As I sat on a bench along from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, smoking my last cigarette, I assessed my situation; twenty pounds left in my overdraft and still half a month till payday. The £9.00 admission fee (to the Picasso and Lee Miller exhibition) may as well have been £115,000,000 (the price a Picasso painting recently sold for).
£9.00 is over an hours work and on a zero hours contract the guarantee of that work was less certain.
As the smoke curled up around my face, singeing my eyebrows, I recalled a recent article I’d read. Jonathan Jones had suggested that all museums and galleries should start charging for entry. I felt it displayed a curious lack of understanding for the positions of others and the narrow way in which health is measured. Not to mention the disastrous effect this would have on people who are passionate about the arts but already at a financial disadvantage, which is every artist I know.
As arts and museums everywhere across the (un)United Kingdom feel the pinch of the cut’s they have to find a way of making up the shortfall… Art however has always challenged the boundaries and principles of the mainstream discourse, why did Jonathan feel the need to capitulate to the myth of austerity: art or healthcare? Rather than arguing in the defense of the public’s ownership of art — itself threatened by the insane prices drummed up by organisations such as Sotherby’s and other up market auction houses — Jones suggests that we accept that art is an elitist pursuit, one which should be viewed only by those financially endowed to appreciate it (much like our health services are becoming). What Jones should have suggested is that art like healthcare has value beyond the merely economic.
Why is the argument always framed in such a way the worst effects pointing down the social pyramid and never up?
By charging such admission prices at museums and galleries, they might as well deny entry to people like myself, let alone people in situations worse than mine. It would result in a further tightening of cultural access to institutions transforming them into the leisure grounds of the upper middle and neo aristocratic classes. His proposition that galleries are sites of privileged discourse is sadly correct but we should be challenging this rather than suggesting that all galleries and museums should charge entry, which would result in cultural infirmity for our shared artistic future.
We need more accessibility not less.
We need a more open door society not less.
We need more art.
With the last draw on my cigarette I decided that ‘man cannot live on bread alone’ and in the absence of god, art was probably as better alternative as any. I paid the entry fee. I didn’t eat that day, save for a stale bread roll I’d ‘stolen’ from a bin at work, but at least I felt a little satisfaction, same reason I smoke I suppose.
