-and-a-half
times what they are."

As in the past, MoMA will offer a number of discounts. Children 16 and under
who come with an adult will pay nothing, as will students from a number of
local universities, including Columbia and the City University of New York.
Other students will pay $12. On Fridays after 4 p.m., when visitors used to
be invited to pay what they wished, admission will be free across the board.
These discounts mean that many people will not in fact pay $20, as the
museum's officials are careful to point out.

But list prices still matter, as economists and psychologists know. That is
why businesses often set prices just below a round number - only $49.99! -
and why car advertisements often emphasize the monthly payments instead of
the sticker price. The higher a list price, the more people regard it as
simply beyond their means. Given the excitement over the new building, MoMA
could well break its own attendance record in 2005. But the $20 ticket price
is likely to mean that those who walk through its doors will come from a
narrower slice of the population than in the past. It will almost certainly
restrict the way people make use of one of the New York's signature
institutions.

"Even for New York, it's very high. It's going to be a barrier for some
people," said Ruth Berson, deputy director for programs and collections at
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "I wish them well with it. And I'm
sure they have a lot to make up," she added, referring to the cost of the
renovation. 

"But - whew!"

When Mr. Lowry, Mr. Gara and their colleagues gathered in the small
conference rooms around MoMA's temporary offices on Sixth Avenue and in the
museum's Queens offices to discuss the cost of admission to the renovated
museum, they knew only one thing for sure. It would no longer be $12.

Since MoMA last raised its ticket prices, in 2001, a series of calamities
worthy of a Goya painting have befallen art museums. The stock-market bubble
began to deflate in 2000, leaving large institutions with much less income
from their endowments than they had expected. MoMA had better luck than some
museums, failing to make money on its investments in only one year. But its
money managers were not immune to dot-com euphoria, and they overestimated
the financial returns they could make.

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, hurt museums even more, first by causing
tourism to plummet and then by raising the cost of insurance and security.
The insurance policy for the "Matisse Picasso" exhibition last year, for
example, cost twice what it would have if the show had been held before the
attacks. MoMA had expected its attendance to fall even before Sept. 11,
because of the move to Queens, but the decline was aggravated by the fall in
tourism. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which hasn't budged an inch,
attendance is still about 10 percent lower than it was in 2000.

All the while, salaries have been increasing for MoMA employees, as they
have for many professionals, and benefit costs have grown even faster. Once
the renovated museum opens, with its high ceilings and additional space to
display paintings, it will also cost more to heat, cool and protect than the
old one. 

The total budget hole facing MoMA's planners was about $20 million, equal to
roughly one fifth of the museum's operating budget. "There are very few
elements of a museum's budget that have any tweak to them," Mr. Lowry said
on a recent afternoon, sitting in his small interior office on Sixth Avenue.
"You're already raising $30 million in gifts. O.K., maybe you can raise $31
million, but you're not going to raise $35 million. And maybe you can tweak
a little extra out of the museum's costs."

Only a big new source of revenue would close the gap, and only ticket prices
had potential to provide it. So MoMA employees began to talk about the many
ways they could coax more money out of the museum's visitors. They discussed
following the Disney World model and charging separately for various
experiences. Basic admission could even stay at $12. Each movie might be $8.
Special exhibitions could be $5 or more, depending on their popularity.

"We debated the 'Chinese menu' approach," Mr. Gara, the chief operating
officer, said. "We decided it was annoying."

They also debated making the airline industry their model and charging more
at peak times, like the weekend, than slow times. That could raise more
money, but the burden would fall mainly on New Yorkers, whom the museum is
trying to entice into coming more often. Lowering the age limit for free
admission to 12, from 16, risked alienating another lucrative constituency:
families.

The solution that emerged from the many meetings was the simplest one -
raising the basic ticket price - but it was also one that gave visitors the
least flexibility. MoMA is effectively a prix-fixe, all-you-can-eat
restaurant. There is no à la carte sampling of Brancusi's "Fish" or Gaugin's
"The Seed of the Areoi."

MoMA's planners knew that moving beyond $15 would represent an unusually
large increase for a museum. They agonized and, Mr. Gara said, beat
themselves over the head about going to $20. But the very recent success of
"Matisse Picasso" emboldened them. With a surcharge, admission to the show
had cost $20 (even more for people who used Ticketmaster), yet it was one of
the hottest tickets in New York, arguably the biggest outer-borough draw in
years that did not take place in a baseball stadium.

MoMA's market researchers, from both the museum's staff and an outside
marketing firm, gave critical support to the price increase. After polling
visitors to Queens and studying surcharges at other museums around the
world, the researchers argued that it would not hurt attendance
significantly. The laws of economics say a 67 percent price jump would have
to affect demand for a product. But the people running MoMA decided that
visitors lost to the price increase would be replaced by those drawn to the
renovated museum.

"There's no science to this," Mr. Lowry said. "It's all feel. At $20, we
thought it would still feel like a good deal."

For MoMA, as opposed to the museum-going public, the biggest downside to the
$20 ticket may simply be the attention that will go to the new benchmark of
museum inflation. "Between us and the Guggenheim, it had always been a
battle over the last decade to see who would go to the next price," said
John Stanley, deputy director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. "We're
happy they" - MoMA - "are now the price leader."

MoMA does have an advantage, however, that most price-hiking museums lack.
Many of its visitors are likely to spend as much time thinking about the new
lobby and new galleries as they are about the new ticket price. By the time
they have returned for their second or third visit, some other museums may
have moved closer to $20 themselves.