Museums Should Be Free

Not everyone wishes to visit museums, which are essentially a form of entertainment for the middle classes and tourists. The majority of adults never visit a museum, preferring instead leisure pursuits such as football, the cinema or clubbing. Why should they have to pay for their chosen entertainment while subsidising the generally wealthier middle class through their taxes? Tourists pay no taxes here and so gain a free ride at the expense of domestic taxpayers. The state provides educational opportunities for all through free schooling, which often includes free museum trips. If free museum entry were considered a cultural right, shouldn’t the state make theatre tickets free as well?

Such potential economic benefits are dubious and rely upon access to collections that are excellent in their content and in the way in which they are conserved and displayed. If museums are to be funded entirely out of public money, the pressure on any government’s budget from the demands of hospitals, schools, pensions, etc. will inevitably mean that museums will come a poor second, resulting in under-funding and poorer museums at the end of the process. This will not help our creative industries or tourism. It is excellence rather than the cost of visiting attractions which attracts tourists in any case.

If museums are entirely funded by the state, they will have little incentive to increase visitor numbers and to make their collections exciting and accessible for all. The need to attract paying customers concentrates the minds of museum and gallery directors upon the needs of the public and produces imaginative and popular exhibitions, as well as adding value through guided tours, lectures and tie-ins with television programmes. All of this ensures that more people, not less visit museums. In addition, if museums were made entirely reliant upon public funding, it is likely that money would be channelled to those institutions the government felt were most important, forcing smaller, local or more specialist museums to close. Nazi Germany also points to the dangers of allowing politicians control over interpretations of national identity and presentations of other cultures.

Today television plays a much greater role in transmitting our cultural heritage and a sense of national identity. Usually free to the viewer, it reaches into almost every home, both rich and poor. Most countries recognise television’s power by giving broadcasters a duty to include cultural and educational programming. It is a far more effective way of reaching a mass public than expensively subsidising every museum on the off-chance that people will enthusiastically flock to them. Often, inspirational television programmes will increase the popularity of relevant museum exhibits – for example, Britain’s Natural History museum saw greatly increased attendances after the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs series.

Clearly this is a question of balance, as the government cannot afford to fund every activity of possible value, especially given the social and economic costs of increased taxation. It is reasonable for governments to focus their attention upon schools and higher education in an attempt to provide more equality of opportunity. In any case, there are alternatives to state funding in the private sector – today many companies or private patrons sponsor museum exhibitions, acquisitions and new building work. This philanthropy is linked to a desire to make a difference, so it is unlikely to be strong when the government is seen as the source of all funding – it is most advanced in the USA for example, where government funding is very limited compared to other developed countries.

Entry figures did increase when the UK scrapped admissions charges at some museums, but studies have found that this was not because more people actually visited the museums. Instead similar numbers of people as before chose to make more individual visits to the same museums, pushing up admissions numbers. In this way subsidising free admissions acts as a giveaway of public money to the privileged middle classes, who would in any case pay to attend the same institutions.