Museums Want Accessibility? Try Free Admission

Endless lockouts and high entry fees make their woke lingo seem fake.

T he Cold War gave us Dr. Strangelove. COVID? Dr. Sleaze Quack is our peculiar beleaguerment. Fauci is the poster geezer for power abuse. “I can’t think of what else they can do,” he said of endless shutdowns; killing theater, opera, and dance; closing museums; masking two-year-olds; and barring families from deathbeds and funerals.

Of course, he can’t. He’s a Swamp creature, and the Swamp loves lockdowns.

The octogenarian who hasn’t treated a patient in 50 years is the highest-paid federal worker, making $417,608 in 2019, according to Forbes. At 5-foot-6, the Napoleon of Germs didn’t get to the top by standing on a box. He got there by climbing the greasy D.C. pole. Impressive, even with those elevator shoes.

It was clear in March 2020 that the Chinese coronavirus is lethal only to the very old, very sick, and the obese. Its victims’ average age is 80. Epidemics are as old as humanity. Still, in a unique form of child abuse, we threw 50 million kids out of school, mostly poor, working-class, and special-needs children for whom virtual learning is, practically speaking, no learning.

How about those kids, or the rise in child abuse or drug abuse or the 100,000 businesses whacked? “I don’t care,” purred neurotics, the childless, and work-from-home laptop lazies. “Tough luck” clucked the rich, unionized, and tenured, and what about those legions educated beyond their intelligence? Wouldn’t you think we’d hear “Hey, wait a minute” or “What’s the cost?” You know, some skepticism? Especially from young people? They bought the flimflam, which doesn’t say much good about the future.

Fauci is riding off into the sunset. Do they make elevator saddles? Hot on his tail are reporters who’ve finally gotten around to asking him about all that federal money that Dr. Sleaze Quack poured into the lab in Wuhan that cooked COVID in the first place. Good riddance.

I’ve written a lot about museum directors, senior staff, and trustees who used COVID to flip the public their own good-riddance bird, triply masked, of course. They kept their doors closed as long as they could, livin’ la vida lazy. There’s no documented case of the Chinese coronavirus transmission in a museum setting. The air in museums is constantly purified. Guards are trained to keep people apart.

The game’s over, alas, and, grudgingly, the high-salaried, direct-deposit class of museum elites is heading back to the office. It’s impossible for a museum curator, librarian, director, conservator, art handler, PR person, educator, or fundraiser to be productive for a year with no access to the collection or files, no exhibitions, and no public. That trustees countenanced this is the biggest museum scandal of my lifetime. They’re stewarding charitable dollars that mustn’t be spent to pay people who aren’t working.

What’s waiting for them, aside from a restive, surly staff? It’s called IDEA. I hate the acronym but let’s use it since it’s part of museum jargon. That’s Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility. Almost every museum making a new strategic plan is making IDEA its centerpiece.

I was a museum director for ten years and understand what IDEA means as a practical, substantial matter. It’s not complicated. Over the past year, though, these four issues have caused endless turmoil among museum staffs. In part, it’s because everything’s racialized. The National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the MFA in Boston, SFMoMA, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim seemed like the biggest battlefields, but lots of smaller museums are consumed by turmoil. Much of it is about pay, hiring, and promotions. IDEA’s about power, too.

This week, I’ll write about accessibility, which should be an easy issue to tackle and where great progress is possible. It can mean two things. It could mean targeting the lowest common denominator, say, the fourth-grade reader, and aiming to him or her with dumb shows and dumber interpretation. Some museums do this.

Or it can mean attendance or, better still, a welcoming atmosphere to people who like art and heritage. I’ll state what should be obvious but to most museum people isn’t — we mortals can’t access a museum that’s closed. Directors and senior staff milked COVID long and hard, keeping their doors shut while Zooming away, with direct-deposit paychecks guaranteed, no commutes to work, and while dressing down meant dressing from the waist up. The public? Who are they? I think they showed what they really think about access. “I don’t care,” in chorus, would be the answer.

In the museum-staff turmoil over the past year, I heard very little about the public, or about art. All the shouting, name-calling, and letter-writing concerned things of no interest to the public, things like who gets promoted and who needs endless mentoring. “You don’t listen to me” is a lament without end. It really means “you don’t do what I want,” which is entirely different and probably smart decision-making.

If museums took accessibility seriously, they would have opened the minute they could, as Texas museums did a year ago. Kudos, too, to MoMa, which opened in October with a full seven-day-a-week schedule. The Met is now open five days a week, but that took some time, with the Met president sniffily telling the public that, with tourism dead, it costs the museum more to open than to stay shut. The Met’s Watson Library, New York’s best art library, is still closed even though it’s been clear for months that COVID doesn’t cling like ink to paper. Science, anyone?

In the COVID regime, every state, county, and city had its own version of Fauci hogging power and publicity. Under these polyglot rules, museums showed very little will to push back and seemed happy to stay closed or, to use a better word, inaccessible. In North Carolina, the museums in Asheville and at Wake Forest University lobbied the governor to let them open and succeeded.

The Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums, the profession’s two big lobbying groups, seemed to find staying shut to their collective liking. Many Ivy League museums stayed closed as long as they possibly could, and some, like the Fogg at Harvard, the Hood at Dartmouth, and the Princeton museum are still shut. Yale, where I went to school, kept its museum doors shut for nearly 70 weeks.

It’s easy to blame the president or the provost of a school, but it was up to the directors to educate their masters. The directors seem happy to stay shut. The Yale Center for British Art conveniently won’t open until after graduation. Even now, the Ivy League and other chi-chi college museums are opening two or three days a week. I suspect they’ll try to make this truncated schedule permanent.

For those museums closed for a year, I’ve got news. Your visitors have found other things to do. The saddest thing, in my opinion, is the disappearance of children from museums. It takes years to develop a good partnership between museums and public schools. These have, alas, evaporated.

If museum directors and trustees get religion on accessibility, they can do a few things. Once museum directors, trustees, and senior staff look up “accessibility” in a dictionary, and throw away the Keep Out signs, they’ll make admission free. Museum admission charges, unless we’re dealing with tourism-saturated cities like New York, don’t make a huge amount of money. They exist, in the world of professional fundraisers, to drive membership, which is the first rung on the donor ladder.

By making admission free, museums have their best accessibility pitch. “It’s free, it’s open, it’s for you” works wonders, except, of course, in snooty New York City and its snootier suburbs. There, if it doesn’t cost a pretty penny, it can’t be any good. Ignore these types. “Free” gets noticed.

Getting a robust attendance is part of the director’s job, so “accessibility” doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. The director is the public face of the museum but also green-lights exhibitions and the museum’s advertising and marketing program. A good director is a teacher, too and, at least in my generation, a good curator and a salesman. Putting out a Welcome sign and meaning it is the director’s priority. This is hardly new and a traditional part of the director’s charge. I think part of the problem is the proliferation of assistant directors who absorb enough of the director’s job description that we’re left with a muddle.

“Accessibility” can easily sink into a pander swamp, and visitors know this when it happens. I never targeted an exhibition to an African-American or Latino or gay audience. I’d feel embarrassed and manipulative. A balanced exhibition program naturally attracts people and keeps them coming. This also is the director’s job and can’t be off-loaded. It comes from a vision based on curiosity and expansiveness.

Some people see “accessibility” as meaning “easy to understand.” An exhibition or permanent collection arrangement shouldn’t be pitched to the lowest common denominator. Everyone from a high-school student to a professor needs to get the same pitch, and it needs to be meaningful to everyone, not necessarily in the same way but based on a core scrutability. All of this said, a museum is a museum. It’s an educational institution. If a museum sells itself as venue for entertainment, its staff needs to go to work for Disneyland.

My message to trustees is simple. Look at how long your director kept the museum doors locked, what the local laws were, and how hard your director pushed to reopen. Then you’ll know how seriously “accessibility” is taken at your institution.