Increase Museum Attendance

The problem of how to increase museum attendance and educate visitors is described by the new director, Thomas Campbell, of the Metropolitan Museum, in an article from the Financial Times. The issue being framed is that museums feel that they are in competition for patronage in an increasingly frenetic audio-visual world replete with many, many other choices that offer much more immediate gratification. Thus the Brooklyn Museum offered up exhibits on Harley Davidson motorcycles which brought in visitors to see the bikes but never made it back to see any of the other good things in the place. (Hat Tip: Arts Journal)

“That engagement with contemporary art is part of what he describes as a “fundamental shift” in the presentation of the Met’s displays, helping to make them more accessible. “We assume a great deal of knowledge in our audience; I’m conscious that we need to do more for our general visitors.”

““We assume people know who Rembrandt is, for example. We have wonderful, thoughtful labels next to each Rembrandt painting, but there’s no overview of who he was and, frankly, considering our international audience, I doubt whether many of them do know who [he] was, or the significance of a particular period room, in a broader context.”

““What I’m trying to do is to get the museum rethinking the visitor experience from the moment that people arrive at the museum: the signage they encounter, the bits of paper they pick up, all the way through to the way we deliver information in the galleries. And obviously that’s an enormous task. We’ve got a million square feet of gallery space and tens of thousands of objects on display, so nothing’s going to change overnight.””

I have a suggestion on how museums can get attendance, beyond signage and bits of paper, beyond the elitism of assuming that visitors know who Rembrandt was; offer up free family tickets on a once or twice a year basis to all citizens of the town, be it New York, Brooklyn or Chicago. I note that the Art Institute of Chicago sits on land donated by the Park District, a tax levying entity. Surely all those within the park district’s boundaries should be entitled to free attendance at the museum at least once a year. Mayhaps then we can have a polity that knows who Rembrandt is, and that values art, art education and museums.