A Talk With Jim Cuno

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Jim Cuno before the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago

Jim Cuno before the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago

When I was in Chicago last week for the opening of Renzo Piano’s new addition to the Art Institute I sat down with the Institute’s Director James Cuno to talk about a number of things, but in particular the controversy that broke out in April when Chicago Alderman Ed Burke, chairman of the city council finance committee, challenged the museum’s decision to raise admission charges from $12 for an adult to $18, with lower rates for students and senior citizens. (At the same time the museum decided to do away with separate charges for temporary exhibitions.) The situation was defused this month when the museum agreed to give Chicago residents a two dollar discount.

As always I’ll divide this conversation over a couple of days. Today we’ll talk about the museum’s budget and the new fee structure it recently arrived at. In Part II we’ll discuss about other possibilities.

LACAYO: Okay, let’s talk about what it costs people to enter your museum.

CUNO: The allocation we get from the city is about $6.5 million a year, in exchange for which we’re meant to benefit Chicagoans. When I came here six years ago we were open free every Tuesday. But during the day most Chicagoans are at work or school. It was mostly tourists who were coming in for free. So we moved the free time from all day Tuesday to Thursday evenings after work and in the summers Friday evenings as well, plus all of the month of February.

What we’ve seen is an increase of 26% in the number of people who come during our free hours. Last year 305,000 came. In February alone there were 150,000, whereas in years when we charged during February there were only about 65,000. And where we were always free for children under 12, we’ve now raised that threshold to children under 14. We’re also free to Illinois educators, to Chicago police and firemen, to U.S. active duty personnel. And people who have Chicago public library cards can get free admission “passports” at the libraries.

We know that about 48% of our visitors don’t pay at the door, either because they get in free in any of the ways I’ve described or because they’re members and don’t need a ticket.

LACAYO: A one-year adult membership at the Institute costs $80. How many people can you bring in with you as a member?

CUNO: An adult guest plus all children in your household under age 18.

LACAYO: So describe for me the fee structure you ended up with now.

CUNO: We went from $12 to $18 for adults but at the same time eliminated the separate $8 admission charges for special exhibitions. But as a result of our conversations with Alderman Burke, we also subsequently re-instituted what we call the Chicago discount. City residents will pay two dollars less for admission – $16. [Lacayo: The fee for students and senior citizens went from $7 to $12, also with a $2 discount for locals.] We also doubled the number of library “passports”, so there are now ten passes in each branch library instead of five, which puts 820 passes in circulation. You can bring four people on a pass, so that means 3280 Chicagoans can come for free any day of the week. We also extended free admission to disabled veterans.

Our goal is to increase access to the collection; that’s the business we’re in. We’re not in the business of making money. So you have a calculus that you’re always trying to get right, and it includes free access, discounted access and then the revenue that you need to support all that. Our revenue comes partly from the city, about $6.5 million of our $100 million budget. Then there’s earnings from endowments. Our endowment went down 23.7% last year. Then admissions, which is about 18% of our budget. Then you’ve got revenues from sales in the shop and you’ve got fund raising.

It costs us about $15 million to be free 401 hours per year, and as I said we get about $6.5 million from the city. So in order to be open all those hours we need to make up the difference. And that’s the calculus of that $16 or $18 admission price, which we hope is the right one.

LACAYO: What’s your annual attendance?

CUNO: About 1.4 million over the last seven years or so.

LACAYO: And what’s your typical attendance for a special exhibition?

CUNO: That’s been declining. For special exhibitions when there was still a separate admission charge we’ve gone from about 600,000 for Van Gogh and Gauguin in 2001 to about 400,000 for Degas and Beyond Impressionism to around 300,000 with Manet and the Sea in 2003 and 250,000 with Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre in 2005. And the Edvard Munch show that just closed did 110,000. Based on conversations I’ve had with other museum people it’s a phenomenon that seems to be taking place all around the country. It’s less true in New York and Washington, cities that have so many tourists.