Us News

Art Museums Try Resources to Engage Broader Audiences

People practice yoga and meditation in front of art at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, France. Photo by LOIC VENANCE / AFP) (Photo credit should read LOIC VENANCE/AFP via Getty Images

Museums these days seem to do everything for people except give them a bed to sleep at night: they offer food, shopping, concerts, dance performances, lectures and films. Others organize travel opportunities, set up singles meetups and offer after-school classes and summer camps for kids. Others host classes for adults, guided tours for caregivers and mothers with toddlers or fitness programs. There are museums that hold yoga classes in the galleries before they officially open in the morning and dance classes after the museum closes its doors at night. During the Olympics, the Louvre Museum in Paris hosted exercise classes in its galleries. And I was wrong about the bed, as some museums—rarely art museums, but it does happen—offer “sleeping blocks” for young and old.

Some of these 'extras,' such as classes, concerts and films, are part of each institution's programs and related to the visual arts, while others are “resources.” They exist to make the experience of visiting a museum enjoyable, to give people reasons to come again and stay longer.

“Overall, museums that can maintain a good buzz of busyness—busy, but not so busy that they feel crowded—tend to do better than those that feel like they have nothing going on or are so busy that no one feels happy about the experience,” says Susie Wilkening, a museum consultant based in Seattle, Washington. . Doing better means having more visitors and more members, and making more money for the institution. Having several different things going on increases the chance for visitors to find something they like, which is good for deepening their engagement with the museum. He noted that young people (40 and under) and those who rarely go to museums of any age are more attracted to centers that offer yoga and music performances or interesting items that you can buy in the museum shop, while older people (60 and over, that is. , the traditional museum visitor) can find other or all these resources interfere.

In some cases, services have become the drivers of institutions, which one can see in the expansion of the museum including new or enlarged areas for museum shops and the hiring of weddings, bar mitzvahs, business events and other gatherings. Larger museums have been increasing their food offerings to compete with other cultural institutions doing the same, creating a culinary arms race. In most museums, there are separate entrances, which can be entered into a cafeteria or restaurant, which can be a whole area of ​​its own, separate from anything displayed in the galleries. Museum restaurants are regularly listed in the Michelin and Zagat guides; reviewed in magazines such as Bon Appetit, Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure; and is marketed differently by the museums themselves: “The Modern holds four James Beard Foundation Awards, three stars from The New York Times and two Michelin stars,” according to the Museum of Modern Art website. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art refers to its restaurant as “Michelin-starred,” and if you don't want to take the name Michelin or the museum, a 2016 review in the New York Times called it “the most original of all. restaurant in the country.” Guest writing for Russ & Daughters Café at New York's Jewish Museum is often highly recommended. “The cafe is a place to go. My dad and I went on a Friday around 9:00 am, and it was packed,” one satisfied customer wrote last June on Yelp.

It is nine o'clock in the morning two hours before the Jewish Museum officially opens to the public, but that is the viewing public, not the eating public. Similarly, yoga classes at various centers often take place before the museums open to the public, when yogis bring their mats to the galleries from 8:00 am.

“In the past, museums were more educational—places to see things,” says Adrienne Horn, president of San Francisco-based Museum Management Consultants. “Increasingly, they are becoming community gathering centers, where there are many things to do.” The evolving role of art museums is about making institutions a regular part of people's lives, “creating more value to society” and, as a result, earning more money.

READ ALSO: Why 2025 Will Be The Year Of Robert Rauschenberg

Expanding the number and range of resources may appear to be part of a thriving art museum business model, but the reality is more complex. There is no department in charge of services; it might be the education department that offers classes and the membership department that does special events while operations oversees food services. There is no interaction between them, and the popular help of money loss can be kept as a loss leader. “Several museums have storytimes for toddlers,” says Terrie Nolinske, a museum consultant in Tampa, Florida. “They will happen once or twice a week, and mothers flock to them.” The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, hosts a regular 'PEM Pals' event for the 5-and-under crowd, with stories, music and crafts. Facilities for young children rarely pay for themselves, but they train parents to think of museums as family-friendly, so museum managers are willing to take a hit.

Event spaces, on the other hand, tend to be cash cows for museums—whereas restaurants only pay sometimes, according to Anne Butterfield, a museum consultant in Harvard, Massachusetts. “Many don't do much.” To make a profit, they need to be high, and not all establishments get a steady flow of hungry visitors. In fact, it is not uncommon for museums to lose money on food services when a restaurant or cafe is run in-house; they are more likely to see a profit if they contract with a third-party vendor. But even if the museum restaurant loses money, the center will keep it “because it keeps visitors longer and makes the visit more complete,” Wilkening said.

Summer camps for kids are often profitable for museums, but not so much for after-school programs because the student population is so low (kids may have other activities scheduled, and getting kids from school to the museum can be difficult). Yoga classes are another resource that people love, but they also tend to lose money. “There is a high cost to hire a yoga instructor, turn on the lights, bring in security and other staff in the time before the museum opens to the public,” said Wilkening.

“The public has come to expect that any decent museum will have a first-rate gift shop and cafe, and they increasingly expect special events,” said John H. Falk, founder and CEO of the Institute for Learning Innovation. Beaverton, Oregon. These expectations have led to museums needing to invest heavily not only in space and resources but also in real talent so that these spaces and knowledge remain competitive, especially in busy metropolitan markets such as New York City, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. “In many museums, all these 'resources' end up being lost leaders,” he added. “The biggest ones are getting more complicated in this regard, but small to mid-sized institutions trying to 'keep up with the Joneses' often find the return on investment is not what they expected.”

Art Museums Are Increasingly Trying Resources to Engage Broader Audiences




Source link

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back to top button