My Letter to the SF Chronicle

Last week I sent the below letter to the editors of the SF Chronicle, and their art critic Charles Desmarias, in response to an editorial by Michael O'Hare, who proposed museums sell off the bottom 1% (in value) of their collection to fund free admissions.

Yesterday, Desmarias was kind enough to include a reference to my letter toward the end of his OpEd responding to O'Hare. However, since my full letter didn't make it into print (that I know of), it is below. 
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I’m all for a good “let’s sell off the artwork to save the art museum” argument as the next guy. Unfortunately they are never good arguments. Michael O’Hare’s editorial from Jan. 12 is no exception.

His old essay supporting deaccession, repackaged for your paper, infuses recent deaccession news at the Berkshire Museum and admission increases at the Metropolitan Museum to support an argument that art museum attendance would improve if art museums were free. (The Met, I should note, had record attendance years in 2015, 2016 and 2017, when admission was still "suggested.")

Attendance doesn’t exist in the vacuum of admission costs, of course. His argument ignores the numerous plausible causes that have disenfranchised an arts audience over the last 50 years: Cuts in art criticism in collapsing pulp media outlets;  Arts curricula cut or eliminated from K-12 education; Cuts to the NEA; President Obama's disparaging joke about art history majors.

Clearly O'Hare has glommed onto the outrage of The Met's aim to charge out-of-towners $25 to visit the museum, which holds millenia of masterworks that only exist in one location. That does seem like a steep price. Never mind people pay $18 to watch predictable 2-hour long super-hero movies in New York (which are available in theaters everywhere, and on-demand next month).

So, let’s drill down into O’Hare’s bar-napkin economics argument on how to raid museum basements to increase their attendance, why it doesn't work, and to where he contradicts his own argument.

O’Hare’s revisited premise of selling 1% of the value of a museum’s collection currently leans on a thought experiment that The Met sell off 9 works to endow free admission forever: 9 works by the likes of Picasso, Gauguin, and Rembrandt. The free admission will increase attendance, he claims, citing how attendance rates soared in the UK when they made their museums free. UK museums are supported by the government, not by fire sales from the collection. Conversely, two Baltimore Museums (which are not government funded, nor purging artworks) experienced a drop in attendance after they eliminated admission fees. Baltimore is not mentioned in O’Hare’s editorial.

The 1% figure is pulled from the $35 billion assessed value of the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). 1% = $350 million. O'Hare suggests selling all the bottom 1% of the collection, "which no one ever sees," to nearby institutions that would want them: Museums, O’Hare presumes, that would be eager to have them! Museums, that we can assume, like Baltimore, are also experiencing attendance issues (and, let’s speculate larger attendance issues, since they lack Chicago’s density and tourism appeal).

What treasures lurk in the bottom-valued 1% of the AIC collection? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe purchase prizes from area exhibitions in the 1930s and 40s? Some Roman coins with eroded reliefs? A calotype left in the sun too long? It's not to say any of those are booby prizes. But their greater value likely resides in how they support the collection as objects of curatorial and conservation research, or how they reflect the history of Chicago and the Art Institute more specifically. Exhibited anywhere else: those works might seem out of place.

Alas, this 1% recipe, O’Hare admits, might not work everywhere. It might not work for San Francisco museums, he suggests. San Francisco: a relatively big city, in an area of dense population, where tourists tend to go. If it won’t work for San Francisco, then it certainly won’t work for scores of museums in smaller markets like Oklahoma City, Milwaukee, Omaha, Davenport, or Toledo.

What could work for The Met, or the AIC, won't work many other places. And since The Met isn't having an attendance issue, it's an unnecessary argument to begin with. O’Hare’s bar-napkin economics exercise must have been after a few too many.