YES, PLEASE!

Met Museum Considers Opening on Mondays

By CAROL VOGEL

Published: September 11, 2012

Every Monday streams of would-be visitors climb the grand stairs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art only to discover that it is closed. Now the museum’s director is proposing to open the doors on Mondays, starting next July, so that the Met would be open every day for the first time in more than 40 years.

“We turn away thousands of people every Monday,” said the director, Thomas P. Campbell. “We’re not really serving our audience.”

The museum started closing on Mondays in 1971 to save money, and the proposal to reopen is partly driven by financial considerations as well. Mr. Campbell said rising tourism had brought so many new potential visitors that the economic balance might have changed. According to NYC & Company, the city’s marketing and tourism organization, tourism to New York City has grown 16.2 percent in the last five years, to nearly 51 million visitors in 2011 from 43.8 million in 2006.

The Met’s attendance has been rising too, to a record-breaking 6.3 million visitors in the fiscal year that ended in June, about 600,000 more than the year before. Met officials say they are calculating how many more staff members would be needed to open on Mondays, and at what cost, and how much revenue the increased traffic would bring in admissions charges (the suggested amount is $25), retail sales and restaurant receipts.

“When you start drilling into it, it seems as though we’ll be ahead,” Mr. Campbell said. He said the proposal was being discussed this week at staff and board meetings, and that a decision was expected in the coming months.

The Met has been experimenting with occasional Monday openings for several years, beginning with members-only previews. In 2003 it started opening on holiday Mondays. And for a few blockbuster exhibitions, including “Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting” and “Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman,” in 2003; “El Greco” in 2003-4 and “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” in 2011, it has offered visitors a chance to pay $50 each to see the shows on Mondays, without waiting in long lines or fighting crowds.

Mr. Campbell said seven-day-a-week access had become a topic of discussion among museum directors at conferences here and abroad, partly for financial reasons and partly out of a sense of democratic mission. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is open every day, as is the Prado in Madrid, which was closed Mondays until last November.

“That got me thinking, if others are doing it, why aren’t we?” Mr. Campbell said.

American national museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington are open every day. So are the major London institutions, including the National Gallery, the Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the Wallace Collection. The Museum of Modern Art has been open on Mondays but closed on Tuesdays, except for the past two summers, when it stayed open every day. (This year it has extended that practice beyond the summer, staying open every day through Sept. 25.)

More Met hours could take visitors away from MoMA at a time when the Met is clearly out to raise its profile in the area of Modern and contemporary art in anticipation of temporarily taking over the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Breuer building when the Whitney moves to its new home in the meatpacking district in 2015. Mr. Campbell said competition was not a factor in the consideration of Monday openings.

“It’s a mission issue,” he said. “At the end of the day it’s all about accessibility.”