Van Gogh’s Really Big Show

When tickets go on sale Sunday for “Van Gogh’s Van Goghs,” the blockbuster show opening Jan. 17 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, patrons will pay what appear to be the highest prices ever charged for a museum exhibition in the U.S.

Tickets at LACMA--the only other venue for the show aside from the National Gallery--are $17.50 for weekdays and $20 on weekends. Purchasing tickets by phone through Ticketmaster adds a $3.50 service charge per ticket, plus a $3 mailing fee per order. There will be no service fee charged for tickets purchased at LACMA, however that option will not become available until Jan. 10. The museum’s normal admission price is $7 for adults.

Citing security reasons, LACMA will not reveal the exact cost of presenting the 70 Van Gogh paintings--on loan from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam--but museum officials pegged the budget at “several million dollars,” including massive insurance and liability fees. LACMA President and CEO Andrea Rich said the steep ticket prices are a matter of economics.

“It’s a very simple question of whether a museum like ours, which doesn’t have a huge public subsidy, can afford to bring to California a show like this,” Rich said. “The premium times is when the big ticket price is, people who want to spend less money can come at off hours; that will smooth out the demand, and we will accommodate as many people as we can.”

The museum will offer extended hours during the exhibition--9 a.m.-9 p.m., seven days a week--scheduled through April 4 at LACMA West, the museum’s renovation of the former May Co. store at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax. Tickets are time and date stamped, and patrons will only be allowed into the exhibition at the time indicated on the ticket. (Admission is good for all shows at the museum’s main complex, which will maintain its current operating schedule.)

Rich said that “you can’t really tell yet” whether the high ticket price and extended hours will result in a profit for the museum, but added that “if we did make money on the exhibition, we’ll still only break even, because the money will go right back into subsidizing perhaps less profitable exhibitions. We have expenses. A museum doesn’t really profit.”

The museum has already seen related benefits in one area. A membership drive that started shortly before the current Picasso show opened has resulted in 12,000 new members, increasing the museum’s total to 73,000. Each membership includes two tickets to both the Picasso and Van Gogh exhibitions.

LACMA expects as many as 600,000 visitors to the Van Gogh exhibition, exceeding attendance for the museum’s most popular attraction to date, “A Day in the Country,” a French Impressionist show in 1984 that drew 460,000 patrons.

The Van Gogh ticket prices are the highest for the museum since the highly popular 1991 exhibition “Mexico: Splendor of Thirty Centuries,” which had a $7.50 admission. There are reduced rates for seniors (62 and over), children (ages 6-17) and groups of at least 20.

While no price statistics are available from museum organizations, Mimi Gaudieri, executive director of New York’s Assn. of Museum Directors, says she has never heard of an exhibition price higher than the $20 Van Gogh ticket.

“I don’t think it’s exorbitant,” she added. “I think it’s more the wave of the future than anything else, because there are many exhibitions that are very expensive to have at an institution.”

The steep fee seems to be part of a nationwide trend toward premium prices for so-called “blockbuster” art exhibitions, often at museums where patrons have traditionally paid nominal fees for admission.

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, for example, is charging $17.50 on weekends and $10 on weekdays for its ongoing exhibition, “Monet in the 20th Century,” and the Art Institute of Chicago is asking $14 on weekends for “Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman.”

Washington’s National Gallery of Art, where the exhibition continues until Jan. 3, has had federally mandated free admission to all exhibitions since 1937. Gallery spokeswoman Deborah Ziska said the museum is dealing with its first-ever major wave of ticket scalping--both on the street and via the Internet--with prices reaching as high as $125 for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

“It certainly is an interesting phenomenon that we were not expecting,” Ziska said. “It’s the Van Gogh name--his name is just so legendary, of such mythic proportions; it’s just magic.”