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Art Museums Are Increasingly Trialing Amenities to Engage Broader Audiences

Museums these days seem to do everything for people except give them a bed for the night: they offer food, shopping, concerts, dance performances, lectures and films. Some organize travel opportunities, set up times for singles to meet and offer after-school classes and summer camps for children. Others host classes for adults, guided tours for caregivers and moms with toddlers or fitness programs. There are museums that hold yoga classes in the galleries before they officially open in the morning and dance classes after the museum closes its doors for the night. During the Olympics, the Louvre Museum in Paris hosted exercise classes in its galleries. And I was wrong about the bed, as some museums—less typically art museums, but it happens—offer “sleepovers” for young and old.

Some of these ‘extras,’ such as classes, concerts and films, are part of each institution’s programming and related to the art on view, while others are “amenities.” They exist to make the experience of visiting a museum more pleasant, giving people reasons to come more often and stay longer.

“Overall, museums that can maintain a pleasant hum of busyness—busy, but not too busy that it feels crowded—tend to do better than those that feel like they have little going on or are so busy no one feels great about the experience,” said Susie Wilkening, a Seattle, Washington-based museum consultant. Doing better means having more visitors and more members, as well as generating more revenue for the institution. Having several different things going on increases the chance that visitors will find something they like, which is apt to deepen their involvement with the museum. She noted that younger people (40 and under) and those who rarely go to museums of any age are more attracted to institutions that offer yoga and musical performances or interesting things to buy in the museum shop, while older people (60 and up, i.e., the more traditional museum visitor) may find some or all these amenities distracting.

In some instances, amenities have become drivers for institutions, which one sees in museum expansions that include new or enlarged spaces for museum shops and event rentals for weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate functions and other gatherings. Larger museums have been upscaling their food offerings to compete with other cultural institutions that are doing the same, creating a culinary arms race. At many museums, there are separate, admission-free entrances for the café or restaurant, which can become a destination all its own, separate from whatever is on display in the galleries. Museum restaurants are regularly written up in Michelin and Zagat guides; reviewed in magazines such as Bon Appetit, Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure; and marketed as distinct by the museums themselves: “The Modern holds four James Beard Foundation Awards, three stars from The New York Times and two Michelin stars,” according to the Museum of Modern Art’s website. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art refers to its restaurant as “Michelin-starred,” and if you don’t want to take the word of Michelin or the museum, a 2016 review in The New York Times called it “the most original new restaurant in the country.” Visitors’ write-ups of Russ & Daughters Café at New York’s Jewish Museum often are laudatory in the extreme. “The cafe is the place to go. My dad and I went on a Friday at about 9:00 a.m., and it was packed,” one satisfied customer wrote this past June on Yelp.

Nine in the morning is two hours before the Jewish Museum officially opens to the public, but that is the viewing public, not the eating public. Similarly, yoga classes at various institutions tend to take place before museums open to the public, with yogis bringing their mats into the galleries as early as 8:00 a.m.

“In the past, museums were more academic—places to go see things,” said Adrienne Horn, president of the San Francisco-based Museum Management Consultants. “Increasingly, they are becoming community gathering centers, where there are a lot of things to do.” The changing role of art museums is about making institutions a more regular part of people’s lives, “creating more value in the community” and, consequently, generating more revenue.

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Increasing the number and range of amenities might seem to be part of the evolving art museum business model, but the reality is more complex. No one department is in charge of amenities; it might be the education department offering classes and the membership department staging special events while operations oversee food services. There is no coordination between them, and a popular money-losing amenity may be kept on as a loss leader. “Several museums have storytimes for toddlers,” said Terrie Nolinske, a museum consultant in Tampa, Florida. “They’ll take place once or twice a week, and moms flock to them.” The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, for example, hosts a regular ‘PEM Pals’ event for the 5-and-under crowd, with stories, music and a hands-on activity. Amenities for little kids rarely pay for themselves, but they train parents to think of museums as family friendly, and so museum administrators are willing to take the hit.

Event spaces, on the other hand, tend to be cash cows for museums—while the restaurants only sometimes pay for themselves, according to Anne Butterfield, a museum consultant in Harvard, Massachusetts. “Most don’t make much of anything.” To be profitable, they need to be high volume, and not every institution gets a steady flow of hungry visitors. In fact, it’s not unusual for museums to lose money on food services when a restaurant or cafe is run in-house; they are more likely to see a profit if they contract it out to a third-party vendor. But even when a museum café loses money, the institution will likely maintain it “because it keeps visitors there longer and makes visiting more of a complete experience,” Wilkening said.

Summer camps for children are often profitable for museums, but not so much the afterschool programs because there is much lower attendance (kids may have other activities planned, and getting children from school to a museum can be difficult). Yoga classes are another amenity that people like, but they also tend to be a money-loser. “There are the overhead costs of hiring a yoga instructor, turning on the lights, bringing in security and other staff at a time before the museum otherwise is open to the public,” Wilkening said.

“The public has come to expect any decent museum will have a first-rate gift shop and café, as well as increasingly expect there to be special events,” said John H. Falk, founder and chief executive officer of the Institute for Learning Innovation in Beaverton, Oregon. This expectation has resulted in museums needing to invest increasingly not only in space and resources but also in actual talent so that these spaces and experiences remain competitive, particularly in crowded metro marketplaces like New York City, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. “For most museums, all of these ‘amenities’ end up being loss leaders,” he added. “The very largest have become quite sophisticated at this, but small to moderate-sized institutions trying to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ often find the return on investment is not what they expected.”

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