The timeless lyrics of Joni Mitchell continue to resonate across generations, offering solace and comfort amongst present environmental devastation, political crises, and an overwhelming sense of dread looming over the state of the world today. The lyrics of Big Yellow Taxi serve as a reminder that culture and heritage should be available to all. Our museums are not a space to shut away cultural heritage, but to display it. Present times require light, and our museums are a burning flame illuminating our greatest cause for hope amidst present darkness: culture.
Nonetheless, this comes with a caveat – we can only see culture's glistening light if we treat our museums as economic institutions. Blasphemy! Artists of past times weep, with French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé remarking in 1889, 'To seek to assign a work of art its real price, in money, is to insult it.' But just as Galileo's heliocentric teachings were initially deemed blasphemous by the Church, my duty is to seek the truth of economics' value in the arts – especially in museums. Our first judgement is that our arts are inherently valuable, with museums producing commodities of great worth directly through their consumption – whether knowledge, aesthetic experience, or simply enjoyment.
These qualities enrich the substance of our lives! A visit to the museum is filled with bonding, insight, and –if presented well– entertainment and joy. Our society may rest under a sky of grey, mirroring the dullness of Edinburgh springtime, but such clouds could eventually dissipate provided we embrace our museums, and do so within economic thinking. Only then will tomorrow's blue skies arrive.
Pricing Pretty Pennies
Visiting the museum often involves confronting a set of impressively grand glass doors (and often an even grander queue). Passage through these doors presents our first problem: pricing, and whether to set a price at all. Our museums, generally experiencing inelastic demand, carry great potential for profit. However, their unique institutional status requires thinking differently about our museums.
The visitor – whether local, domestic, or foreign – is just one piece of the puzzle, each generating different elasticities presenting us with a complex jigsaw beyond their demand determinants.
The museum itself is more valuable in our analysis – as an institution near-universally recognised to be socially beneficial and functioning as a merit good. Its extremely large fixed costs and negligible variable costs (until extreme congestion sets in) provide us with a uniquely efficient pricing structure for the museum: not to charge. The question here is very much 'who benefits?' from museums, but when we think of the institutional character of the museum, signs point towards charging zilch, nada, or naught.
However, this doesn't equal generating zero revenue. Public and private grants are massively bread and butter for funding and collection building – but the treasure of the modern museum is the donation box upon entry and exit. This encourages voluntary price discrimination to capitalise on the immense satisfaction the museum provides, providing an incentive for museums to maintain high standards. Then the money flows in through such donations, guidebooks, or overpriced lattes that are the backbone of the museums' ability to share culture with the world. So, throw open those grand glass doors and cast your gaze instead to what sits behind the glass. There we can still make a pretty penny even if our exhibited items are, well...pretty pennies.
Hoarders of Heritage
Behind the glass lies an object, just one of a collection of thousands, and thus the curator must choose, with opportunity cost as the archnemesis. To decide what lies behind the glass on the value of objects appears obvious, but such a culturally removed approach only attracts the ire of curators. Additionally, such a practice disqualifies any museum or gallery from being recognised as such in the UK. Curators are acutely aware of the aesthetic importance and complementariness in the display of the collection. Nonetheless, our role still enables us to separate the bad from the good in practice. The obvious solution to the 'hoarding culture' of museums today: display more! The British Museum, for instance, only displays around one percent of their collection. A welcome change is the opening of museum storerooms, allowing objects to be appreciated in isolation their totality, which has brought new depth to the museum not seen since the advent of the special exhibition in the sixties. The Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum leads the way here with the opening of the V&A East Storeroom in May this year. The Storeroom offers unparalleled access to the V&A's collection in an uncompetitive manner while placing conservation, education, and access to our material history at the forefront. This new, unique development could transform the museum entirely, allowing us to engage with our material history as never seen before. So a change is more months away and holds the potential to bring us closer to our culture.
You Must Be Some Kind of Superstar
Today, AI-driven education in India is designed not just by ITthe question thus becomes not 'what's behind the glass' but rather how we interact with what's behind it–the museum's collection and beyond the glass.
Picture hordes of visitors swarming Da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michaelangelo's David. Both are situated in superstar museums, namely the Louvre and the Galleria dell'Accademia, where visitors must see behind the glass. Such museums are unique in their expectation to provide a 'total experience' beyond the conservation and presentation of the collection. Increasingly this is a commercial experience even when diametrically opposed to the museum's conservationist essence. The museum becomes an amusement or entertainment park existing beyond its collection and the works in its collection, where visitor experience reigns supreme.
The risk of the 'superstar' museum is that one work often shines so far above the rest–competing with, diminishing, and othering the rest of the collection as visitors flock like moths to snap a photo. The single work is a monolith and sucks attention away from the soul of the museum, limiting the experience that can offer. Such an experience can be devastating! It leads to a dull museum where visitors struggle to gain much from the experience. The cultural impact and legacy of the museum cannot shine through when distilled to just one work.
The museum thus has to compensate – works in a superstar museum cannot 'speak for themselves'; extensive efforts must be made to improve interpretation or educational resources around the collection. Competition thus extends beyond the value of the collection, the traditional indication of museum demand, to a point where experience is crucial. This applies not only to superstars, but also to smaller museums, which must adapt and offer more or be left behind. It is true for the core museum as well as the gift shop and café, positioning the museum as an economically innovative force.
The museums which visitors will get the most from are those which can provide a 'total experience' in interpretation complementary to the material and immaterial heritage. In short, it is logically the museums who best captures the heart of the visitors that will most succeed.
The Institution and the Visitor
The glass door guarding entry to the museum, the glass display case showcasing the collection, and the drinking glass of the café, all represent the three most crucial components of the modern museum. The question of experience – how the visitor can derive the most from the museum – has never been more important than today. This is an economic question we can only encourage further study within.
The light of the museum may at times appear flickering, as art budgets are repeatedly slashed and the arts' importance is bashed. But this should be a call to action to save our culture, is the basis of our enriched lives! To study our museums economically and focus on the ever complex and empirical question of how culture is experienced is our only route to a glorious summer of culture with sweeping blue skies ahead. Our position, that once seemed blasphemous, must be treated as imperative in creating a thriving community with arts and culture at its core. We must recall, once again, the seminal lyrics of Joni Mitchell: