Pay What You Can
A recent visit to Hew Locke: what have we here, an exploration of alternative accounts of history and colonialism’s still pervasive legacy cost £17.50. Adding to existing barriers to inclusion, high entry fees like these feel moronic at best, ironic at worst.
This month, I have both paid through the nose for a standard ticket to Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (£28) at the National Gallery, and the price of an artisanal coffee - £5 - for an under-25s ticket to Francis Bacon: Human Presence round the corner at the National Portrait Gallery. What’s the rationale for this lack of price consistency to visit London’s galleries?
Across town, the Design Museum touts The World of Tim Burton as an exploration “into the fantastical”, offering glimpses into the childhood and mind of the celebrated auteur. “His amalgamations of man, animal, and machine are evocative of an artistically-inclined Dr. Frankenstein with an unfettered imagination [...] the soulful melancholy of Burton’s iconic misunderstood outsiders—from Edward Scissorhands and Jack Skellington to the Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie—is deftly expressed in the drawings featured in the exhibition.”
The exhibition lives up to the hype. Its collection of 500 drawings, sculptures, paintings, sketchbooks and moving image works has the potential to communicate, in a gallery setting, the fantastical nature of cinema as a popular art form: but it is no classical orchestral concert, opera or Parisian salon. Why, then, do tickets start from £19.69 for adults and from £14.77 for students (excluding donations)?
The Barbican Centre offers a solution: its “Pay What You Can” initiative offers reduced entry to one new release film screening every Friday, as well as entry to its gallery on Thursday evenings. Tickets begin at £3. As students above the age of eighteen, my peers and I welcomed this as a way of enriching our cultural education, without breaking the bank.
The National Gallery operates a similar scheme, “Pay What You Wish”. Announced in August 2024 in response to the cost of living crisis, PWYW allows those who would perhaps not usually attend paying exhibitions to visit from £1.
According to the NG’s website, in one of the exhibitions that ran the scheme, there was an incredibly high take up, with nearly two-thirds of visitors opting to pay a reduced amount based on what they could afford. Twenty-two and a half percent of visitors to After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art and The Credit Suisse Exhibition ‒ Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, “came to a paying exhibition for the first time”, and 5.5% of visitors “came to the National Gallery and its collection for the first time”. The scheme continues for paying exhibitions on Fridays from 5:30pm. Like many of the barriers to art and culture, access to information relies on existing knowledge: the reduced tariff is somewhat hidden from view, and is only available once you’ve already selected a Friday evening slot from 5:30pm onwards.