Attendance: The big excuse

Malcolm Rogers tells the Boston Globe that his mission is to bring new visitors to the MFA Boston. That's a fancy way of saying he wants to increase attendance. (Related: More today from the Globe's Geoff Edgers on the Koch show. It's a doozy.)

There's an essay I'd like to write about the misguided evangelism that museum-types have about increasing attendance (when I was a kid, my parents had a similar evangelism about making me eat spinach). That will have to wait. For now, let's look at how important attendance isn't to the MFA's bottom line.

In the most recent tax filing I have, MFA took in $4 million in admissions charges in FY 2002 (which ended in June, 2003). MFA's total budget for the year was $99 million. So admissions charges made up only four percent of MFA's budget. Increasing them 25 percent -- which would be a huge spike -- would only bump that to five percent of the MFA's budget. (True: It's likely that some of MFA's grants are tied to attendance numbers. I'll probably look into this in the not-too-distant future. But I doubt that would be more than another one percent or so.)

So Malcolm Rogers' attendance-lust is not about revenue and making ends meet. And it is not about bringing great art to Bostonians who don't get to see it -- as I've noted before, if he cared about that he wouldn't be doing this. Maybe he just likes being the center of attention and hanging out with wealthy yacht owners. And maybe, like Barry Munitz, he's using his museum to do it.