Quite Free

I want to praise the Philadelphia Museum of Art (my employer, in case you have forgotten) for providing a day last week free of charge. The museum waived the cost of general admission last Saturday in honor of the museum's late director Anne d'Harnoncourt. I love these kinds of days because they make museum collections accessible to large portions of the population who may not normally be able to afford a trip to a high-quality art museum. Days with free general admission help a museum to accomplish one of its most important goals: educating the public about its collection.

But nothing can be that simple.

Without fail, free admission days mean that museum staff will spend much of their time asking visitors not to eat or drink in the galleries, to turn off their camera flashes, and not to touch the art work. Children will run and scream. Parents will yell. Everyone will talk too loudly. Generally speaking, the people who come to museums on days with free admission spend very, very little time inside museums. The visitors lack knowledge about museum conduct.

Let me be quite clear: I do not fault these people for being unaware of proper museum protocol. Many people just do not know how to behave in museums. The reasons for this are complex and not easy to pin down. Many children attend a museum of some kind while in their elementary years, and should, in theory, learn how to act at museums on these trips. However, these trips are probably too infrequent and brief to make much of an impression. I would also argue that the dynamic of school trips is different than on a regular trip to the museum. The students often eat in a separate location and are provided with stimulating activities. This kind of stimulation is likely to occur on a weekend visit with their parents or older siblings.

Part of the problem may also be that museums tend to be minimalists when it comes to signage. They fail in many cases to make people aware of the rules upon entering the museum. In my mind, listing the rules on the back of the museum map in small print simply doesn't cut it.

I'm quite sure that I'm missing a host of other reasons for people's bad behavior, but I want to make some observations about potential fixes for this issue. The first is obvious: make museum attendance a more common theme in every child's formative years. Make sure that these trips extend beyond the elementary years and well into middle school and high school. I am not talking about more trips for kids whose parents are likely to take them to art museums anyway. I'm talking about the kids whose parents have probably never been to a museum since their own school years.

Museums should also not feel shy about posting the rules in a more obvious way on days when the building will be flooded with visitors coming more for free entertainment than for the museum itself. A couple of well-placed signs will certainly intrude less upon a person's experience at the museum than screaming children and irritable security guards. (For some great journalism about the importance and necessity of good signage, read this series of articles by Slate's Julia Turner.)

In the end, museum etiquette is no different than etiquette at the symphony, the opera, or a church service. The way people behave in any public situation comes down to knowledge. If people are not aware that a code of conduct exists, how can we expect them to follow it?

In the name of spreading the word, here are a couple of good references for proper museum behavior.

http://www.artagogo.com/reviews/learn1/learn5.htm

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/397360/museum_etiquette_how_to_behave_when.html?cat=2