” Hello. Again. »The slogan chosen by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for its reopening last fall after four months of work has found new news: since Monday, the museums of New York – and the Statue of Liberty – have the right to reopen their doors to the public, after five months of closure due to Covid-19.
The Governor of New York State, who follows a caution line in its plan to reopen the city, imposed strict conditions: “25% maximum occupancy, fixed-time ticketing required with pre-established staggered entry,” said Andrew Cuomo. And, of course, masks and organized traffic flow.
Promotional operations
The museums, which have been waiting for the green light for weeks, will reopen in scattered order – Thursday for the MoMa, Saturday for the Met, October 3 for the Guggenheim Museum. In order to reconnect with their visitors, museums often plan promotional operations giving priority access to their members, and free entry or at the visitor’s choice for a few weeks. Tickets that have already gone quickly to the sites of some of the city’s biggest cultural institutions.
Museums have tried to keep in touch with their public by organizing virtual tours of their collections, but their finances have suffered heavily during these months of closure. Most of them operate with donations from individuals and endowment funds (the proceeds of which finance operations), to which are added ticketing revenues and sales in stores.
Layoffs at the “Met”
The Met, which was to celebrate its 150th anniversary in the spring, had to lay off 20% of its workforce and faced 150 million losses (on an annual budget of 320 million dollars), according to the “Wall Street Journal”. To limit their spending in the coming months, museums should also reduce their number of exhibitions, which are also more complex to mount.
In the short term, the attendance cap imposed on the city’s museums will not be the biggest obstacle. Tourism in the city remains severely hampered by the multiple traffic restrictions: New York State imposes a two-week quarantine on visitors from 35 American states. And foreigners are always persona non grata in the United States from the European Union or Canada.
Cultural life in New York is thus still largely at a standstill. The concerts haven’t restarted, nor have the Broadway shows, with hopes of a September reopening long gone. As for cinemas, they remain closed in New York, while the network AMC announced the reopening of two-thirds of its some 600 cinemas in the country from August 20.
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