Chagall at SFMOMA

If you've picked up a reasonably highbrow magazine recently, chances are that you've seen a feature on Diane Arbus. She's all over the news because a major retrospective, Diane Arbus Revelations, opened at SFMOMA on October 25. It would be reasonable, then, to assume that the show, barely a couple of weeks old, is packed.

Reasonable, but wrong. It turns out that anybody going to see the Diane Arbus show between October 25 and November 4 – its first 11 days – more or less had the exhibition to themselves. Not because the exhibition is bad – far from it. But because of the incredible incompetence of SFMOMA.

The first 11 days of Arbus, you see, coincided with the last 11 days of Marc Chagall, a major retrospective of the Russian artist which was on show only in Paris and San Francisco. Chagall is a popular painter, and as the show started coming to an end, people flocked to the museum to catch it before it closed.

None of this, of course, should have anything to do with Arbus. But SFMOMA's reaction to the Chagall crowds was so idiotic that almost nobody ended up seeing anything else: the 5th floor, home to the Chagalls, was packed, while the rest of the museum was a ghost town.

The reason was that SFMOMA clearly has no idea how to ticket a blockbuster exhibition. The standard setup at the glitzy newish museum is to have two lines, one for members and one for non-members. The line for members is generally shorter: they can usually just turn up, get free admission for themselves and their guests, and walk in. The line for non-members is longer, since everybody has to pay to get in. Non-members can buy general admission, or pay $5 more to get into the big shows.

Obviously, with a really big show, this system doesn't work. Since there's no difference between the line for general admission and the line for the blockbuster show, the would-be blockbuster-goers form a queue so long that no one else would ever dream of joining it. Anybody wanting to see the permanent collection, or even the Diane Arbus show, takes one look at the length of the line and decides to come back another day.

Dealing with this sort of thing is not exactly rocket science: museums from the Tate in London to the Natural History Museum in New York have separate lines for the big exhibitions, as well as timed tickets which sell out when the show is full, preventing people for waiting unnecessarily long to get in. And when the crowds really start to metastasize, the museums stay open later – the Tate opened its doors 24 hours at the end of its Picasso Matisse show.

SFMOMA, on the other hand, had other ideas. Firstly, they never had timed tickets at all: the closest that they ever came was offering admission for a specific day, which meant that if lots of other people turned up at the same time, the queue to get into the show – even for ticket holders – could be the best part of an hour long.

Also, SFMOMA never saw any need to change its ticketing situation. The Friday I went, the members stood in a short line waiting for three employees to hand out their free tickets, while the non-members stood in a two-hour queue waiting for two employees to get around to serving them. Yes, that's two hours just to get into the museum, over and above the amount of time spent waiting to get into the show itself. I fear to think what the situation was come the weekend.

Even if you really, really wanted to see the Chagall show – say, because you were in town with your mother, who named you (middle name, at least) after him – the wait was daunting. The obvious alternative to standing in line was to phone up SFMOMA's ticketing agent, TicketWeb, and book a ticket for that or a different day. But here's where SFMOMA's unique brand of genius comes in to play: at the end of the Chagall show, when demand for tickets was higher than it had ever been, the museum simply stopped selling them through TicketWeb. No one was to be able to buy their tickets in advance: everybody had to suffer equally in line.

And even the one thing that SFMOMA did do right – expanding its opening hours – it still managed to cock up. For one thing, the only difference between Chagall hours and normal hours was that the museum stayed open a bit later on Friday nights. More germanely, however, the new hours were not well advertised: they were nowhere on the information line, and only on the special exhibition page (not the general information page) of the website.

SFMOMA sits in the heart of Silicon Valley, where sporting stadiums are named things like Network Associates Stadium and 3Com Park. It gets funding from Hewletts and Googles and everything. But it can't manage a basic technology like timed tickets, with the result that whenever more people turn up than can fit into the exhibition, the only mechanism it has to deal with the problem is to let lines grow to the size at which people give up and go home instead.

Here's what would have happened in a halfways-sensible world. We would have turned up on Friday morning and the show would have been sold out, certainly for the morning, and maybe for the rest of the day. Either by joining a queue or by buying tickets from TicketWeb over the phone or online, we would have got ourselves admission for a set time in the future. We would have gone off to enjoy one of the most beautiful cities in the world, come back when our tickets told us to, and entered with almost no wait: after all, with timed tickets, the museum can ensure that it has never admitted more people than can fit into the exhibition.

Here's what actually happened: we turned up on Friday morning and waited interminably for our tickets, then waited all over again to get into the show. Total time in line: two and a half hours, give or take. Children, pregnant women, elderly patrons, anybody without five hours to spare – all of these potential patrons were denied any entry at all. And, of course, the Diane Arbus show languished, all but unseen, a victim of the Chagall show's mismanagement.

Meanwhile, the Chagall show itself was packed insanely tight, as harried SFMOMA employees desperately tried to deal with the lines by letting in as many people as they possibly could. Here, in a nutshell, is the difference between a timed-ticket system and the lack of one. When you don't have timed tickets, frazzled patrons just want to be let in, with the result that so many people pack the galleries that you can barely see the art. When you do have timed tickets, patrons complain about the crowded galleries, with the result that the Royal Academy in London (to take one recent example) extends its opening hours and reduces the number of tickets that it sells for any given time, making life much more pleasant for everyone.

A free suggestion, then, for SFMOMA: get a tech-savvy donor to give you a timed-ticketing system. Your patrons will be happier, your employees will be happier, and when people talk about your headline exhibitions, they might even mention the art rather than just griping about how horrible they were to get into.

Oh yes, the art. How was it? Good, although the exhibition seemed intent on presenting Chagall as an Important Artist rather than as the more or less unchanging maker of beautiful paintings which he really was. There's no real need for a chronological approach in the case of Chagall, since his work from 1920 is not all that different from his work from 1970.

Biggest disappointment? The emphasis on large-scale spiritual works meant that my favourite part of his oeuvre – the heartbreakingly simple pastorals, with maybe a goat, a tree and a farmhouse – were glaringly absent from the show. Biggest revelation? The works on paper, stunningly preserved, with a wonderfully vibrant immediacy.

Was it worth a 160-minute wait to get into the packed galleries? No: I can't imagine any exhibition which would be. Art appreciation is a solitary affair, and tough enough in a popular exhibition at the best of times. When you're physically exhausted from the queuing process and mentally drained from trying to comprehend the paintings through the crowds, there's a limit to how much you can take from any exhibition. I'd recommend going to your local museum and checking out its two or three Chagalls instead. There won't be any crowds, you can go back as often as you like, and you can develop a relationsip with the specific pieces. In the case of Chagall, there's nothing bigger that you really need to know about the artist's life and work as a whole.

Posted by Felix at 20:41 EST

Comments

Yes, timed tickets, BUT with an extra line for people who do not want to see Chagall this time round.

Or, my favorite European invention, those little incremental numbered tickets you tear off from a machine. You might have to wait 2 hours, but not in line. You'd wait in the Arbus exhibit, in the shop, in the cafeteria..

Posted by: Stefan Geens at 5:12 EST, November 06, 2003

I think I like the idea of the tear-off tickets but they might remind me a bit much of being in a butchers... I do like the idea of lots of people clutching their little raffle type numbers as they walk around the gallery.. and it would probably force them to spend more time, and see more things, in the gallery than they had ever intended to which may or may not be a good thing. You'd have to ensure that the 'next number' screen was easily visible from all rooms or corridors otherwise it would end up like an airport waiting lounge with everyone crowding aorund those stupid little television screens. Whatever happened to the nice big clickety clack boards that made sense, could be seen from everywhere and had big enough writing for not just the young and tall to be able to read?

Posted by: Rhian Salmon at 6:45 EST, November 08, 2003

Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what's right.

Posted by: Saperstein Ali at 8:39 EST, January 25, 2004