Last year I chaired a small group set up by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council to think about the future of museums.
It was a good mix of museum expertise and outsider viewpoints. For me, as a lay person who has always been in the habit of visiting museums but had never looked at them other than in my role as a consumer, it was a fascinating exercise which has certainly changed for ever my way of experiencing museums.
My colleagues were emphatic that we should keep any output to a minimalist shape, so we confined our conclusions to a three-page report. They are options for moving towards museums as part of the knowledge economy. But here I want to air one off-message proposal, not discussed with any of my colleagues on the Leading Museums group.
I’ve wrestled with the rationing issue for some time. I remember being the first person into the Alhambra, Spain, at 9am on a Tuesday in February. For a few minutes I and my friends shared the calm atmosphere with a few others. By the time we came out, the place was a cacophony of tourist chatter.
The behaviour of others was no different from that of my friends and myself – there were just many more people. The queue outside was 50 yards long and four wide – and this, remember, was February. For the rest of the day, the atmosphere inside would be completely at odds with its cultural character – and worse I assume as the season develops.
The rationing problem is widespread, and is one of success as more and more people want to get in to see many of our exhibitions. As a result the experience is too often one of crush and rush for everyone. This will only get worse.
Price is the obvious means of rationing, and is used somewhat to regulate access to special exhibitions. But prices high enough to significantly limit overall demand go totally against the principle of general accessibility, unacceptably so.
My partial solution is this. Reserve perhaps two sessions per week for tickets whose numbers are limited to, say, half of the normal quota. This means those who buy them will get a proper look at the exhibits, in reasonable peace and quiet. For this they will pay, say, five times the normal price.
But this would give only the rich the chance to enjoy the experience. Indeed; so for each of these sessions, a certain number of tickets, perhaps 10%, should be made available on a lottery basis, for free. So those of us for whom £40 or £50 is too much for a ticket at least have a chance of the experience as it should be.
We can keep applying; in one sense, that is a test of how keen we really are. This is just a barely sketched example of how we might deal with the rationing problem. It’s a small part of rethinking the role of museums as part of the cultural economy.
Tom Schuller is the director of Longview and a visiting professor at Birkbeck and the Institute of Education, London
