Congestion Pricing Is Un-American!

Who exactly pays $50 to escape the riff raff? That’s just unseemly:

Want an intimate afternoon with Adele Bloch-Bauer? The Neue Galerie announced yesterday that, on Wednesday afternoons for the duration of the Klimt exhibit that features the most expensive painting ever purchased, it will charge a higher than normal price — $50 — in an effort to keep the crowds down. At other times when the museum is open, Thursday through Monday, its normal price of $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors will be in effect.

“Because we get such a crowd, we thought we might offer a more private viewing,” a representative of the museum explained over the phone yesterday evening. Asked if there were any concerns about offering this more intimate encounter with the paintings only to those who could afford the steep ticket price, she said there were not. It’s an experiment, she explained, “and we’ll see how it goes.”

Ever heard of timed tickets? Jeez . . .

I Just Went All Rachael Ray On Your Ass

After the Met raised its suggested donation (emphasis on “suggested”) to $20, the Times conducts a sociological experiment of sorts to determine the precise level of scorn heaped upon cheapskates by passive-aggressive ticket booth clerks. Now we know:

The first clerk had clearly heard it all, so many times before: the cheapskate’s whisper, the tone of moral calculus and finally the question, delivered with a sheepish grin: “What do I really have to pay?”

Veteran visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art usually weigh the decision silently, even guiltily, as they stand before the cash register that serves as portal to one of the world’s greatest art collections. Tourists rarely think to ask, and just fork it over.

But on Thursday, the day after word went around that the Met had decided to raise its suggested admission price to $20 — the same lofty figure that has earned the Museum of Modern Art its share of municipal scorn (at the Modern, it is mandatory, not just suggested) — The New York Times dispatched a reporter with a pocket full of quarters to conduct a small, slightly mischievous sociological experiment.

He went up to five different cashiers, asked the question, humbly proffered 50 cents and waited to measure the levels of scorn that would pour down upon his head.

In truth, there was not much noticeable scorn. There was, instead, that brand of aggressive disregard particular to New York that is sometimes much more effective in evoking shame and extracting money. The first clerk who was approached, a large man with a goatee, never even looked up from his screen when asked.

“It’s just suggested,” he mumbled.

“What if I only have 50 cents?” he was asked.

“Uh-huh,” he answered, staring momentarily at the two coins plunked into his palm before ringing up $15 on the cash register, punching in a 50-cent subtraction and sliding over a green metal admission button with the detachment of a Vegas dealer parting with a dollar chip. If he had been trained in a psy-ops camp in the most effective ways of wounding a conscience, he could have done no better.

And if not Rachael Ray, then those notorious cheapskates at $9.99 . . .

Met Passes On Admission Fee Hike To Out-Of-Towners And Europeans; Cheapskates Yawn

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces it will raise the price of an adult ticket to $20, translating to a 33% increase in guilty feelings for stiffing them on the “suggested donation”:

When the Museum of Modern Art announced in 2004 that admission to its new facility would cost an eye-popping, and wallet-lightening, $20, a symbolic threshold was crossed, and it was only a matter of time before someone else caught up.Yesterday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that, as of August 1, its recommended adult admission would go up to $20 from $15, bringing it onto a par with MoMA.

The Met’s spokesman, Harold Holzer, said that ongoing deficits necessitated the increase. “Ever since 9/11, the museum has faced the ongoing challenge of a structural,operating deficit,” Mr. Holzer said. The deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30 was $3.5 million. “This is a solution that helps us defray the cost of running essentially the largest museum of the country, while still protecting the concept of pay-as-you-wish.”

. . .

Unlike MoMA, or the Frick, or the Guggenheim, or other uptown museums, the Met’s admission fee is only a suggested donation, although Mr. Holzer said, “We’re not shy about asserting that we ask visitors to pay whatever they can.” He declined to say how many people pay the suggested rate.

The suggested-donation policy is a requirement of being part of what is called the Cultural Institutions Group, a group of 34 New York City-owned institutions that also includes the American Museum of Natural History, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Bronx Zoo. As part of the same deal, the city provides 11% of the Met’s total budget, according the Department of Cultural Affairs. In the last fiscal year, this came to about $24,598,000, an amount that contributed to general operating costs, as well as paying for heat, light, and power.

. . .

A painter and the coordinator of the painting department at the New York Academy of Art, Wade Schuman, said he didn’t mind the fee increase and didn’t think it would discourage artists or young people from going to the museum. “Most artists do not give the suggested donation,” he said. “I’d be curious how many people actually do. I think that changing the suggested donation is mainly going to affect out-of-towners and Europeans.”

Staten Island’s James Oddo Is The Biggest LL Cool J Fan In The Council

The City Council has approved funding for a hip-hop museum in the Bronx:

The City Council has quietly allocated $1.5 million in capital funding over the next two years that will serve as seed money for a hip-hop museum in the northeast section of the Bronx.

The funding came at the behest of a City Council member, Larry Seabrook, who is closely allied with a nonprofit group in his district that is planning a community center and housing development at the corner of 212th Street and White Plains Road. The museum would be part of the project.

Mr. Seabrook said he envisions the museum as a forum to educate future generations about the hip-hop movement as it began on the streets of the Bronx in the 1970s, long before the genre became linked with turf wars and lyrics that advocated violence against women. “We’re not talking about gangster rap,” Mr. Seabrook said. “We’re talking about hip-hop.”

While the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., announced plans earlier this year for a permanent hip-hop exhibition, the project in the Bronx is believed to be the first museum dedicated to the movement.

. . .

Other lawmakers criticized the use of public funds for a hip-hop museum. “I’m the biggest LL Cool J fan in the council, but this is not a proper use of taxpayer money,” the council’s Republican leader, James Oddo of Staten Island, said. He added that he supported a hip-hop museum, but only as a private venture. “If this is such a great idea, then it sells itself,” he said.

. . .

Despite the start-up cash from the city, a hip-hop museum in the Bronx still faces a number of obstacles. Early plans call for the museum to occupy one or two floors of a multi-purpose center being built by the nonprofit Northeast Bronx Redevelopment Corporation. The group is hoping to combine several floors of low- to moderate-income housing with a gymnasium, a small theater, a recording studio, and the museum.

The project is planned for the site of an abandoned transfer station that the group acquired from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority this spring. The corporation has also received more than $1 million in state funding to clean up the site, which Mr. Seabrook said could take up to two years.

I’m A Loser, Baby

Officials at the Met dispute the claims that the Duccio is a fake:

The museum said the work, attributed to Duccio di Buoninsegna, “is considered by virtually every expert in the field to be a keystone in the history of Western art.”

It said it “carefully examined” the tempera and gold on the wood panel before buying it in 2004 in the most expensive purchase ever by The Met.

Curator Keith Christiansen said The Met conducted technical examinations, including using X-rays and infrared reflectography and studying pigment samples that established its Renaissance origins.

He said two authoritative conservators also studied the painting.

“They not only gave it a thumbs-up, they said, ‘Boy, we are lucky,'” he said.

Christie’s auction house, which arranged the sale, said, “We and all current authorities on Duccio are entirely satisfied by the attribution of the panel to Duccio.”

But Beck stood his ground.

“They’re trying to say the consensus agrees with them, and that’s correct. But the consensus was poorly informed. The consensus also said the world was flat before 1492,” he said.

. . .

Beck offered to dispute the question of its authenticity with The Met and its experts.

“I’d be glad to debate them — in front of the picture,” he said.

“There’s nothing to debate. Absolutely not,” Christiansen shot back. “Is everyone in the world an idiot except him?”

Meanwhile, the Post’s art critic (yes, they have one!) sheds light on Beck’s history:

Beck has never shied away from controversy. Though last decade’s cleaning of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel won almost universal praise, Beck was the lone voice calling for the work to be halted.

His latest claim is that this much-ballyhooed “Madonna and Child,” which has figured in many of The Met’s posters over the past year, was not painted in Siena around 1300, but probably somewhere else in the 1880s.

Equally plausible is that the work is misattributed. As to that, you’d expect that the first thing The Met would determine, when they bought the work, was whether it is 100 or 700 years old. This is easy to do.

In fact, Beck seems to take great pleasure in loudly proclaiming that every expensive painting is a fake:

A Raphael painting bought by Britain’s National Gallery this month for 22 million pounds ($41.7 million) is a fake, a U.S. art professor says.

The gallery secured the “Madonna of the Pinks,” which it called the most significant Old Master in any British collection, after a fight to keep it in the country.

But James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University in New York and the President of ArtWatch International, told Friday’s edition of the Times the gallery had paid “a record price for a fake.”

“They haven’t done their homework,” Beck said. “It’s a disgrace. The National Gallery never checked any of them physically.

“When you’re spending government money, or anyone’s money it’s an omission. Frankly, it’s a kind of arrogance of the Establishment.”

That’s from February 2004 . . .