Do You Think All Entry Fee Is More Of Thick Kidding, Or do you think the Paramount Is Outweighed By The Downside? Support your answer with reasons and relevant examples, such as personal experience or your knowledge of the world.
Do You Think All Entry Fee Is More Of Thick Kidding, Or do you think the Paramount Is Outweighed By The Downside? Support your answer with reasons and relevant examples, such as personal experience or your knowledge of the world.
The debate about whether cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries should be financially sustainable by charging an entrance fee, or whether a more equitable approach is to provide free access, because our cultural heritage belongs to all of humanity, and we need to bear the cost of preserving it together Having weighed the arguments carefully, I think that for most publicly funded cultural institutions the disadvantages of charging entry fees far outweigh any advantages, although private operators probably calculate fairly differently.
The biggest argument for entry fees is financial sustainability of institutions. Museums and art galleries are very expensive to run — the costs on maintenance, acquisition, storage, employee salaries, upkeep of buildings and schools need precise amounts. Entry fees create an identifiable stream of income that responds specifically to these operating needs and diminishes reliance on state funding, which is often ambiguous in its duration and more regularly vulnerable to the forces of electoral politics and austerity-driven approaches to public sector financing. For those institutions with outstanding collections of global importance, an entry fee can also fulfil a visitor management role – limiting numbers during busy periods to protect the collection and experience from the deleterious effects of mass tourism. The British Museum and the Louvre have both tried out a range of admission pricing models partly to manage visitor numbers, an imperative that would only be exacerbated by free admission.
But the case against entry fees is much stronger, and touches on the very core functions of public cultural institutions. In the most significant sense, museums and art galleries are stewards of collective human legacy — collections owned not by their institutional heads but rather by the public whose taxes (for the most part) have paid for their acquisition and care through centuries. To take money from individuals to access what is, in principle, already theirs is an ethical contradiction that distorts the legitimacy of public institutions’ ‘trustee’ relationship with those whom they serve.
The social exclusion costs of entrance tickets are especially severe and hit hardest on the very groups whose access to cultural institutions is both most valuable politically, socially, culturally, and the group which can least effectively go through other means of gaining admission (e.g. ensuring underfunding higher education provision). Academic analyses of cultural participation trends show with overwhelming consistency that entry charges have the most dramatic effect on reducing visits from lower income households, children, young people and minority ethnic communities; audiences least likely to attend formal heritage organisations and those where access will have the greatest impact in terms of social mobility, cultural capital development and educational engagement. London’s Tate Modern and National Gallery — which both keep access via their permanent collections free of charge — have visitor profiles that are much more socioeconomically diverse than the equivalent fee-charging institution, showing how, even where large numbers of people can afford to buy themselves in, free entry actually alters who benefits from a cultural institution rather than simply pumping up the decimals on the affluent ticket-buyers.
Entry barriers really undermine the educational mission of a museum or gallery. Even nominal admission prices deter informal education vehicles of great aggregate significance — school visits, family trips, spontaneous visits by individuals inspired solely by passing curiosity — and in so doing cumulatively constrain the ability of cultural institutions to fulfil their educational missions for entire communities. It is argued that the success of free entry at the Victoria and Albert Museum has changed its audience profile and allowed it to deepen its educational role in the community in ways which could never have been achieved with a charging system.
Alternative funding models — public sector grants, corporate sponsorships, donations as well as temporary exhibition and commercial activity revenues or membership schemes that grant extra services to donors willing to pay for them can serve together to keep institutions afloat without placing access barriers in front of their general audience. Many successful institutions have shown these methods to be financially sustainable, and such approaches offer more ethical consistency between parental funding mechanisms and the values of institutions.
In the end, whilst entry fees do provide advantages to cultural institutions with actual money, these are eclipsed by the social barrier that they constitute; their excluding effects on education; and their inherent ethical conflict. Gallup data shows that public museums and galleries, which serve the true spectrum of their communities – not mostly those who can pay a ticket price (which they often cannot) — offer so much richer cultural, educational, and social returns to society that public support must strive to cover the costs to provide free access.