Tuesday, May 4, 2004

The high cost of being 'free'

British museums are still pondering the net effect of eliminating entry fees at the 50 government-funded national museums and galleries, most of which are in London. Announced with great civic pride and pomp back in December 2001, the elimination of entry fees was an attempt to make great art and culture available to all.

Depending on how you measure, the initiative has been either a great success or an on-coming train. How could it be both? Do the math:

• Museums that previously charged entrance fees have seen a 72 percent boost in attendance; some museums have seen attendance jump 120 percent.
• Most of that increase in traffic came with little to no corresponding revenue stream. Cafe and shop sales were up a bit, but not dramatically. The government provided a larger subsidy to those museums that were charging admission before the change, but not to those that weren't. And there's no promise that the additional subsidy will continue.

It's the classic arts challenge of 'death by success.' When every sale or visitor costs more than the revenue it generates, significantly higher volume doesn't improve your bottom line, it destroys it. For the museums, more visitors mean more maintenance, more service personnel, more administrative staff, and more overhead costs. Worse yet, higher volume can also lead to a skewed perception by government and other funding sources about how much subsidy the organizations actually need (just look at how busy they are, they should be ready to make it on their own). Of course more audiences are good, but such growth must be balanced with a thoughtful eye on capacity and capital, and the long-term health of the institution and its community.

From the sound of it, the government perspective is already skewed about why citizens weren't participating in the arts in the first place. Said a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the original sponsor of the initiative:

'It is a key part of the government's cultural policy that obstacles to admission should be tackled....Clearly admission fees are the greatest obstacle.'

What about education? What about apathy? What about the relevance of museum programming to the lives of their communities? What about a general drift in leisure time toward mass media and commercial entertainment? What about seismic demographic changes in the surrounding population -- from immigration to ex-migration to average age?

And what about the non-governmental museums in the UK that continue to work on all the issues above, now struggling against 'free' competitors, and a population encouraged to believe that preserving and presenting great cultural works actually has no cost?

If cultural institutions aren't valued by their communities, that's a much deeper problem than price-sensitive consumers. Despite the rosy take on the initiative on the DCMS web site, it's clear that at least some British museums are now wondering if their government isn't helping them to death.

posted on Tuesday, May 4, 2004 | permalink