Met Museum will start charging mandatory $25 fee

The best things in art, unlike the best things in life, are no longer free. Not if you're from New Jersey.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Pay as You Wish" policy, instituted in 1970, will be severely curtailed as of March 1, the New York museum announced Thursday.

Visitors from New Jersey will have to pay the full $25 admission to see Monet's "The Water Lily Pond," David's "The Death of Socrates" or some of the other 2 million or so works in the museum's permanent collection, unless they're under 12 (free) or have a student ID. Only New York state residents will continue to get the flexible option of paying what they choose.

This means that a commuter from Fort Lee who lives right across the bridge and is liable to visit the Met frequently must pay the full $25. A visitor from Buffalo, nearly seven hours away, can pay as little as $1.

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Admission will remain free for all children under 12, and the pay-what-you-wish policy will remain in place for students up to graduate school in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. Students living outside the tri-state area will be charged $12 and seniors $17. Also starting March 1, the Met will honor one full-price admission for three consecutive days at its flagship location on Fifth Avenue, the Met Breuer on Madison Avenue and the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park.

The change, painful as it might be to some, was necessary to keep the museum's mission intact, spokespeople say. The Met currently has a $10 million deficit; museum officials are striving to balance the museum's budget within two years.

"The pay-as-you-wish admissions policy is simply not sustainable for the Met to maintain its level of excellence and comprehensiveness," says Ken Weine, a museum spokesman.

The Met has an annual $305 million budget, only 10 percent of which comes from the city, with a little more from state, and none from the federal government. The rest comes from endowments, fundraising, membership, retail and admissions. (A $100 membership allows for unlimited visits for a year.) Ticket sales now account for 14 percent of the budget — or $43 million.

"Our audience has grown in eight years from 4.5 to 7 million visitors," Weine says. "This is the second most visited museum after the Louvre."

In 13 years, under the "Pay as You Wish" policy, the number of visitors who have paid the full $25 admission has declined to 17 percent from 63 percent, the museum says. Increased Web savvy may be partly to blame: many more visitors come into the museum already knowing they can choose their own price point.

"The Met is about three things: excellence, comprehensiveness, and accessibility," Weine says. "Any admissions policy one settles on has to balance these three ideals."

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Comparable museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim and others in New York, have always had a full-admission policy, he notes (though these museums don't get any city subsidies). In recent years, the Met has tried to make up the shortfall through retail sales and staff cuts, Weine says, but it hasn't been enough.

The question, for some New Jerseyans, is: why this particular option? Why should somebody in a distant part of New York pay more than a visitor from nearby Bergen County?

"I think it would be wonderful if they created a radius," said Gina Miccinilli, a sculptor and arts educator who lives in Mahwah. "Anybody within an hour and a half, who could come in and come out and make it a day event, could keep the Pay as You Wish." Many New Jersey residents, she added, "visit multiple times a year, if not a couple of times a month."

Bearing in mind that no solution will please everyone, museum officials point out that New Yorkers make up 36 percent of the museum's visitors. New Jerseyans make up 5 percent (11 percent come from China).

What many arts advocates see as ominous is the move away from full accessibility to museums. Art, they say, should be for everyone, for people of all backgrounds and income levels — the sanitation worker as much as the CEO. It should not just be those with the deep pockets to pay for it.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded to educate the American public, that's the bottom line," says Deborah Frizzell, an art history professor at William Paterson University. "This was a way to create democracy, to create an educated public. This is where I stand as an educator. The exclusivity of charging $25 dollars for an adult is prohibitive. "

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com