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Dear Jean- Michel:

Thanks for putting front-and-center what I earlier treated aa a side-show. As you know, I've taken the position that the Metropolitan Museum is, by its own charter, required to offer free admission to ALL; even the web page for the Met, which you reference, does not specifically state that a fee is required. At the same time the Met, again by its charter, has a clear mandate toward the people of New York. As you've indicated yourself, there is a conflict in many a museum's mission, between encouraging tourism on the one side and promoting education on the other and the Met appears to be trying to do both, despite the fact that the two missions work at cross-purposes. That's why I see the latest move, dividing visitors into two camps (those "entitled" to free admission and those not), as a product of conflicts within the Board of Trustees--conflicts between divergent ways of protecting and growing "their" investment. And yes, to the Trustees "education," too, is an economic investment, a fact noted by Henry James over a hundred years ago. The Met, willy-nilly, is encouraging the redistribution of cultural capital downwards, to the underserved urban populations--in effect it's investing in those populations for its own benefit. It's unfortunate, of course, that out-of-town visitors are made to bear the brunt of this redistribution. America, as you know, is on the verge of a civil war. The Cultural Civil War is already well underway, and this two-pronged system of admissions is only going to exacerbate resentment. Am I too fatalistic if I see this resentment as inevitable?

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