You Would Have Lost
Good thing you didn't bet me about the FY2023 attendance numbers at the MFA Boston.
One year ago nearly to the day I offered readers a wager:
My contentions are that the museums are not pivoting quickly enough from the priorities of 2020, that the pandemic response exposed persistent and fundamental weaknesses in the arts organizations more than it created short-term difficulties for them, and aggressive signaling in the institutional presentation spaces tends to cause people to smell a rat whether they agree with the associated message or not. Therefore the threat of a silent backlash as I described it in December remains in effect.
Encouraged by the example of Bryan Caplan and his regard for the power of the bet, I offer one: When the the MFA Boston FY2023 Annual Report comes out (probably in early 2024), it will reveal visitor numbers less than than the 900,000 projection from FY2022. You win if it’s that or higher, in which case I’ll donate $100 to the charity of your choice. I win if it’s lower than that, in which case you’ll donate $100 to the charity of my choice.
Said numbers have finally been published.
We have endured several challenging years due to COVID, but the Museum has emerged on a strong footing with improved results in FY23. Growth in all audience-related activities indicated a renewed interest in visiting the Museum, fostered by an expansion of public programming, events, and lectures, which helped bring attendance to a four-year high. Overall attendance increased 34 percent from 632,000 in FY22 to 849,000, and membership households increased by 27 percent to 51,000. Visitor amenities experienced growth as well, with increased revenue of 25 percent in parking, 14 percent in food service and 12 percent in retail relative to FY22.
I grant that this is handily within 10% of target and I have enormous respect for the people who can do this kind of modeling. It was a close miss, but it was still a miss. I had an angle (of course I had an angle, I wouldn’t have offered the bet otherwise)—I figured that the report had been prepared before news broke that museum attendance had stalled in its trend back toward recovery. Because my readers are intelligent1 nobody took me up on the bet, but if you’d like to donate to the charity of my choice, I recommend Magen Am.
As for the MFA, they are holding to their 900,000 estimation for FY2024. Since that sounds plausible I’m not re-upping the bet. I note, however, that the same figure for FY2014 was 1,132,206. I expect the numbers at the museum to tick up and down year to year, but over the long term continue their horizontal-to-slightly-downward motion as Massachusetts sheds 25,000 residents a year and the MFA prioritizes culture war. This will continue until the next recession, when the numbers take another permanent hit similar to the one they suffered after Covid. Its cowardly director will spend the ineffectual last years of his tenure mewling “Here all belong,” the museum’s new tagline, though it is apparent that all do not and ever fewer people care to even if they might.
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Also comely, erudite, and well dressed.
Haha, great. It's the same story at art museums everywhere. It's less and less about the art and more and more about social messaging. Many institutions feel like activist group that merely have "art" as a front for their political and social aims.
The people most serious about art as such (all of it, not just the flavor of the moment) are evidently not the target audience for the art establishment, which appears far more interested in those with the "correct" sociopolitical views. Members of the latter crowd may be quite ignorant in terms of art history and may not even have an eye, but they are still the ones being catered to. Thus, the system is perverted and inspires little credibility or respect, nor does it deserve the benefit of the doubt.
At least a place like the Boston MFA has plenty of art worth seeing, which will always draw visitors, but there are other museums nowhere near so well stocked and of practically no interest to those of us who insist on quality first and foremost--and who know what that is without reading the wall labels.