No. But Christopher Knight at the LA Times thinks they should:
Yes, every art museum needs multiple sources of revenue. It does cost money to run the place.
However, because they are tax exempt, art museums already count the public as a major, indirect source of revenue. Required admission fees add a second hit — a kind of “double jeopardy” — and it is one that falls harder on those who can least afford it.
But being tax exempt is not an indirect source of revenue. Exemption from the property tax is one less cost to bear, but all the other expenses of running the museum still need to be met (If the museum costs are $10 million, you cannot say ‘well, the property tax exemption has an implicit value of $500,000, so we just need to find $9.5 million in revenue and we are all set!’). Exemption from the corporate income tax only matters in the first place to the degree that there is net revenue at all – receipts in excess of expenses. The deduction in the personal income tax for charitable deductions certainly helps, and represents an important public subsidy, but it doesn’t help balance the accounts. If your museum has annual expenses of $10 million, it needs to find $10 million to stay in the black; the tax exemptions are not a reason to choose an admission or membership fee of zero. Should all nonprofit colleges have zero tuition fees? Should nonprofit hospitals provide free medical care? Should all nonprofit orchestras, theatres and dance companies have free admission?
And in terms of fairness, why shouldn’t the people who actually go to view the art bear some of the burden of the costs of the museum? Yes, they contribute indirectly through the tax expenditure that arises from the charitable tax deduction and the property tax exemption, but so do people who never visit the museum. And the tax expenditures for nonprofit organizations in the arts are not progressive. The benefits flow disproportionately to the better-off; that’s who attends museums and plays and symphony concerts. The people who get more of the direct benefits of the museum, or any nonprofit arts, ought to contribute a greater amount to its financing than people who never attend.
We might also question how expensive the tickets for art should be. The average price of tickets at the Metropolitan Opera are about $170, or $340 for a couple. Big donors receive priority ticket offers before the tickets are sold to the public, so most of the good seats are gone before average people have a chance to buy them. The entry level donation for priority ticketing is about $10,000. So you might need to put that upfront before spending your $340. Most of the best seats at the Met actually have brass name plates on them and are reserved for the biggest donors.
And of course, arts institutions are concentrated in financial centers where wealthy donors live while the rest of the country often remains neglected. The USA thus ranks 39th in the world for opera performances per capita, behind every European country and just ahead of Costa Rica in position 40. And of course, opera isn’t alone. It illustrates a pattern found in most art forms in America.
How does this relate to concepts of the public good? Should arts institutions be rarified cultural country clubs for the wealthy? Or should tickets be affordable as in Europe? Should we charge for the use of public libraries since some people use them more than others? Should we eliminate public schools and charge according to how much each child uses the schools? Or is there a concept of the public good, in which elements like culture and education are placed outside the market because their furtherance benefits society as whole? Why is the United States the only developed country in the world without comprehensive systems of public arts funding? Why are almost all universities in continental Europe tuition free? And why do most continental countries forbid private universities by law?
There are different reasons for goods to be subsidized, sometimes entirely, through public sector funding – combinations of public good (in the economist’s sense of shared goods that once provided for one can be provided for many at no additional cost), and alleviating to some degree the inequities in resources across households that result from the market economy. But the mix is different for different goods. Public K-12 education, and public health insurance, are progressive in that when looking at funding and the distribution of benefits there is a net transfer from the better off to the less well off. For museums and opera performances that is not the case. That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be public funding support of the arts, and I am someone who thinks there should be. But we can’t pretend it is a policy that is progressive – on net, for the most part, the benefits flow to the better off. All research on the subject confirms that.
This is all true for the most part, but perhaps there some assumptions that should be carefully examined.
1) It might be true that in the USA the wealthy appreciate the arts more than the middle or working classes, but that is not the norm. In Europe, it is the middle class that formulates the vast majority of the public for the arts. And in Italy, for just one example, even many people in the working class frequent the opera.
2) It might not be progressive to subsidize the consumption of art by the wealthy, but it is progressive to create educational and funding systems that expand the demographic of those who appreciate the arts. Taste is not a natural law based on class. In short, subsidized arts expand the public beyond the wealthy which is progressive.
3) We should avoid the circular argument that only the wealthy appreciate the arts when we deny people in lower classes the opportunity to develop an interest and habit of participation.
4) And even in some cases where the arts are patronized mostly by the upper classes, this might still have progressive effect because it gives those people a broader understanding of life and society that leads to more social justice. In short, education and culture reduce the number of reactionary bigots among the wealthy. We thus have people like Warren Buffet, to name a specific example.
William Osborne says: “”Big donors receive priority ticket offers before the tickets are sold to the public, so most of the good seats are gone before average people have a chance to buy them.” There are 3,800 seats in the Metropolitan Opera house. Of these approximately 1700 are in the orchestra (and so, presumably, the best). The Met has had difficulty selling out for the last year or two, and is running a serious deficit. The Met season runs from Dec. 1 to May 30, so there are approximately 250 performances of about 29 operas. I find it hard to believe that “the good seats are gone before average people have a chance to buy them.” If average people want to spend that much money, they probably can get tickets. And speaking as an average person who has attended the Met for decades, I can say that cheaper seats (not “cheap,” just relatively less expensive) in the Dress Circle and Balcony have excellent sight lines and excellent acoustics.
Tickets for Broadway shows and big sports events are not much cheaper than Met tickets, and yet average people seem to come up with the money for those.
However, I disagree with Michael Rushton on one point. I think museums should be free for everyone, because that is the best way to get people interested in the arts. But I don’t foresee that happening in this universe.
The Met has to raise a $320 million budget each year. The hall is big, but it also has a lot of donors with priority seating. You won’t find many of the best seats available for popular productions. Here is the website for the Met’s patron program.
http://www.metopera.org/metopera/support/membership_patron/choose_level.aspx?src=memleftnav&suggestedamount=2500
Donations are broken down into about a dozen levels with graduated privileges based on the amount given. Priority ticketing begins at $2500, but the priority is also graduated, so $2500 won’t get you priority tickets for much. That begins somewhere around $10,000-20,000.
As the website shows, you won’t, for example, get an invitation to the Met’s yearly gala for less than $100,000. The higher the donation above that, the closer you get to sit to the star singers. I once saw an ad for an Austrian performance artist who had made a parody of the Met’s patron system. For a really big sum, patrons could take star singers into a little booth and do whatever they wanted for five minutes.
This reliance on the wealthy also forces the Met to be one of the most conservative opera houses in the world. Even Peter Gelb’s mild attempts to modernize the productions have met with howls of protest and a loss of donations.
Continental Europeans find the Met’s sort of classism in the arts ridiculous and immoral. The ostentatious classism at the Met creates an indelibly ugly impression that is not found anywhere else in the developed world. It contributes considerably to the poor image classical music has in the USA.
Hi William, always good to see you, you always provoke interesting and important questions that for an arts administrator who has worked on both sides of the Atlantic are always gnawing at me.
In this particular instance, however, I’m just not sure the Metropolitan Opera is the best example to address questions about funding at museums. Each work according to quite different models, and in order to make progress on Michael’s area of inquiry I think it’s important (to borrow from another thread where we had exchanges on a different topic) to compare apples with apples.
That said, I would like to address some of your points separately from Michael’s (although I’d be interested to hear your take at some point, Michael).
I live in New York, and although I’m aware that the wealthy have privileged access to the arts that is beyond the means of most – and this is indeed the case at the Met – I’ve never had the feeling that the arts in New York City are exclusively for the wealthy.
It’s certainly true that the arts in New York have always been more dependent on the market, and by extension on the largesse of the wealthy. Which have made many artists and arts organizations more susceptible to the economic troubles of recent times (which I suspect must be true for all US cities). Yet still I look around and see so much good stuff that’s not grand opera at the Met taking place in a rapidly changing cultural landscape (in which, for example, computer code is now pretty much accepted as a legitimate art form) in which you need to consider things in a much broader context.
It’s also not simply the case that tickets in Europe are affordable, and in the US they are not. At the top end, the next Berlin Philharmoniker concert orchestra prime is $170, and for the next NY Phil concert it is $271. So, if you must have the best seats, you will indeed have to pay more in New York. But I wouldn’t characterize $170 as “affordable”. At the other end of the scale, you can buy a balcony seat for the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet at BAM in a few weeks’ time for $30. And a growing number of contemporary music chamber groups who are contributing to the current renaissance of the scene in New York who regularly offer world class performances for any seat for under $20, or for free.
Sure there are big problems with our system, one of which is a current over-reliance on wealthy donors. And you’re absolutely right in addressing them on Arts Journal’s blogs, and I commend you for doing that. But it’s important that this should be seen in a wider context, both for better identifying specific flaws in the US arts funding system that can realistically be addressed in the current climate, and in terms of taking into account the disappearing middle class that is a factor nationwide. There are still many people and organizations out there in the US working hard to make world class opera and much else affordable and accessible for the cultural adventurer, wealthy or no. And in significant respects, they are succeeding.
I agree with most of what you say. It’s difficult to paint a complete picture when writing comments in blogs. I’ve noticed a fairly strong upswing in ticket prices in Germany over the last 10 years, though the tickets are still notably cheaper than in the USA. And it’s true that opera houses and museums are really different. The Met is spending over a million dollars a performance. Even the biggest museums usually don’t have to spend a million a day to keep open.
We need more hard data on direct comparisons of ticket prices between the USA and a range of European countries — opera house averages and symphonic averages for ensembles of similar quality, comparisons for similar types of museums, ballet, etc. One thing I’ve noticed is that tickets are quite a bit cheaper in regional German houses than in the big houses, but that the USA hardly has any regional opera houses — and certainly when compared on a per capita basis. These differences create big differences in the numbers so it’s hard to make comparisons that are complete.
And we need enough data to formulate average numbers. $170 might be the top price for Germany’s top orchestra but where is the average for all tickets for the whole season? Maybe $80? (And we should remember that there are few special privileges offered to big donors.) What is the average for the country’s orchestras as a whole which are quite a bit cheaper than the august Berlin Phil? Are guest performances at BAM a norm for USA ticket prices?
How do we figure in the one-off situations, like in Baltimore where a bank gave the orchestra the funds to only charge about $10 for most tickets for concerts for a whole year? A whole new demographic attended. Ticket lines were very long. Marin Alsop went out and served coffee to those waiting in the lines. Or unique institutions like the Salzburg Festspiel which is one of Europe’s few private festivals and caters to the glitterati?
For me, the really important numbers come from the number of full time opera houses and orchestras per capita and the averages that they charge. This adds up to meaningful measures of geographic distribution and access. Cities like Albuquerque, Tulsa, Wichita, Little Rock, Boise, Tuscon, Cedar Rapids, and on and on would like to have *full time* orchestras with musicians who can live on the salaries like similarly sized cities in Germany and other European countries. This lack of distribution matched with number of performances and the ticket prices is where the differences really show. They are more important that the relative ticket prices in NYC. But as you note, I’m not in a position to draw a complete picture. Why aren’t arts administration schools and musicologists collecting these important numbers?
Michael,
At the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts we believe that art museums should be accesible on every possible level: intellectually, physically, and financially. We offer free general admission and are open 365 days a year. Yes, 365.
Art museums have a perception issue of being elitist institutions. Some of that image is based in history and truth. If we want to make art a part of everyone’s life, we need to eliminate as many barriers as possible. General admission is one of the most important hurdles to cross. Free works.
In a city of barely over 1.2 million people, we average 500,000 visitors a year. We charge for some special exhibitions, such as our current “Forbidden City: Imperial Treasures from the Palace Museum, Beijing” which was curated by our own Carpenter Curator of East Asian Art, Li Jian, but even the majority of our special exhibitions are free.
Come for a visit and you’ll see why our slogan “It’s Your Art” really works for everyone.
I enjoy your column. Thanks for doing it!
Alex Nyerges