A new report on spending at art museums says most such institutions spend a median of $82 per visitor, expansions don’t always lead to deeper public engagement, and free admission can lower costs per visitor due to greater attendance.
Those insights come from the latest report recently published by Remuseum, an organization and initiative from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Remuseum was established and funded by entrepreneur and Top 200 collector David Booth in 2023, with additional support from the Ford Foundation.
Stephen Reily, Remuseum’s founding director and former director of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, told ARTnews that one of the biggest challenges to compiling the report was a lack of available data. “It’s a time where museums need more support than ever to be able to fulfill their missions as vital cultural institutions, and in that context, the you know, the lack of publicly available data doesn’t really help,” Reily told ARTnews.
“The idea is that more publicly available data has the capacity to expand public trust in museums, align more with what Next Gen philanthropists want to see, but also will help each individual museum figure out how to be the best possible version of itself, how to maximize its own mission, how to maximize the quantity and quality of visits and the number of the people in the public it serves,” Reily said.
Through a large collection of data from 153 American art museums, the key question the Remuseum report aimed to help answer for museum leaders and boards is “How do you best invest dollars to maximize the quantity and quality of people’s visits?”
One of the report’s biggest insights, which contradicted a common industry assumption, was that a museum’s physical expansion would help serve its mission of serving the public. “What we found, somewhat to our surprise, is that there are, in fact, not economies of scale in these institutions,” Reily said. “For most museums, the bigger they get, they appear to get actually less efficient at serving their public mission. They spend more dollars on each visitor, the bigger they get.”
Aside from museums in bigger cities which benefit from a large number of tourists, most institutions get greater returns from investing in education and community programmin, according to Remuseum’s data.
The report also showed how offering free admission for individuals and families can actually lower the cost per visitor, contrary to the industry assumption that charging or increasing the price of admission an help fill a critical budget gap.
Notably, Remuseum checked if museums which charged for admission had any different practices than institutions which were free to the public, such as more exhibits, more spending on programming, or more funds for marketing. “We could not find that distinction,” Reily said.
Based on publicly reported information by museums, Remuseum’s data showed that art museums spend “a very, very low amount” on marketing—whether their admission is free or paid—at a level comparable to the US mining industry, which Reily noted does not need to invest in public visitation.
Reily said he would like to see more museums trying sustained initiatives focused on public benefits from delivering free admission, as well as “radical experiments” with modes of hybrid admission practices. He cited one museum with a traditional admission fee but an annual membership that is $10 or $20 greater than the admission price.
“As a result, they have generated hundreds of thousands of memberships, and that creates a relationship that they can sustain over time,” he said, also noting the variety of admission policies, such as free admission for local residents, people under 25, or on certain nights. “We just need to understand which of those works better, so that each museum can find its own answer to generate the audience and its support they deserve.”
Lastly, the Remuseum report highlighted how art museums in a small or medium-sized region with 2.25 million or fewer residents had “really clear benefits” to being free to the public, like the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “They attract a much larger percentage of the people from the region than do their peer museums, Reily said, also noting the success of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and the Crystal Bridges Museum in attracting many more visitors. “I think if you can show that you matter to that many people, I believe it may be actually easier to find the support you need to do it at the smaller museums.”
However, Reily said more museums need to share their data and test out more scenarios over longer periods of time.
“There are not enough examples of museums trying sustained initiatives over many years to see what they deliver,” Reily said, recalling anecdotes from people about museums which tried to offer free admission, resulting in a spike in attendance that they can’t sustain. “It would be important to know, were those museums doing things again to make the visit meaningful and relevant to the to the new visitors they attracted?”
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