I noticed that what goes for music goes for musea too: charge me less for the music and I will go to more concerts. I never used to go to museums in The Netherlands as the entrance was too expensive to be fun. Recently though I have been to 2 specific temporary exhibitions that cost me quite a bit but were well worth the money (Chinese Terracotta Army in the British Museum, and the Tutanchamun exhibition in the O2)
2008-07-31EDT14:51:00+00:00
#
Nice piece on museums, but I need to chuck in a couple of thoughts (having worked at the Science Museum for 7 years..)
First: although free entry is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, it has had a HUGE negative impact on the museum bottom line. Although the hope was that government funding would match entry fees, this has failed to happen.
Great PR story for government, bad scene for already tight-up museums trying to make ends meet. There's a couple of other more subtle side-effects of freeness: for one, when people haven't invested, they tend to dip rather than stay: this means that wheras before a family might have spent a day, and maybe £50-60 in total (lunch, shop, various up-sell activities etc), nowadays they turn up for an hour, bring their own sandwiches and go away again. So a secondary source of revenue has also been removed.
Second: one of the main reasons for making museums free was to expand the demographic away from a white/middleclass/ABC audience. What has actually happened is that you get MORE of the original demographic. That's a bit of a fail, and probably speaks to some of your criticisms about dumbing down.
Third: I have to disagree (for the most part) about interactive exhibits. When done well (see for example the Energy Hall in the Science Museum, London), you'll find that the interactives are there to *enhance* the objects. In this context, for example, you can see the workings of a steam piston or get to see the inside of Apollo 10 - and this to me really adds to the experience and learning (and yes, they're online too - see http://tinyurl.com/67445c). Yes, there are some REALLY BAD interactives, and yes, there are places where you definitely *don't* want to take away from the object itself but when done well, interactives on-gallery can be very powerful.
Finally (phew): the metrics surrounding museums are - of course - utter Blairite nonsense BUT it really (unfortunately!) isn't as simple as saying "we should have museums because we should". That just doesn't stack up. Museums have to have metrics of success, including how effective they are at working with educational groups (an enormous chunk of any museum audience!) or how inclusive they are. Housing objects (your measure) is one thing, but surely "getting them in front of people" is more important? Most museums hold 80%+ of their collection in off-site storage units - that would tick your metric, but is obviously unsatisfactory... I'm nit-picking here, but the point is that measuring success has to be taken into account, and it isn't necessarily easy...
2008-08-07EDT17:34:07+00:00
#
First: although free entry is undoubtedly a wonderful thing, it has had a HUGE negative impact on the museum bottom line. Although the hope was that government funding would match entry fees, this has failed to happen.
Great PR story for government, bad scene for already tight-up museums trying to make ends meet. There's a couple of other more subtle side-effects of freeness: for one, when people haven't invested, they tend to dip rather than stay: this means that wheras before a family might have spent a day, and maybe £50-60 in total (lunch, shop, various up-sell activities etc), nowadays they turn up for an hour, bring their own sandwiches and go away again. So a secondary source of revenue has also been removed.
Second: one of the main reasons for making museums free was to expand the demographic away from a white/middleclass/ABC audience. What has actually happened is that you get MORE of the original demographic. That's a bit of a fail, and probably speaks to some of your criticisms about dumbing down.
Third: I have to disagree (for the most part) about interactive exhibits. When done well (see for example the Energy Hall in the Science Museum, London), you'll find that the interactives are there to *enhance* the objects. In this context, for example, you can see the workings of a steam piston or get to see the inside of Apollo 10 - and this to me really adds to the experience and learning (and yes, they're online too - see http://tinyurl.com/67445c). Yes, there are some REALLY BAD interactives, and yes, there are places where you definitely *don't* want to take away from the object itself but when done well, interactives on-gallery can be very powerful.
Finally (phew): the metrics surrounding museums are - of course - utter Blairite nonsense BUT it really (unfortunately!) isn't as simple as saying "we should have museums because we should". That just doesn't stack up. Museums have to have metrics of success, including how effective they are at working with educational groups (an enormous chunk of any museum audience!) or how inclusive they are. Housing objects (your measure) is one thing, but surely "getting them in front of people" is more important? Most museums hold 80%+ of their collection in off-site storage units - that would tick your metric, but is obviously unsatisfactory... I'm nit-picking here, but the point is that measuring success has to be taken into account, and it isn't necessarily easy...
