An afternoon at the museum
My wife and I like museums and go to them fairly often. We were members in a bunch of them around our area pre-Covid.
But, over Covid we let most of our memberships drop.
The only two we kept were the local art museum and the botanical gardens near us.
The other museums notices our lack of membership and have tried various things to get us to come visit again, but we haven’t.
Not for any major reason, just we’ve been busy and there haven’t been any things at the museum we considered “must see” things that made it worth it to spend the time and effort to go to them.
A few, like the outdoor sculpture park, we did visit a few times, but not enough to get a membership.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (https://www.mfa.org) sent me a survey to go over my reasons for not going in the past few years and I filled it out in some detail. (I like surveys too.)
I got an email two weeks ago asking “would you be willing to answer some additional questions in depth?”
I said yes and they requested me to come to the museum in person for an afternoon for which they’d pay me $200.
I agreed.
To be honest I’d have probably gone if they just offered to pay for my parking, which costs almost as much as going into the museum.
But, I didn’t tell them that.
Saturday my wife and I drove into Boston. I waited in the lobby for the marketing group doing the survey to come and get me and my wife went to roam about the museum.
They had about 15 folks there for the survey and they brought us all back to a very nice conference room in the new wing.
It took the woman leading us there a bit to find the conference room. If I knew where we were going, I could have helped. And, did end up taking the stairs rather than waiting for multiple trips in the elevator.
The first thing was they told us to spend an hour roaming the museum, looking at anything that took our fancy. They had tickets for the special exhibit going on if we wanted them, and I did take that.
“Be back and the main entrance in an hour and I’ll lead you back here,” the woman in charge said.
“Is it OK if we just come back here ourselves?” I asked, hoping to avoid another inadvertent tour.
“Oh yes,” she said.
The special exhibit was so crowded that I left almost immediately.
I roamed around the rest of the museum looking for things that I was interested in.
I couldn’t find any good images of tents from 500 years ago. I had trouble finding my favorite statue.
I was given bad directions from a visitor to the museum to the Egyptian exhibit (which was not where I remembered it being) and ended up spending time in modern art.
(Yes, I could have asked someone who worked there, but then I wouldn’t have found new things…)
One of the things I like to see was closed.
I only had time for the special exhibit gift shop and only because of how I got out of that exhibit.
A LOT of the museum was very crowded and there were places I gave up on trying to get to and went to other places just because I didn’t want to put up with the crowds.
I got back to the conference room after 56 minutes of the hour.
The woman looked at me.
“I should get to the entrance to get the others!” She said and went out in a hurry.
Eventually 14 of the 15 returned. No idea what happened to the last person.
We were then given an essay question on what we liked, didn’t like, would change and don’t think should change.
Then we were broken into 3 groups and asked to rate statements on “The MFA is or isn’t” and “The MFA should or shouldn’t be”.
It was things like “The MFA is a world class museum”. “The MFA is inclusive.” “The MFA is family friendly”.
There was quite a debate about the last one as we all thought that families should feel welcome in coming to the museum, but none of us wanted the art censored or altered because kids might attend.
We ended up putting that one in the middle with a paragraph explaining why.
The woman running then survey came and looked over my shoulder as I wrote out our reasons.
“Can you read that well enough?” I asked her. “We all think it’s pretty important.”
“It’s fine.”
Then, the three groups were taken to different rooms to discuss things in detail.
My group got the conference room in the administration offices, which I’d never been in before.
It was very nice. Nicer than the offices of other museums I’ve either worked at or visited.
My group had:
Me
An engineering student at a local school
A stay at home mother
A semi-retired music industry person
A college professor
A retired software engineer
A building contractor
All of us either were former members of the museum who had let our membership drop.
We were asked a lot of questions about why we let it drop, what would make us renew, why we didn’t come to the museum much anymore, if it was all museums or just this one and things like that.
I found the student’s answers interesting as he said:
“I let my membership drop because I found out I could get in for free as a student without one and I come here a lot to eat as the cafeteria here is cheaper than the food service at my school.”
The mother had some interesting ideas on family friendly things:
“I would like things for my kids, but I don’t trust them to come to the museum and not break things. And, I hate other people’s children so having family friendly events just makes me think I’ll have to put up with that, and I don’t want to.”
Most of the others had reasons closer to mine that there just hadn’t been anything that drew us back in after Covid.
A few of us did reminisce about better special exhibits of the past and how much we liked them. And, how the current ones did not measure up.
There was an observer from the museum in the room with us who didn’t look overly happy as we said these things.
Many of us also talked about how crowded it was and how we didn’t want to spend time in big crowds after Covid.
I suggested a “Museum Waze” that give you crowd reports for the different areas of the museum. We’ll see if anyone makes that.
The whole thing took about 3 hours. My wife had been kicked out of the museum before we finished, but not too much before. And, she had found a chair to wait on outside.
I have to say that getting out of the parking garage was challenging as everyone they pushed out of the museum at 5 went to the garage to drive away.
I had a prepaid ticket, which means I did not have to wait in the line to pay for parking, but still had to wait in the line of cars to get out.
The museum parking method is notoriously bad where you have to get to read a barcode and it doesn’t want to.
So, to get everyone out of the garage quickly they pay folks to stand at the exit and scan things for you.
How this saves them money over having a parking attendant is not clear to me.
It was nice to be asked my opinion. As someone who has worked for and volunteered at museums earlier, it is nice to see them ask patrons what they want.
We’ll see what comes of it.