Are our museums sleep-walking into disaster?

THE museum world has never felt more exciting. Our national institutions continue to attract huge numbers of visitors and are lending both nationally and internationally to an unprecedented degree. They have commissioned buildings at the vanguard of architectural fashion (whether you like them or not) and made good use of tools such as the internet to make their collections available to the widest possible audiences. As a mark of the political support they enjoy, their collections are available to us all for free.

Yet Athena sees trouble ahead, as free access has created a peculiar problem for national museums. After 2008, its perceived benefits, social and political, helped protect blockbuster exhibitions. To accommodate these, national museums are increasingly closing their galleries in opening hours. The National Portrait Gallery particularly offended in this respect earlier this year (Athena, February 28, 2018), but the slide into this habit is widely discernable.

Blockbuster exhibitions, meanwhile, are becoming much riskier undertakings. In the past, they have helped buoy up the visitor figures for host institutions and yielded indirect returns through sponsorship, as well as extra custom at the shop and cafe. However, they are greedy in terms of resources and, to cover the costs of staging them, entry prices have risen inexorably. This year, tickets broke the £20 barrier for the first time, initially for ‘Picasso 1932’ at Tate Modern (£22) and then ‘Monet & Architecture’ at the National Gallery (£20, rising to £22 at the weekend).

That may be no more than the cost of a theatre ticket, but it has possibly contributed to the growing difficulty of securing the requisite audiences (despite ever more overtly populist schedules). This, in turn, increases the likelihood of financial exposure. It has also exacerbated an overall decline in visitor numbers, particularly from British visitors, who constitute the backbone of the exhibition-visiting public.

As a final twist, Heritage Lottery funding for national museums seems set to diminish sensibly (and central Government shows no sign of making good the loss). That probably means an end to grand extensions or building projects in the mould of Tate Modern or the V&A. This is arguably nothing to regret, but it removes one of the mechanisms that has helped modernise and revitalise these institutions. Athena predicts challenging times ahead.