In October of last year, internationally renowned artist Julie Mehretu announced a $2.25 million donation that would make admission to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York free for visitors aged 25 and under. There’s also good news for the 12 and under set in Wisconsin. In December, an anonymous donor made a gift of $3.54 million to the Milwaukee Art Museum to eliminate admissions for this group of young people, allowing them to enter the museum free in perpetuity. Not so lucky, however, are these children’s parents, who still need to pay $27 ($20 for their 65-and-older grandparents) if they come along. But perhaps the elimination of admissions for children was helpful in taking the edge off the recently raised price of admissions for adults, which had been $22 (and $17 for seniors)?
Going to art museums is expensive because these institutions are 1. typically housed in big, increasingly costly buildings to operate, 2. responsible for the conservation of massive collections of fragile artworks and 3. kept running by large workforces. Yet these institutions aim to disseminate knowledge and enjoyment widely, for which a high admissions charge may be an obstacle for the less well-heeled. Museums are being pulled in opposite directions in what amounts to a cultural tug-of-war, the accounting department yanking the rope on one side while the outreach and engagement departments tug from the other. “It’s almost a moral duty that museums should be free,” Glenn Lowry, the soon-to-depart director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, said during a 2002 panel discussion, but what to charge remains an ongoing agenda item for the board members in charge of major art institutions around the U.S. and globally. In 2023, Lowry defended MoMA’s admissions increases in the New York Times, saying, “These changes in admission price will help the museum maintain financial stability.”
“The costs of running a museum have risen,” Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, told Observer. That particular institution has raised its general admission prices several times in the past decade. Last year, admission for adults increased to $24 (in 2023, it was $19), $20 for seniors ($16 in 2023) and $20 for children ages 13-18 ($12 in 2023). Here, too, children 12 and under can enjoy the museum’s offerings for free. Admissions and memberships at the museum amount to 4.5 percent of its annual revenues, and according to Tinterow, the most recent increase “enabled us to balance our budget after several years of rising costs.”
Museums large and small have sought to pass on their rising expenses to visitors, with the Art Institute of Chicago charging adults $32—making it one of the most expensive art museums in the country—while the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Guggenheim charge $30.
Some art museums aren’t raising ticket prices
Lori Fogarty, director and chief executive officer of the Oakland Museum of California, which has $19 adult general admissions (three years ago, the price was $16), told Observer that “admissions make up quite a small component of our revenue, but we also know that free admission is a major motivation for visitors to become members.” A yearly membership allows people to enter the institution without having to pay anything on the day of. “We’ve learned from the experience of other museums that completely eliminating admission fees can also significantly impact membership revenue, which is an important source of support.”
Several institutions around the U.S. do offer actual free admission, and other art museums have taken steps to lower fees or eliminate them for some groups as a way to reach more people. Anne Bergeron, a museum consultant and former head of external affairs at the Dallas Museum of Art who has studied high-performance museums, told Observer that the institution in 2013 “purposefully transitioned to a model of free admission in order to broaden visitorship, especially by audiences more reflective of the city’s demographics than those traditionally associated with the museum. And it worked: audiences diversified and grew by 10 percent in the first year of the new policy.” She added that these days “the need for museums to be more people-, service- and community-focused and socially just has never been more relevant.”
Quite a few museums have adopted that line of thinking—most recently, the Wichita Art Museum in Kansas, the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa, California, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, which did away with admissions fees to remove “the economic barrier to visitation,” according to former executive director Jill Snyder.
SEE ALSO: Art Museums Are Increasingly Trialing Amenities to Engage Broader Audiences
Several other institutions have moved in that direction, including the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, Bronx Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, Cincinnati Art Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Dayton Art Institute, Toledo Art Museum, Kimbell Art Museum, Menil Collection, Amon Carter Museum, Dayton Art Institute, Hammer Museum (at UCLA), Des Moines Art Center, J. Paul Getty Museum, the Walters Art Museum and the museums of the Smithsonian Institution. (At some of these, general admission is free but there may be charges to see special exhibitions.)
Calculating the impact of free museum admission
It remains unclear whether there’s a direct correlation between admission prices and museum visitation and engagement. Simply lowering or eliminating ticket prices has not been an unalloyed success. Bergeron said that at the Dallas Museum of Art “we assumed that the loss of gate revenue would be made up by increased parking fees and increased museum restaurant and shop purchases, but that did not bear out in practice. Yes, many more people came because the museum was free, but they parked on the street, packed a picnic lunch for their families to enjoy in the adjacent public park and didn’t spend money on postcards or tchotchkes. That meant we had to step up our efforts to augment philanthropic investment in the museum.”
Museum admissions price increases are rarely gradual and often jump substantially. Before the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2023 increase, eight years had gone by. “Typically, but not always, institutions or companies that raise prices less raise them by more when they do raise them,” Johanna L. Francis, chair of the Department of Economics at Fordham University, told Observer. The idea is that, like ripping off a bandage, it’s easier to bear a big hurt once a decade instead of small pains every year or so. And institutions have different ways of arriving at a suitable admissions price, she noted—“everything from using an A.I. forecast technique common across museums, using a similar ordinary non-A.I. forecasting model for determining demand elasticity across museums and using the same marketing firms (which suggest entry fees) as other museums.”
Tinterow stated that the price of admissions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, involved “looking at our museum neighbors” to see what they charged. The Houston Museum of Natural Science, for instance, is priced at $25 for adults, while the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and The Menil Collection both are free to the public. As compared to these free institutions, he said, “our charging admissions allows us to do more programming and higher-cost programming.” He added that “our fee structure is not a deterrent for people to come to the museum.”
Still, the wide assortment of discounts most art museums offer suggests museum administrators are either uncomfortable with ticket pricing or, like Lowry in 2002, with charging visitors at all. Many institutions have instituted “variable pricing” so that people who might be put off by high admissions fees can visit for less money or for free on certain days or at certain times of day.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois residents can visit for free on designated days (listed on the museum’s website), and free admission is also available to all children under the age of 14 and to Chicago residents under 18, as well as to active duty service members and their families and those on food stamps (one needs to show a SNAP card and a valid ID). Bank of America credit card holders, Sotheby’s Preferred cardholders and Cultivist members (whose annual memberships range from $40 to $15,000) can also visit for free.
The New Orleans Museum of Art offers discounted admissions rates for Louisiana residents, seniors, service members, recipients of Taylor Scholar Awards certificates (for students in grades 6 through 12 with a 2.5 or better GPA), Louisiana residents who take public transportation and those enrolled in food assistance programs. At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “60 percent of our visitors come in for free,” Tinterow said, a group that includes children 12 and under, active military service members, food stamp recipients, Texas public library cardholders aged 18 and younger, students from local universities and anyone who visits on Thursdays, on which admission fees are waived across the board.
Why lowering admission fees may not matter
While pricey for out-of-towners, the Met in New York does have variable pricing based on where you live, your age and what you do. New York State residents and students with valid ID in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York may pay whatever they wish, while students outside of those three states are charged $17, and non-residents with disabilities and over 65 pay a slightly reduced rate of $22. Perhaps someone’s conscience is assuaged. The Met’s own visitor surveys have found that the vast majority of ticket-buyers are from outside of the tri-state region or from overseas, and those visitors are spending well over $1,000 on their trips to the Big Apple. From an economic point of view, no one is going to travel to New York City, put up in a New York hotel, eat out at New York restaurants, go shopping and/or performances but decide that a $30 ticket to visit the museum is unjustifiably high. They are already spending top dollar on everything else, the thinking goes, so why should the museum be a bargain? (The directors of the Louvre in Paris undoubtedly think the same way, as the admissions price there rose at the beginning of 2024 to €22, or $23, from €17.)
Tourist dollars are simply there for the taking. In January of last year, the New Orleans Museum of Art raised its adult admissions price from $15 to $20, since 65 percent of its visitors come from out-of-town, according to the institution’s director Susan M. Taylor. She noted that $20 “is still lower than many other museums, and additional revenue from admissions has helped offset inflation and rising costs of crucial services like insurance.” In the wake of the increase, visitor numbers have continued to rise.
Another economic reason the Met and other major museums keep their high admissions fees is that the principal beneficiaries would not be prospective visitors for whom the current price seems high but the same people who already visit these institutions and comfortably pay the $30. The people who regularly visit art museums—and we are not talking about school field trips now—tend to be wealthier and better educated. “Only a third of the American public visits a cultural attraction in the course of a year, and the determining factor for visiting an art museum is having a college degree, which only a third of the American public has,” John Morey, a museum consultant in Charleston, South Carolina, told Observer. That segment of the population doesn’t need an incentive like free or reduced-price admission to visit. The people for whom the price of a ticket is a consideration are less accustomed to museum-going, which is likely why abolishing entry fees only goes so far. Baltimore’s principal art institutions, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum, eliminated admissions at the same time, and the results have not been positive overall for either institution. After a year or so of notably increased attendance when entry became free, the number of visitors declined at both museums—by 18.6 percent over the last 15 years at the Walters and 12.7 percent over the same period at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
“Museums that underperform undercharge,” Morey said, adding that the “market is generally accepting of museum admissions prices. When prices go up, there usually isn’t a huge reaction because the people who go to museums value what they get there very highly.”