How Much Would You Pay to Visit Your Local Art Museum?
The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is a good art museum, staffed by friendly people and located on beautiful grounds. Some of the employees and interns there are my friends, and I was on a research team that conducted an evaluation study at the museum earlier this year. I visited the museum at least a half dozen times while I lived in Indianapolis and think the institution is an important civic destination for the entire city.
I was quite surprised a few days ago when I heard about the IMA’s recent decision to raise its admission fee from free to $18 ($10 for kids 6-17) starting in April 2015. Buried deep within an official December 12 announcement about a “new campus enhancement plan,” the IMA (beyond the usual desire to boost memberships and the “we need to guarantee long-term financial sustainability” argument) justifies the price hike on the basis of visitor convenience, asserting that “visitor research has shown that the IMA guests do not like paying for parking and key programs like exhibitions separately.” Elsewhere the IMA board chairman, Thomas Hiatt, further justifies the increase by arguing that the new admission fee is in line with other Indianapolis destinations like the Children’s Museum and the Zoo and cites the Huntington in Pasadena, California, as a model institution for instituting an admission fee to boost both visitor attendance and financial endowment. Finally, a few supporters have argued–with some justification–that the new pricing model is actually cheaper for visitors.
Let’s take a deeper look into these claims and assess their validity.
Visitors want to pay one uniform fee: This claim is misleading at best, disingenuous at worst. The announcement never mentions that the museum is currently free to enter (except for optional special exhibits and parking), and it implies that visitors are okay with this price hike because it combines special exhibit and parking costs. So, rather than keeping the bulk of the museum free and keeping the special exhibits an optional expenditure for those interested, visitors allegedly want everyone to pay an admittance fee because it’s more convenient that way…
The way an evaluation question is framed can do much to shape the possible answers a visitor provides. My suspicion, which I feel pretty confident in, is that the evaluation question that provided this result was probably worded along the lines of “If the IMA were to institute an admission fee, what would you consider a fair pricing structure?” You can easily see how a question like that suddenly leads to an announcement that says “visitors think the new price model is more fair.”
The new pricing model is cheaper for visitors: There is some justification to this argument. The current pricing model stipulates that an adult weekend visitor to the IMA’s special exhibit would have to pay $20 plus a $5 parking fee, whereas the new model combines both fees into its $18 admittance price. But of course the visitor who only wants to visit the free permanent and temporary exhibits now has to pay $18 as well, so we could ask: what percentage of visitors pay the current fee to enter the special exhibits?
The IMA maintains limited visitor use data online here, including attendance over the most recent two weeks (which is pictured above). The chart also distinguishes between the number of visitors who went through the entrance and the number of visitors who visited the special exhibition gallery. For the period between Tuesday, December 9 and Monday, December 22, 2014, 5,805 visitors out of a total of 13,176 visitors (44%) visited the special exhibit, which means that more than half of all visitors chose not to visit the special exhibit.
This sample is limited in numerous regards, obviously requiring a necessary margin for error. Different seasons bring out different attendance numbers and visitation patters; some of these December visitors may have been school groups who may or may not have visited the special exhibits; and we don’t know how many visitors had memberships that allowed them access without paying an addition fee for the special exhibit (although another online statistic indicates that only 6.58% of all visitors in 2008 were IMA members). We can tentatively conclude, however, that it’s pretty close to 50/50 in terms of visitors getting a cheaper deal with the current and future pricing models.
The new pricing model is in line with admittance fees to other Indianapolis cultural institutions: The $18 admittance fee is on the higher end of Indianapolis cultural institutions that charge a fee, making it more expensive that the Colonel Eli Lilly Civil War Museum, the Eitlejorg Museum, the Indiana State Museum (but not the “Total Museum” experience that includes an IMAX film showing), and a number of other places. And yes, it is cheaper than the Children’s Museum and the Zoo. But I think it’s mistaken to compare the art museum’s fees with other cultural museums in Indy rather than other art museums throughout the country, especially the Midwest. Art museums are not the same as children’s museums, history museums or science museums. Art, in my opinion, is a public good. As this article helpfully points out, public goods are defined as goods that, if provided for one, are provided for all in an accessible manner that excludes no one. Consuming art is not like purchasing tickets for an Indiana Pacers basketball game through a market that limits access and excludes people from a given commodity. The other types of museums can be justified as public goods too, but I think we get a more precise understanding of the value of an art museum visit if we draw comparisons to other art museums. Let’s take a look at the new IMA admittance fee (for adult individuals) compared to other Midwest art museums:
The Art Institute of Chicago: $23Cedar Rapids Museum of Art: $5Cincinnati Art Museum: FreeCleveland Museum of Art: FreeColumbus [OH] Museum of Art: $12Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis: FreeDes Moines Art Center: FreeDetroit Institute of Arts: $8Dubuque Museum of Art: $6Indianapolis Museum of Art: $18Milwaukee Art Museum: $14Minneapolis Institute of Arts: FreeMuseum of Contemporary Art Chicago: $25Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit: $5 suggested donationMuseum of Wisconsin Art: $12Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: FreeRockford Art Museum: $7Springfield [IL] Art Museum: FreeSt. Louis Art Museum: Free
It’s clear that IMA will be on the high end of admittance fees for larger Midwest art museums.
The Huntington is an appropriate “model” for the IMA’s new price model:William Poundstone points out several problems with the IMA using the Huntington as a model for their new admittance fee. While the Huntington tripled its attendance and endowment after instituting an admittance fee ($20 adults on weekdays and $23 on weekends), that fee was implemented in 1996, thus this increase gradually took place over 18 years. 3 million additional residents have moved to LA since then, and the Huntington has grown since that time to include several gardens, a conservator, a wing dedicated to the history of science, and its American art gallery has tripled in size. In sum, the Huntington in California is on a completely different scale than the IMA in Indiana. Poundstone minced no words, arguing that “to imply that the Huntington’s admission fee had anything to do with increasing attendance or endowment gifts is like saying the Obama administration is responsible for beards, food trucks, and Iggy Azalea. Correlation doesn’t prove causation.”
Conclusion
Using my knowledge of evaluation practices, available online data about IMA visitation, and comparing IMA’s new admittance fees to similar Midwest museums, I have attempted to point out inconsistencies in the IMA’s justification for their price jump while at the same time acknowledging that the $18 fee may be cheaper for a decent number of visitors who want to see the special exhibition galleries. I think the new model will lend itself to more people purchasing memberships, but am skeptical of IMA’s ability to bring in new audiences or even attain its yearly attendance numbers in recent years due to this price change. I understand that the IMA is reliant upon memberships to help offset costs, and I think it’s more than fair to charge some sort of admittance fee for that purpose. That said, the jump from free to $18 is high – probably too high. Why not charge in the $5-$12 range instead? Finally, based on comments from friends in the area and from this article online, it appears that the IMA failed to properly communicate this policy change to the public before making plans to implement the new fees in April. That is unfortunate, and it raises questions about IMA’s willingness to communicate with the local community in a shared endeavor towards building a museum that fits the needs of residents while also meeting the bottom line.
What do you think?
Cheers
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