Crowd Control, European Style

The Tate Modern has announced many uses for its planned new $397-million Herzog & de Meuron expansion, but the chief raison d'être seems to be the overcrowding of the original facility, built for 1.8 million annual visitors but now thronged by 4 million.

Why hasn't the Uffizi thought of this solution? My daughter Joyce, who rarely sets foot in an art museum at home (where did I go wrong?), just came back from the Grand Tour of the major cultural institutions in Europe---part of her celebratory summer after college graduation, which also included (gulp) skydiving. She complained that by the time she stood on the long lines to enter the art venues, especially in Italy, she was hot, tired and not in the best mood to enjoy what she had waited so long to see. Luckily, her traveling companion knew that they could pay a small surcharge to buy advance tickets to the Uffizi, allowing them to stroll right in. Would all those people be languishing on line, if information about this policy were widely disseminated?

Getting back to the Tate Modern (which Joyce enjoyed and did not find too crowded), I had reported on its possible plans for future expansion, back at the time when its original facility was under construction (Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19, 1999) :

The Tate hopes eventually to retool additional portions of the power plant's space, both beneath and adjoining Herzog & de Meuron's makeover. It would also like to install elevators and a viewing platform in the building's 325-foot-tall chimney, creating a sure-fire tourist attraction. The Tate needs maximum audience appeal if it is to reach its ambitious goal of attracting two million visitors a year to its new digs, while maintaining its current two-million level in the original [Tate Britain] building.

So much for CultureGrrl's powers of prognostication. (Well, at least I got the expansion part right!)