MOMA Raises Suggested Donation and It's ALL Boooosh's Fault!

Christopher Knight, the Arts writer for LAT seems to be attempting to formulate his own little modest proposal

The imminent price jump is way, way too small. Three hundred or 400 percent would be closer to the mark. Given an annual operating budget in the vicinity of $250 million and yearly attendance of roughly 4 million people, my calculator says it costs the museum more than 60 bucks for every soul who stumbles through the shiny bronze front doors. The old fee covered only a quarter of the Met's per-visitor cost, and the new fee will cover less than a third.

What's more, the real tragedy of the thing is that it's just another one of the small indignities cultured folks must endure in Boooosh's lowbrow AmeriKKKa

It's 2006! America has been through Reagan, Bush, Clinton and another Bush. Whether it's health insurance, schools, campaign funding or any of the arts, liberal concepts of public responsibility have been out of fashion for a quarter-century. Didn't the Met get the memo? Americans want things fully privatized.

Seven years ago I wrote that every art museum should work toward making admission free, but boy was that naive. (It was 1999; as we know, Sept. 11 changed everything.)

The Met gets a big break on federal, state and local taxes, so it's already raking in huge indirect public subsidies. The government cannot afford to hand out still more — not if this country is going to continue spending $7 billion each month waging war. And not if we're going to keep cutting tax rates for the overburdened rich. The U.S. has priorities, after all.

That puts everything in perspective, dunnit?

The thing is, an annual membership is only $75 dollars for an individual, $120 for a couple and $150 for a family, and besides that, the admission is a 'suggested' donation, not a mandatory fee.

Museum going is an elitist activity, it shouldn't be, but it is. Personally, I could live at LACMA, and there have been times when I visited the place once or twice a week (I kept up a patron level membership for a decade or so, the invitation only receptions for the big travelling exhibits, kick ASS!) (great place to enjoy a sack lunch, and then peruse a de la Tour painting, or a Shiva Nataraj statue, or a Rodin sculpture during a long lunch break).

And there's no reason that these institutions shouldn't be fully privatized, or private non-profit-ized, either people support 'the arts' or they don't, the federal government shouldn't be involved in picking which art gets how much support (or any other level of government, really).

Also I would rant about how the LAT pays far too much attention to the NYC art scene, and not enough to the local scene, but that's a losing battle, plus even when they do pay attention to local events, it's almost always to decry them regarding how inferior they are compared to the more sophisticated global cultural capitals (almost always NYC, London or Paris).