Should museums charge for entry?

For goodness' sake, I hear you cry, why is she bothering with that. Why is she not writing the promised second analysis of the election and its aftermath? Well, I am, dear readers but that is taking a somewhat longer time than I had hoped. I am also aware that this subject is not on the agenda at the moment. John Whittingdale, the new Culture Commissar Secretary having got the BBC in his sights is unlikely to take on another lot of big beasts for the time being. It will, however, come up again before this Parliament is out for the same reason that the BBC licensing needs to be looked at: the present situation is untenable and the museums and art galleries that really are part of this country's cultural fabric are suffering.

There are, of course, many issues to be raised, not least the question of tax reform that would make it easier for people to donate large sums to the various cultural institutions. They do a great deal of it already but why not make it easier to do so? The answer is that the Treasury would not like it but, maybe, we should stop listening to the Treasury.

In the end I do not think that the big institutions in London and other cities can survive without some money from the taxpayer; they do not anywhere else, not even in the US. The question is how that money is to be administered and what other funding can be raised.

This is the point at which the question of paying for entry is raised, only to be dismissed through various spurious reasons. We already pay through our taxes, I have heard from one person. Yes we do but we also pay for various theatres and opera houses and companies, yet there is no suggestion that seats at the National Theatre or Covent Garden be free. Furthermore, a good many visitors do not pay those taxes, being visitors in this country but the solution to that, seriously proposed by people who ought to know better, that there should be a system of some people paying but not others on the basis of whether they are contributing anything in direct taxation, would require the setting up of such a complicated bureaucracy as to make one's head spin.

If people are made to pay for entry to museums and art galleries they will stop going is the favourite refrain, which somehow manages to ignore the fact that almost every other country charges for entry and, apparently, people still go. In fact, in almost every other city in Western Europe and North America one will find more local people as a proportion of visitors than in London, where the large museums and art galleries are overwhelmingly filled with tourists. The only other place that might be comparable in that respect is Paris.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days in Budapest. While there I went to see a very fine exhibition of József Rippl-Rónay and Maillol at the Hungarian National Gallery, where visitors have to pay. As usual, the place was full and, though there were many tourists, the majority were Hungarians.

On Thursday I went to see the superb exhibition of John Singer Sargent portraits at the National Portrait Gallery; it was quite well attended and most of the visitors were local. This, I find, is quite normal: while the permanent collections, which are free at the point of entry, tend to be filled by tourists, the exhibitions that have to be paid for get a far higher proportion of local visitors.

Could it be that we should think counter-intuitively and accept that more people will visit museums and art galleries if (or when) they start charging for entry?

How convenient

The Greek economic crisis is being blamed for all sorts of things, including poor security at their museums though reading the story of the break-in at the Museum of the History of the Olympic Games in Antiquity one can't help wondering whether the story would have been different at any other time. Still, this gives politicians a chance to pontificate and try to make everyone feel guilty:

The mayor of Olympia has told me there is a direct link between today's burglary and the policy of cuts and Greece's economic crisis.

He said he was very angry at the situation and the international community needed to realise how important these treasures were for Greece.

But not, obviously for some Greeks who do not mind stealing the treasures and smashing others in their eagerness to get to them.

At least the Elgin Marbles are safe.

Half-right, anyway

It is difficult to know what to make of Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the ubiquitous Muslim journalist, writer, pundit who is also a fairly ubiquitous left-wing journalist, writer and pundit. Most of the time she spouts predictable left-wing rubbish ideas and has expressed the view that Boris Johnson winning the mayoral election was the equivalent of a coup in City Hall. She has also been known to spout rubbish about the fear that the Muslim community allegedly lives with in this country as they are all targeted by the secret police or whatever.

Yet she has written consistently and at some risk to herself about the lamentable position of women in Muslim communities, has opposed the burqua and has expressed great anger at our own Taliban putting pressure on parents and schools to deprive children of music and the arts in general.

The reason I started musing about the lady is because I actually heard her address a rather motley audience at Leighton House, the splendid museum that had been Lord Leighton's home in West London today. It was the opening of the Nour Festival of Arts that is designed to showcase (or so they say) modern Arab and Middle Eastern art and culture. Given Lord Leighton's interest in his own version of the Near East, his collection of artefacts, his paintings and certain aspects of the house, this is actually entirely suitable. The old boy would have been rather pleased. (The Arab Hall above is one of the great attractions.)

Ms Alibhai Brown spoke precisely for the five minutes allotted to her, which impressed me enormously, used as I am to the endless wafflings of politicians. The first part of her short address was dedicated to the subject of the article I mentioned above: the terrible perversion of Islam that rejects the idea of music, art, beauty, any sensuality. It is not what she remembers from her childhood in East Africa and, I must add, it is not what one gathers from descriptions made by travellers to the Mughal, Ottoman or Persian Empires. Quite the opposite: these places were seen by Westerners as the homes of unimaginable richness of senses, be that smell, taste or music. For a Muslim woman to attack the Taliban, whether the one in Afghanistan or nearer home can be dangerous. One has to admire her for doing this.

Then she went into her know-nothing left-wing mode. She talked of her surprise that she obviously thought we should share that a "toff" like Lord Leighton, one of Boris Johnson's class as she helpfully explained, should be so interested and involved with the East.

He was not exactly a "toff" having been born into a middle class business family and receiving a peerage (the first given to an artist) for his achievements. Furthermore, if Ms Alibhai-Brown really is going to write that book about Exotic England she had better find out a little more about the number of English people, toffs and others, who travelled to the Near East, studied it, wrote about it, even painted it. As a matter of fact, Lord Leighton was not really one of them. He does not seem to have gone further east than Italy.

As it happens, Ms Alibhai-Brown expressed herself pleased and excited by the thought that there were all these various links between England and Muslim cultures so why she should get so many things wrong in a few sentences is a mystery.

But there is one thing she does not like, as she told us, and that is colonization, which did terrible things to "us", well the colonized. Odd then, that she did not mention another aspect of Muslim culture in East Africa and that is the great slave empires of Zanzibar and Sudan. No, since you ask, the slave traders were not British or even Europeans.

Charging tourists?

Yesterday's Evening Standard, London's freebie newspaper, had a little item on the subject of museum charging, something this blog has mentioned before. This time it was the Victoria and Albert Museum that was discussed. It seems (though one can never tell with the Standard whether what they report does seem to anyone except themselves and the security guard the hack in question managed to corner) that the V & A is thinking of charging tourists for entrance and not charging British visitors. The Standard thinks this is an excellent idea as anything would be better than charging people who live here for going to museums. Two reasons are advanced: foreigners are used to paying, anyway, as they do at home; and British visitors will stop going if they have to pay. It is also undoubtedly true that we already pay through various taxes.

There are a few problems with this idea. The first and most obvious one is the bureaucracy that the museum will have to set up to deal with the various kinds of people who visit it. Whatever they may take in through the entrance charges will go largely on that bureaucracy.

Will they take in all that much. The South Kensington museums, which include the V & A, unlike the large institutions have proportionately fewer tourists as, for some reason, British visitors do go to them in large numbers. Tourists quite often put reasonable sums into the collection boxes anyway. A tourist who might put in a fiver would probably decide not to do so if he or she has already had to pay at the door. There will be precious little gain as a reader of this blog, who happens to be an accountant reminded me.


Finally, the big question: will they be allowed to charge visitors from the EU or is that discrimination that the ECJ will not allow? Will it only be Japanese and American tourists who will have to pay?

Do they know what they are doing? Part 2,358

Somewhere in that speech of William Hague's, which I shall fisk properly tomorrow, there are references that this country can be proud of and use to promote herself and her values abroad. There is the BBC World and Overseas Services, which is mostly deserved and there is a reference to our "world class education", which is a sick joke. Why, I asked myself, when I read that, does not Mr Hague use his favourite concept of networking by establishing links with his colleague Mr Gove?

Being, I assume, a complete philistine the Foreign Secretary omitted to mention such institutions as the British Museum or the National Gallery, which are famous throughout the world with their stellar collections and wondrous exhibitions, not to mention research and conservation. They are, however, in trouble and HMG is making their lives difficult.

As part of the public sector, they are going to have to face cut-backs. Neil McGregor, the brilliant director of the British Museum and a communicator of no mean ability as his enormously successful series History of the World through 100 Objects proves, is a little worried.

Museum director Neil MacGregor said today the immediate three per cent savings demanded this year meant opening hours were “under review” as an “area of quick flexibility”.

There were no immediate plans to charge admission, he said. But he refused to rule it out in the future. Late opening on Thursdays and Fridays could be hit, or some galleries could close periodically to save on staffing.

The museum has also scaled back acquisitions, IT projects and smaller building work. Mr MacGregor said the unprecedented size of cutbacks in prospect meant it was “too early to speculate” on the long-term impact.

The museum, like other institutions, has until tomorrow to meet a government deadline to explain in broad terms what the consequences would be for a further planned cut of 30 per cent.

Well, fair enough, one might say. The public sector needs severe cut-backs though there are parts of it that are considerably less useful and, indeed, more harmful than the British Museum, which has been, with 5.7 million visitors last year, the most popular attraction for the third year running. Can one say the same for DEFRA, which acquires new buildings and new staff with every passing week?

So, what is the British Museum to do? Jeremy Hunt, our new Kultur Kommissar, tells us that the coalition government is committed to free entry. That means they are going to oppose any attempt to charge as it is done in other countries.

There is no suggestion of a tax reform that would make it easier for donors to give and for museums to raise funds. Or, in other words, the coalition government is committed to not letting the museums charge for entry and to making fund-raising difficult while they are also committed to cutting back their funds.

Small things can really annoy one

I claim to be the leading expert on late openings of art galleries and museums in London. Give me a day of the week and I can tell you exactly which galleries are open and, of course, how to get there, also what the disadvantages might be.

Annoyingly enough, nothing is open late on Sunday, the evening you really want to go to an art gallery. At one point the Royal Academy experimented with that but, clearly, it did not work out or, more likely, it was not advertised adequately and the administrators decided that it was not working out.

Nowadays the RA is open on Fridays and Saturdays till 10 o'clock and it buzzes on both evenings.

Nothing is open late on Mondays and only the British Library galleries are open till 8 o'clock on Tuesdays. Well, it's better than nothing.

The highlight of one's week was Wednesday when the National Gallery, the first to experiment with late openings, stayed open till 9 o'clock. It was a wonderful way of celebrating mid-week. No longer. In their wisdom, the directorate of the NG has decided to move its late opening to Friday and the now open Picasso exhibition also stays open till 8 on Saturdays. As a matter of fact, it does not seem to be a complete sell-out as one can wander up to the ticket desk at any time and but tickets for immediate entry.

I seem to recall other exhibitions when one had to queue in the morning in order to go in the evening. In particular I recall doing that for the Vermeer on September 11, 2001. Every minute of that day is etched in my memory as, I expect, it is in everybody else's.

Back to the National Gallery's decision. What is the point of that? There are already plenty of other museums and galleries open late on Fridays. There is the RA, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, Tate Modern (great building, depressing collection) and once a month Tate Britain that I still call the Tate. And nothing is open late on Wednesdays.

Things like this can make you really mad. On the assumption that the Director of the National Gallery does not read this blog, I think I shall write a letter of complaint and that is not something I do very often.