AGO to be free for people 25 and under

Thestar.com
May 9, 2019
Raju Mudhar

The Art Gallery of Ontario is introducing a new pricing structure where all visitors 25 and under will be free. Visitors over 25 will be able to buy an annual pass for $35 dollars. Single visits will now be $25 -- an increase of $5 -- but it will include all the gallery’s shows, with no additional fees for special exhibitions.

“This is a radical shift for us,” said Stephan Jost, CEO of the gallery. “It changes your marketing. It changes how people move through the museum. It changes our family programming. It changes everything.”

Jost says the gallery has done test marketing, but can’t be sure how tourists will react to the price structure. What will happen if this loses the gallery gobs of money?

“Stephan, you’re fired!” he jokes. “Like, if all our $250 members go down to $35 level, that is not so good. But somebody has got to make the try. The (most common) response was initially, that’s amazing and that’s insane.”

The new admission structure takes effect on May 25, but people can start buying the annual passes online at ago.ca as of this morning. Jost says this is a one-year pilot project which he hopes becomes permanent, as it helps the museum become much more accessible and also attract more young people.

“I do (think it will boost attendance), but we’re projecting that it won’t because I’m really conservative, We’ve raised $1.8 million to help this.”

Jost says he was inspired in part by the thousands-people long queue at the AGO on Wednesday nights, when admission is free.

“I like talking to people, so I walked down the line and asked ‘why are you here?’ And when the seventh person says, ‘well, ’cause it’s free,’ it’s like ‘OK, I don’t need to ask this question again.”

He says he initially pitched this idea to this staff two years ago, and wanted the age limit to be 18, but “honestly it was our staff that pushed it up. We looked at the revenue we get from 18- to 25-year-olds, and it’s not that much. But I do know is most humans make their cultural taste choices between 16 and 25, so if you start coming in for free, we can create that habit and relationship.”

Jost adds that he also observed a much more diverse group of visitors on Wednesday night, and one where many young people were bringing their immigrant parents to the museum.

 “I thought, oh, this is different, usually, it’s parents bringing their kids to the museum, but on Wednesday night, it’s kids bringing their parents. Which, also to be self-critical, we’ve got an offering that not everyone can afford, and … there’s a lot of people in Toronto where museum-going is not part of their cultural background, but they are here and they are interested,” he says. “One of the questions that I had was how accessible can we become and still be financially responsible?”

Jost admits that the new pricing structure will put more pressure on the gallery’s fundraising, but thinks that it will also provide opportunities. Jost says that the AGO has about 1 million visitors in a year (or as he puts it, 500,000 unique visitors), and a membership base of 100,000. He says the goal with this is to boost the membership rolls at the new $35 level, adding another 100,000 members, and admits that part of this is about getting more data about his visitors.

“That can be talked about as a negative, but for us, we’re a charity, we’re an educational organization. The reality is that wealthy people give us their data, and we communicate with them. We spend a lot of time and energy educating our membership, and at 100,000 individuals, that’s pretty good. But it also means that four-fifths of the people (who visit) are anonymous to us … So this will change that significantly. We think that 40 per cent of those 500,000 unique visitors will become known to us in the next year. I think data is absolutely king. It changes our relationship with our corporate sponsors, so if you can say we communicate with 225,000 people and we know who they are, that is powerful.”

Very little else about the AGO will change. Wednesday nights will still be free to all. There will still be free passes available at Toronto libraries. The price level of other AGO membership tiers -- which offer more perks like free coat checks and special events -- will also remain the same, at $110 and up.

This is not a completely free admission model that some institutions -- like the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. -- have, but it will be interesting to see what effect it has on the AGO.

“There is a risk because we pushed the price down to the level that we felt was the lowest we could go. And we want it to be an obvious choice. Do you want to come in once for $25 or do you want to come anytime you’d like for the year for $35? We want that to be an easy yes,” he says.

“After we look at six months, we’ll probably decide if we’ll continue or just (say) ‘well, that was a one-year experiment.’ I think the reality is that when we’ve bet on our public, we’ve done great. And part of this is we get a third of our budget from the public, so I better make sure that the public thinks we are doing the best job we can.”

Kicking off the changes will be a new party called AGO All Hours, to take place three times a year. The all-day and evening event starts with programming at 10:30 a.m. and goes until 1 a.m. This first instalment, on May 25, will feature a talk on art and satire by Maria Qamar a.k.a. Hatecopy, performances by musician Zaki Ibrahim, and several deejays and more.

May 25 is also the public opening of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room: Let’s Survive Forever, the piece of contemporary art that is now part of the AGO’s permanent collection, thanks in part to crowdfunding.