| | site-map | e-mail

User:

Guest

Name: Password:

www.center.hu / Company / Press / Free entrance to museums 

Free entrance to museums

In the weekly paper Magyar Narancs, on 24 June 2004


The most memorable moment of the Európa-terv plan initiated by the Prime Minister was when he announced that the public museums would be free. Museums were taken short by the announcement in February 2003. However, the announcement became reality by the promised deadline: the entrance to all public museums became free on 1 May.

The Ministry of Culture had already been working on a comprehensive museum development programme (Alfa programme) before the announcement with the aim to make the old public collections more popular and user-friendly. In the beginning, it seemed that the ministerial portfolio also heard the first time the result of the counsel brainstorming (taking place the previous night) when it was announced at the parliamentary session, so a rather awkward situation occurred: it was not clear whether all the 119 state and municipal or only the 24 state collections would be free. But the Prime Minister´s out of the blue idea actually fit in the museum development programme. According to Erika Koncz Vice-Sate Secretary ´our goal is to tempt more and more people into the world of museums, and experience shows so far that making museums free is a good means to reach this goal. In the past few months attendance has grown by 20-30% at certain institutions and I myself see lines curving in front of many places at weekends´.
Without doubt it feels magnificent to pass by an empty ticket selling stand and just pop in to have a look at some Spanish Renaissance exhibition during lunch break. Still we have to pay the price of no entrance fee. Museums objected to not having any income from the entrance fee, hence the government is now paying a certain amount of compensation to each of them after every visitor. The basis of the compensation is the frequency of visitors in the past five years and the 2002 income from entrance tickets; this is then multiplied with the foreseeable inflation rate, plus the amortization costs deriving from the 20-30% increase in the number of visitors. Erika Koncz claims that for the 24 public collections this amount reaches 350 million HUF. Had all the 119 collections been made free, the total costs would be approximately two billion HUF with the technical development costs included. The Vice-State Secretary believes it is worth mentioning here that the income from the entrance fees for the museums forms only a narrow part of the institutions´ budget, about 3-4% in average. Even in case of the most popular big museums like the Fine Arts Museum can this amount exceed 8-9%.
Considering the heavy burden on the budget the government decided on the smaller circle to support. The public museums, however, are mainly concentrated in or around Budapest. The list was given, still museums such as the Town Museum in Győr or the Castle in Eger (the latter is the most popular museum in Hungary) bear a more significant role in conveying culture to the public than for example the Fire Museum in Budapest, let alone the nature of the message towards the provincial museums according to which collections in Budapest are more important.

They only disturb

There is another reason why the personnel in the museums is not so happy: museums bear a two-fold function. On the one hand they are the conveyors of culture while on the other they function as scientific workshops. These two roles do not always go hand in hand with each other and according to certain resources in some high-profile institutions people consider themselves superior to dilettantes. To our biggest surprise among the asked nobody wanted to talk about this only anonymously, but according to the head of the cultural department of one bigger museum ´it makes no difference to the scientists whether 250 or 300 thousand people visit the museum. For us what counts is silence, we need a relaxed environment where we can absorb in our work, therefore visitors are more inconvenient and disturbing. It depends on the nature of the museum where the scale turns and what the traditions of the museum are. True thought that the strong workshop-like museums will not be happy about the free entrance´. Another person simply stated that ´they will use us for public toilet´.
It is more significant though whether it was a good decision by the government to take up a 350 million HUF burden. Will culture reach more people this way? A similar system only works in Great Britain and the United States though Denmark, Norway and The Netherlands are also considering the option of free entrance to public museums. The Danish government is already experiencing with some museums to see how they work without a fee, but the cultural administration claims it takes at least three years to see the result of an experiment like this. It should not be forgotten either that in the first few years for the sake of novelty people may tend to visit more museums but later the old attendance level may return.
Many people consider the British example a true success story. Tamás Vásárhelyi Vice-Director of the Hungarian Natural Sciences Museum said that the personnel in the Natural History Museum in London reported a 50% increase in the number of visitors, so many private museums have also joined the initiative. We should, however, be careful. Making museums free changes the visitors´ habits, shortens the time spent in the museum, people will become more superficial and surprisingly the sale returns of the museum cafes and shops also decrease. According to researches, the type of people will not be different after all: the same people will go to the museums but more often. ´There is a complicated cultural and social reason behind people not going to museums. Many people are not aware of the existence of certain museums, they do not bear the value of culture or they feel the exhibitions do not fit their standards. They still consider museums an elite place where they should go to learn and be more intelligent. For these people the entrance ticket is only a factor, not even the most important.´

Mass Hysteria

Both domestic and foreign experience indicates that the successful seasonal exhibitions are more appropriate for addressing new groups of people. However, these require time and a lot of attention from the museum´s side, so people will still have to pay for them. Erika Koncz claims that it is a tendency nowadays for international exhibitions like the Monet, the Budapest-Vienna or the Giacometti to attract a massive audience, therefore 400 million HUF in the Alfa Programme is allocated to support the special or unique art exhibitions. The next big exhibition will take place in autumn in the Natural Sciences Museum. According to Egyptologist Zoltán Bartos the Monet exhibition drew attention to the fact among others that the current infrastructure of museums is not adequate for taking so many visitors. ´We cannot expect people to wait 5-6 hours in front of the building. The exhausted visitors sometimes levelled bitter accusations against us. We were also taken by surprise by this great interest: the exhibition was visited by 251 thousand people, and we even had a profit in the end, the first time in the history of the museum as far as I remember. I don´t think it´ll be easy to repeat this achievement. A Tutanhamon exhibition may even be a bigger shot but these collections are almost impossible to grab for Hungarian museums. Head of the archaeological administration Zahi Hawass told the journalists during his trip to Budapest that the collection is worth about 200 million dollars, but the final price may be less. On this level a seasonal exhibition brings profit for tourism also, Hawass says, in Basel a new hotel is being built for the visitors who are expected to arrive to see the Tutanhamon exhibition.

Better than at home

Beside the seasonal exhibition competitions continuous renewal and ensuring a more user-friendly environment are also useful means. The ministry claims that with a friendlier, more attractive infrastructure (shop, café, training centre) it is possible to tempt the visitors to spend more time in the museum. ´Visiting a museum may be an entire-day programme. It is essential to have as many programmes as possible, to include children, to modernise the technology and interactivity. For the latter we are allocating another 150 million HUF together with the Ministry of Informatics and Communications. Big collections, county museums or smaller provincial museums can all apply for the money. They can serve as good examples for all museums and show how to reborn´, as Erika Koncz is listing the advantages of the Alfa Programme. Technological renewal has indeed broken into Hungarian museum life in the past few years. Although the House of Terror has been criticised a lot, it is incontestably spectacular, modern and interactive, which brought new quality for the museum. In this process it was also very important that the museum hardly had any of its own pieces of arts, so the multimedia means formed the skeleton of the exhibition concept from the very beginning. C.Enter Kft. CEO Zoltán Csáki who was responsible for the entire informatics basis of the museum also considers it significant that this museum was the first where the entire archives, film and video materials are digitalised to ensure survival and subsistence. The informatics device in the museum is worth approximately a hundred million HUF with all the projectors, plasma TV-s, sensor and TFT monitors, which are all representatives of cutting-edge technology. ´The House of Terror has everything a modern museum needs to have in terms of multimedia solutions. Only a few minor things that we could still take over are worth mentioning. In the Western world, speakers are often used, which you hear only when you stand at the right place in front of the equipment. Still I wouldn´t think we should come up with further new technology solutions, but rather spread and make the already existing ones even more popular.´ Csáki believes that informatics helps not only in making the exhibitions more enjoyable but it can also be of great help for scientists: in the once Stasi archives for example 16,000 sacks of documents having been rattled off in 1989 are now being put together by a special software. By hand this process would take about 400 years, but with computer it should not take longer than five years. The claptrap equipment in the museum fits the international trends a hundred percent: the famous Holocaust Museum in Washington and the rather new Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg are also like.

Middle-aged intelligent woman in cross-fire

Cutting-edge technology only plays one part in the renewal of museums. Various programmes and the image are at least as important as technology. In this respect the museum in Szentendre is a good example where outstanding image and programmes have been present already for a decade. This museum has never been attacked on the basis of not being realistic enough, presumably due to its nature. In May and June this museum is open for children twice a day, the organised school groups can enjoy more than twenty artisan programmes. Based on the information on the internet, most teachers announce the interests of the group already in advance and arrive with determined ideas. It is most popular among the primary school and kindergarten children from Budapest. Children dress up in boorish clothes for collecting hay, weaving or weeding, and as we got to know from the Head of the Cultural Department Mária Káldy this tradition was introduced already in 1987 taking over the Swedish example. ´We learnt a lot more from the Swedish like the idea of seating a handicraft person in front of every house to present the children the traditional professions. In Sweden people volunteer for this but in Hungary people don´t usually have enough time, so we have to pay a lot for our handicraft people, which limits of course our possibilities. In the United States Williamsburg has turned into a vivid little town with this method sending the visitors back in time.´ The Szentendre museum has another little secret to attract people: thematically organised days at harvest, whit Monday, on apple and honey days when long lines are curving on the Sztaravodai road.

The open-air museum last year had about 200 thousand visitors during the two months when it was open. Therefore abolishing the entrance fee does not change much in their case. ´The programmes are rather costly, we cannot abolish entrance fee on these so called active days, hence the only days would be Tuesday and Wednesday (with only the houses open) when people could come for free but would not be able to enjoy any of the services.´ Elvira Király Head of the Castle Museum in Nagytétény told us museums need to find the way to break into leisure market. ´It cost 350 million HUF to renovate the museum, and we feel it is our duty to return this somehow to the people. The most important question is whether there is a true, coherent authentic image that can characterise each museum and can help form its individual style. In our case the baroque style and ancient furniture form the basis of the image, but we also faced a disadvantage resulting from distance: we had to come up with an idea how to put our castle museum on the tourist map. We have made a marketing plan–in the old times we used to say we had an idea–on the basis of which we brainstormed on programmes fitting the milieu of the castle. We used to have a costume exhibition for 18 months, which demonstrated costumes from historical films while in each room there were couples dancing in similar clothes with music also from the relevant era. In responsible quarters this was considered profanity, stating the clothes from the films are not authentic enough. However visitors enjoyed it a lot. In December the museum´s Christmas programme attracted 11 thousand people with the Christmas tree decoration collection we borrowed from our parent institute, the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest. We placed Christmas trees into each room and had them decorated by applied arts experts. There were various concerts, betlehem children and wine festival.´
The key to the success of the Nagytétény Castle Museum may be their effort they made to complete a market research on the clientele as it is usually done with other market products. From the research it turned out that the clientele is mainly formed by middle-aged intelligent women who have heard about the museum possibilities from a friend. Therefore the programmes mainly fit their interest: fans, music clocks, costumes, charming applied art objects. As Elvira Király stated ´every time I ask myself if I would come to this programme or not. If the answer is yes, then it is worth starting the organisation because the clientele will also like it.´

András Zsuppán

 

22 september, 2004 14:51

Back