as per ArtDaily.com :

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NEW YORK.- After an investment of $400 million dollars, the directors of MoMA have decided to raise the price for entrance to the museum from $12 to $20 dollars, which will make it the most expensive museum in the United States.

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Cheers Troy,

I went to the MoMA site to see if this fare hike is listed there. It is not. And although I believe they could be increasing the fare that much [as well as reinstalling the entire exhibit/and building new worlds it seems], isn't there always a "free" slot of time weekly one can always get into NY museums?

what of your hunting skills kitty?

poof

yes... museums usually have free/pay as you wish days... for MoMA there is a 4 hour window on friday evening where people can go for free...

I enjoyed having it in Queens... I found there to be an intimacy to it... at least then we shared it with the tourists... I don't want to give it back to them

merely the gripes of a native new yorker

quote:

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what of your hunting skills kitty?

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Apparently, I'm more the "gatherer" type. I actually got to the Visiting the Museum page but did not notice the tree expanding to the left, in the navigation. Perhaps I'm just daft some days. Old age? How I miss site maps!

Shall we go some Friday in late Nov. early Dec. when it reopens to see if the admission hike is justified industry/inflation?

I've not been there in seven years, not since I took Flat Justus.*

*Flat Justus - My much younger half-sibling from Iowa drew/colored and cut out a life-sized paper version of himself, sent it to me, and requested I take Flat Justus around NYC. As this thing was about 4 feet plus in size, many people were quite astonished that day to see a grown woman, unpack a paper little boy from her purse, sit it up, talk with it [I recorded the tour] and then ask strangers to take pictures of the woman and her cut out little boy. I kept a set of these pics for myself; BTW, I'll show you some day. But I do believe we went to the MoMA and they were very kind to let Flat Justus and I take pics and record in the cafeteria that day.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TonyaKnudsen,

Well this sucks. It has almost doubled in cost. I thought that when you renovate you get money for the project before not after. I think it comes down to 2 things that matter to large businesses in this town. REAL ESTATE and TOURISTS. I just never thought of Museums as a business before.

Are you planning a trip? I have not been to the MoMA in years. If you are then I would like to come if you don't mind the company. But you have to admit that window is kind of on the small side.

Hiya! This afternoon I was talking to a friend and they said that the MoMA will be free for all on the opening day. I will see if I can confirm that!

confirmed my dear...

quote:

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...On November 20, MoMA reopens on Fifty-third Street in Manhattan. On opening day, admission is free of charge, as a special gift to the public for its steadfast support. Free admission is made possible by the generous contribution of lead sponsor JPMorgan Chase...

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So very nice to see the $30/mo. I pay Chase -- to make money for themselves off the money I deposit there -- is going towards the arts.

Is it a pre-Thanksgiving date, then? Count me in.

I'm sorry, but look, $20 for any museum is a total disgrace. It means they don't want people who live in the city to ever come there. This is the same institution that was stiffing its guards and other employees so bad they were on strike a few years ago. I produced a conference for visual arts professionals in the city in 2003, MoMa agreed to do a party for the event. For $30 a person they offered bottled water and carrots. MoMa is one of, if not THE, prime example of incredible arrogance and bloated sense of entitlement establishment culture can offer actual living human beings. Just one more example of how totally distorted and exaggerated things in this city can become.

The last exhibits I saw there were the Richter and Constructivist books shows, which ran simulatneously and were both truly intense. But for $20 I'd rather eat for a week.

Can we call this the "Great MoMa Disgrace" topic.

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it was all in the relationship to the original MoMA building that was a modern classic in itself. it is missed as is the feeling that was lost with its passing.

used to love using the spiral stairs cause you had to. used to love finding Pollach in the lobby and Rouseau when you entered the main room upstairs. and the quiet gentle modern garden at the back. or the time in 1969 (?) when they created this darkened rugged room with large balloon like womb shaped cuddling spaces for twenty, that everyone played in together listening to electronic music. and then there was the whole wall of rauschenberg in the then far room with the stuffed dead long haired goat and the tire. gee back in the day in the old modern building.

that was before MoMA gentrified MoMA, the last time. before they pumped her up and made her all white and blue grey contemporary modern while moving the nouveaux chairs, the bogati convertable and ages of modern furniture at the top just enough so everyone could see the dust better.

it was the love of the original building that's missing, now, in the older new and prolly in this newer new modern version of MoMA. The building may be the secret ingrediant -- a mystery wrapped in confusion that created the modern world. as everyone knows the old space was too little, it was not updated enough, it was just not modern enough?

a simple hats off to the little building that could and did start a revolution in art by creating a home for the first faith filled modernists whose inheritors have long ceased to believe in or forgot.

I used to go to the old MoMa just to see Dali's burning giraffe. The place really did have that vibe of being the showcase of an exciting newness. It was almost like being stoned. But I guess it was the '80's 'art market boom' and the building's inevitably too small storage space that brought on the franchise art emporium stance. The last time I was in the administrative offices on business the place felt like the halls of congress; tension, the palpable power-broker atmosphere, and hyper-tense officials dumping lunch on their ulcers while mentally cowering about their careers. It has become very difficult for our culture to hide the fact that the art does not matter.

The Guggy and the Whitney aren't really much different. And I think the whole thing about a $20 entrance fee is the very olde story about how administrators in institutions, and particularly administrators in American cultural institutions which are mired in the hundreds of years old American caveat of being 'pretend European royalty' are simply too disconnected from the majority of the public to have a sense of what their pricing decisions really mean. They just have no sense at all about what it means for an average person to be asked to pay $20 to go look at art, as if art didn't already have a troubling status among the public.

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The money as you say seven, doesn't go to the artist, it is part of the new hype by museums to creat value in the inventory by exaulting artists thru these expensive and popular exhibits. follow the money and we see it creates the administrative class. and now that government mimics business we will see all the symptoms of failure that are evident now in business, enron included. so art becomes a asset with the real value being that the floor space is ever so rentable to anyone that wishes to see the art on the walls. we are paying to rent the space and not paying to rent the art.

seven, honey, twenty dollars is the fiver these days. it happened after 9/10, tho it has been coming for sometime. it feels like it happened over night tho. inflation really sunkin with the taxi raises and then to think back and recall ---- to THIRTY-FIVE CENT PIZZA at Vinnie' on Amsterdamn and 73rd. remember thirty five cent pizza? lol.

so we all need to charge more accordingly for our services?

what disturbs me the most about this besides the smell of elitism, is that there has not been an official press release regarding the matter... just various leaks via press...

please correct me if I am wrong

I think that any entity owes its supporters the courtesy of informing them when a change of this nature happens and why

seems a bit flippant & rude don't you think?

I think that's right Troy, because I've only heard insider remarks about the ticket hike. And of course it isn't something the museum wants to flaunt in public. They are probably still working on a total snow compaign with some Madison Avenue publicist to tweak the public announcement in some way that it sounds like it will actually be to our advantage to pay $20. And your point about elitism is so true, exclusivity is the basic objective for these institutions and that goes right down the line to the art galleries that fuel the museum. But elitism and exclusivity have been the cornerstones of the art market ever since its contemporary incarnation back in the '60's Soho. Tied up with all this is the awful misnomer of the 'art community' -which doesn't exist- gallerists, curators, critics and the like are designations from a business and commercial formation. It is a bourgeoise romanticization to say there is an 'art community.' As such it largely functions as a regimine of subordinations and abuse based on making the art not matter at all.

Merlin, I don't quite remember 35cent pizza but I do remember when nickle bags were three fingers deep in an actual whole sandwich bag -I'm not sure what the connection is except for the cost of pleasure.

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As a child I frequently traveled the rather difficult route to MOMA, when the subway cars had wicker seats and overhead fans... but once inside-- Rousseau, Picasso, VanGogh's The Starry Night... I learned what pointillism was, saw Godard films, gawked at a Rodin...
And even then, there was a certain irony about the use of the term "Modern" in this museums's name. It was, of course, at a time when everything we thought we knew about art was being shaken to the core-- the mid 1960s. And the museum, which deigned to call itself "modern," owned only one Warhol-- the gold Marilyn-- and very little else of what might be even somewhat worthy of that description.
However, in the context of its opening at the start of the Depression, it was truly that... tres Moderne!

We now live in an era where everything-- even essential services like mass transit & garbage collection-- must turn a profit in order to be deemed worthwhile. And certainly the current administrations in both New York and Washington are majot proponents of that ethic. The showing of art has never been seen by these short-sighted numbers crunchers as an essential service. Indeed, when the price of a quart of milk hovers not far from $2, could looking at a painting even be included in the budget?
It seems to me that the museum's curators are really sticking it to out of town visitors. And with this city's tourism still crippled by 9/11 as well as the government's torturous immigration/traveling restrictions and the unreasonably high price of NYC hotel rooms, it's all bound to discourage all but the most wealthy. Well, that's capitalism in its finest! Get it while you can!
At least there is a tiny window of reduced admission, if I am not mistaken, and children under 16 get an even better deal. I suppose we should be grateful we even get that. Our government would rather subsidize finding new ways to kill people than to enable museums to have free admission. Which actually might be a blessing-- if our lawmakers had their way, MOMA would be a museum of Norman Rockwell paintings!
This is, after all, not Europe.

Hatches, I think we should get in our saddle shoes and find some Choate prep school uniforms, with the shorts and beannies, and walk in to M(ore More More$)oMA as under-sixteens.

Choate? I'll have you know I went to Miss Porter's... the uniform is similar, it's the attitude that differs.
Still, I am sure we would pass!

art for art's sake was the theme when childhood emprisoned merlin. it was a rarefied world of magic painted canvases, old french cathedrals and the local chateau or two. then came modernism and as freedom and almost a right, that was charged by the sight of these inexplicable modern things that we could only understand thru our reactions. did we like it?

very few people ever seemed to go the museums in those days, prices for art tho steep seemed manageable. and getting in was the point in those days. it seems not to be now.

museums are a very crowded affair today... and a hassel, which time of the day is best? which galleries might be less full? did you even get a ticket? merlin's ability to withstand dense crowded traffic on the Jackie 60 dance floor began with managing the crowds at the museums in these more recent years.

there has always been an exclusivity in art. not for the rich. art was for the hardy and the passionate, in those days. in the 50's and 60's art seekers found their way to the temples of art and used it as you suggest hattie. we saw the real thing up close and personal. it was carefree and inspiring.

twenty bucks to get in? once walked from first apartment on ave d and east seventh street to the metropolitan. did not go in cause could not afford fifty cents even and didn't want to ask to get in for free. it was like the walk there and back was as much art as merlin required that day.

can we ever run museums for free? when we can't get gas stations to pump our gas any more?

in love,

merlinator

Beautiful scene, Merlinator, that long walk to the museum, just for the walk.

I went to a museum show last weekend. Tickets had time slots printed on them for when you could go in, and stay for only half an hour. It was horrible. Not to mention all the people who had rented those recorded tours on phones, all lined up to pass by paintings in the order they were talked about on the recording! Totally absurd! Education and propaganda all rolled in to one. Kind of pornographic in a way, dwelling on the details of scopophilia. The museum as tourist trap.

never understood the tapes thingies either seven. it is man-to-man or rather, individual to artist, when we stand before someone's work.

moma especially made me feel welcome in the old days, a place merlin could live when they moved the people out and developed room service.

can remember seeing the lines to Judy Garland's wake wrap around the block from the church and in front of the moma. made me laugh. made me feel good. maybe no one noticed.

the modern 'thing' is the ability to hold the ordinary and make it precious. contemporary modernism is about making a profit from the cost of materials with shipping extra.