Naughty Visitors
Navigating admissions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
August 2, 2024. Usually my partner and I enter the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the ground floor entrance: the lines are short or nonexistent.
Meaning the lines to “buy” tickets, which in our case is inaccurate since we’re both professionals, both members of the International Council of Museums, and almost everywhere we get a courtesy.
Which, last August 2, was no courtesy at all. On the ground floor there are two lines leading to the ticket counter, separated by stanchions. One is for members and the other for paying visitors. Members are admitted free, so naturally we take the members’ line. Or the other line, whichever’s shorter, the lines are always so short at the ground floor entrance that it doesn’t matter; so short, in fact, that whatever line you choose, you’re likely to be motioned over by whichever cashier’s not busy at the time.
Not this time. This time, a supervisor stood behind the cashier’s desk, a young Black woman, arms crossed, eyes averted, mouth set. The cashier bore a passing resemblance to Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies:
And attitude to match. “You’re not members, you need to get in the other line.” There were three people in the other line, a single group. “But we always get in the member’s line,” I said. “We’ll, you’re not members, so you have to get into the paying line.” It wasn’t worth arguing over something so seemingly petty, it would waste more time than going to the other line.
By the time we’d circled around the stanchions and got into the paying line we were the only visitors in either category. Dolores motioned us over. Processed our admissions, and then:
“If you were members you wouldn’t have to stand in line…” A statement so idiotic on the surface it took a while for its meaning to sink in. What was meant was, “Become members and next time I won’t send you back to another line.”
You get so used to ageist prejudice you hardly even notice any more. Because we’re both well past retirement, Dolores must have figured standing in line would be painful for us. Ordering us back to stand in line wasn’t about following the rules, it was about making sure we understood the punishment for not becoming members, now and in the future.
Ten years ago a former supervisor named Gerald Lee Jones came clean about the fact that supervisors at the Met consistently encourage cashiers to pressure visitors into paying more, or buying a membership. This has been going on forever.1 It goes on still.2
Neil Harris, by far our most sophisticated analyst of American museums, wrote:
“The museum experience may well be […] a continually revised set of transactions between exhibitor and visitor, with constant renegotiations of meaning and value.”3
Meaning it’s not about the money, it’s about the coercive manipulations associated with the money. And this coercion will always be dependent on social determinations of power: who’s Black, who’s old, who’s weak, who’s powerless and therefore available for exploitation. So long as the admission system at the Met relies on these unspoken assumptions (unspoken but omnipresent in society), it will continue to discriminate: against workers, against Blacks, against the elderly. What you do unto me you do unto all. Sooner or later, in rotation.
WOID XXIV-13
August 16, 2024
Paul Werner, Jump Jim Corot. Cash, class and Culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Vienna: The Orange Press, 2014, p. 7. https://www.academia.edu/122849671/Werner_Jump_Jim_Corot_Cash_class_and_Culture_at_the_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art
Neil Harris, “Polling for Opinions,” Museum News (September-October 1990): p. 53.