![]() ![]() The results have encouraged plans for more revenue-generating digital activity around a forthcoming exhibition on footwear, but “it’s not about coming up with a formula”, Marlow asserts. Marlow says the “sense of an event” also bolstered attendance to a £5 online talk on rave culture with the artist Jeremy Deller, which drew 1,000 viewers. Strikingly, most of the latter came via the Facebook Live “premiere”, which included an introductory talk. Compared with the 50,000 who bought tickets for the Electronic show, more than 4,100 had paid to access the video tour by late February. Premium digital content “won’t be a big cash cow, but it will reach different audiences and suggest an equivalence of the experience if you can’t visit”, Marlow says. The more museums experiment with their own paid initiatives, “the quicker we’ll find out the format, the price, how it works”, he thinks. The figures are “pretty good” but the “most important thing is learning”, Michaels says. The National Gallery had no revenue targets for the virtual Artemisia tour and sales are undisclosed. Show me the moneyīut how many online museum visitors are willing to pay-and can they offset the drastic loss of income from the traditional box office, café and gift shop? Even as museums reopen, tourists are not expected to return for years to come.įor now, “money can’t be a priority simply because there is no market reference,” Michaels says. So far, educational audiences and members “have been comfortable to pivot”, he adds, helped by the “mass adoption of Zoom”. The mix of free and paid offerings mimics the gallery’s public programme before the pandemic, Michaels says. Since June, it has met the growing public interest by staging more than 200 virtual events, including educational workshops, talks and courses. “Two things were happening: a remarkable year of exhibitions was heavily disrupted and there was an upsurge in digital adoption from our audiences.”įrom March 2020 to January this year, the gallery saw a 1,125% leap in traffic to its webpage for new digital content. The National Gallery’s online Artemisia tour was also driven by the “unique circumstances” of 2020, says Chris Michaels, the director of digital, communications and technology. Got To Keep On (2019), an installation by The Chemical Brothers and Smith & Lyall was on show at the Design Museum Photo: Feliz Speller for the Design Museum ![]() Making a documentary-style film was a way to engage audiences unable to travel to London, Marlow says, as well as a contingency against a second shutdown. Even before the show opened in July last year-with 30% capacity to allow social distancing-£18 tickets for weekend slots were booked until the autumn. “It was a punt in a way-we thought there might be demand,” says Tim Marlow, the director and chief executive of London’s Design Museum, about the virtual tour for Electronic: from Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers. And in Vienna, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is hosting live Zoom sessions, from a €3 lunchtime talk to customised private tours priced €150 to €200. ![]() Online lectures explore themes in the collections of the UK’s Birmingham Museums Trust for £12.50 each, while a monthly package costs £20. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York-which is also open for physical visits-runs a range of hour-long virtual tours by appointment, costing $300 for groups of up to 40 adults and $200 for students. The Artemisia show at London's National Gallery Photo: National GalleryĮlsewhere, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris gave “micro-tours” of its closed Cindy Sherman retrospective for up to nine people at €4 each. The Design Museum rallied curators, musicians and designers to illuminate its show on the history of electronic music the video tour, running until 3 May, costs £7 (free to members, from £65 a year). The National Gallery’s half-hour film explored highlights of its survey of Artemisia Gentileschi, presented by the curator Letizia Treves-for the price of £8, or free for members (from £60 a year). Last November, two London museums announced virtual tours of popular exhibitions that had been postponed by the first UK lockdown and then abruptly curtailed by a second wave of restrictions. And amid the torrent of free 360-degree tours, webinars and social media challenges, a handful of institutions are testing out a new revenue-generating model: selling on-demand exhibition films, expert talks and art education classes online. While galleries of masterpieces have lain empty for months, museums have poured their energies into digital channels in a bid to stay connected with audiences confined at home. In a world where more than 200 million people pay for Netflix and 155 million are premium subscribers on Spotify, cash-strapped museums are slowly waking up to the monetary gains of online content.
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