What's a Museum Visit Worth in Fort Worth?

This just in, via press release, from Fort Worth:

The Amon Carter Museum will eliminate admission fees to special exhibitions when it reopens this fall, providing free access to all of the museum's galleries and enabling greater public access to one of the country's finest museums of American art.

The museum will be temporarily closed beginning May 21 to undergo repairs to the building's fire suppression system. Free admission will begin in August.

Get me rewrite: It will eliminate admission fees "when it reopens this fall," and "free admission will begin in August"? Maybe fall starts early in Texas.

In announcing the change, Ron Tyler, the museum's director, described his institution as "the community's museum, a place were everyone is welcome, where people can come to be inspired and energized."

Another Tyler will be happy to hear this.

The Carter's new admission policy should put some pressure on the nearby Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which opened its Ando building with free admission, later instituted its current $8 admission fee and then watched its attendance dwindle, according to its manager of public relations, Kendal Smith Lake. In a phenomenon familiar to the Neue Galerie in New York, many of the people who come to eat at its very attractive café don't enter the museum's galleries.

Maybe when you spend a certain amount on food, an admission ticket should come with the check.

Meanwhile, the Carter's and Modern's other museum neighbor, the Kimbell Art Museum, will charge $14 for its upcoming blockbuster, The Mirror and the Mask: Portraiture in the Age of Picasso, opening June 17.

They can afford to build a Renzo Piano annex without mounting a capital campaign, but they've got to charge for special exhibitions?

Take it, Tyler.