Who could think that The Night of Open Doors held for the first time 16 years ago in Germany would become so popular with the cultural managers of the whole world? Now the Museum Night is held in 157 countries within the International Day of Museums celebrated on May 18. As a matter of fact, the very holiday appeared in the world calendar at the suggestion of the USSR submitted to the International Council of Museums in 1977. But how has modern Russia modified it “in the spirit of creativity and innovation”?
The Museum Night was originally conceived and now conducted in Germany and the EU as a free of charge feast of culture for students, pensioners, people of scanty means and even vagrants, but in the nighttime. In the daytime museums take an entrance fee but late in the evening and at night they can be accessed free of charge.
For this reason as early as in 2010 the slogan of the International Day or rather Night of Museums was defined as “museums in the name of social harmony,” in 2011 – as “museums and memory” - and in 2012 – as “museums in the ever-changing world.” Russia is strangely proud of the fact that it has joined this global trend, but again in her own peculiar way. Thus in Yekaterinburg, Perm, Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Volgograd, Khanty-Mansiysk and Tyumen the Museum Night is more expensive for lovers of art than a daytime visit – now that’s “innovative thinking.”
Nevertheless almost in all of these cities record attendance is registered on those days. For instance, in Yekaterinburg museums saw 64,000 visitors in 2010, in 2011 their number rose to 80,000, and in 2012 up to 115,000 are expected. Yet every year the local administrations have to answer an embarrassing but rather logical question: why is the Museum Night free in Europe and a paid event in this country? It's like a burr in the saddle.
“In the EU they simply open their museums for one night, whereas we prepare special projects for each venue and often for only a single night. Or else the time of some special event or an exclusive exposition coincides with the Day of Museums and so we charge people who would like to see premieres of the season or of the year an entrance fee,” says Alexander Protasevich, Deputy Minister of Culture for the Perm Region.
It turns out that the acme of creativity is earning by growing attendance here and now. In Europe and the US they first renovate their museums technologically, renew their expositions and then raise their prices, while the Museum Night remains a free of charge project. In this country the opposite is true: prices are puffed up once in a year and exactly on the Museum Night. This is not a ubiquitous practice, to be sure, but many Russian museums indulge in it.
True, the flexibility or rather the ability to cave in to the changing world demonstrated by the new museum management is praiseworthy: thus it was officially announced in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk that there would be no growth of prices for museum tickets in 2012 on the Museum Night as before. What a remarkable “democratic” achievement! They are not going to emulate the “backward” cities of Volgograd, Khanty-Mansiysk and Perm, which officially announced that on May 18, on International Museum Day, their citizens would be freely admitted to federal museums from 11 am to 8 pm (while municipal and regional museums will still charge an entrance fee), while on the Museum Night people will have to pay a regular fee. Maybe this will help stymie the grumbling of the disadvantaged, but few people will care about museums in the daytime when they know that the museum management is preparing an exclusive or special project on the “great night”.
This is a new form of the old controversy, whether culture belongs to the spiritual realm and must be subsidized by the government, or whether it should be commercialized.
“From times immemorial culture has had a double nature,” says Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of State Hermitage Museum. “The key challenge for the modern state is to create a market where people would be able to buy the products of culture and thus help culture to develop. For unless culture is in demand it does not develop. And keeping culture within the closed space of museums and repositories, where nobody has access to, makes no sense. It would be wiser to seek a point of balance, where culture belongs to the domain of human spirit, but could be commercialized as well.”
The practice of creating the market of Russian cultural industries shows, however, that the substitution of notions often takes place. For some unknown reason the modernizers of the market of cultural industries are inspired on the Museum Night when free entrance to all museums is supposed – almost according to Pushkin: “You cannot sell your inspiration, but you can sell your manuscript.”
But a manuscript needs to be created first, while many modern museums do not take much effort and sell whatever they can lay hands on during the Museum Night, or organize special projects and exclusive expositions at the time when museums are expected to ensure free entrance for people.
Such is the Russian version of the Museum Night for money. The model of interaction between the cultural industries being born in travail and museums – has not been found yet. It still has to be shaped.
Vladimir Emelianenko
