A Wednesday article in The Eagle reported that the high-quality traveling exhibits coming to Exploration Place such as Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virtual Codex Atlanticus” are coming with higher price tags for visitors — up to $20 a ticket. Still, is that such a high price to pay for a quality, must-see exhibit? Not according to museum officials, who point out that the ticket prices are in line with other national museums.
Another obvious solution for cost-conscious Wichitans is to buy memberships, which, besides other benefits, drastically lower the ticket prices for these special shows.
Consider that general admittance for the Leonardo show, which starts Saturday, is $19.95 for adults and $14.95 for children 5 to 15.Members pay only $6.95 for adults and $4.95 for children.
That’s a deal.
Kudos to Exploration Place for bringing in top-flight, world-class exhibits that people can’t resist. As one patron said, “if it’s good enough, we’ll come.”
Pursuing quality is a smart strategy that will pay off for the museum.
Posted by Randy Scholfield
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47 Comments
Is it too much to pay? Time will tell. However you can’t argue with the logic of having prices that reflect quality exhibits. I hope this succeeds, else they are going to come back looking for taxpayer subsidies to buy the quality exhibits.
That is not a high price for such an exhibit. Took my kids to see both “Bodies” and “Titanic” here and they both cost more than that.
Twenty dollars may be reasonable. Or maybe not. The American Museum of Natural History in New York is world-class, not just in one exhibit, but hundreds of them. Its admission charge is $14 ($8 for kids), and New Yorkers have a far higher median household income than Wichitans.
Codex will probably be most appealing to engineer types, and they can afford twenty bucks, or alternatively to buy a year-long membership with discounted admissions for traveling exhibits.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of bright and curious kids from working-class families in Wichita and our neighboring communities whose parents can’t afford either option, but who would love to play with the 3D interactive “build a machine” software.
Unfortunately, being summer vacation, schools wil be unable to take students on field trips to see Codex.
Perhaps Exploration Place should offer a free-admission day once a week, or if not that, a $10 adult/ $5 children admissions price. Or this could be offered in August.
EP has received millions of dollars of public money for construction and operational cost defrayment. It would have closed a few years ago had not local government given it a life-saving transfusion of taxpayer dollars.
So it should be accessible to all members of the taxpaying public who want to visit, through some means. Otherwise, if it subsists on public money, but excludes large numbers of the public due to higher admissions charges than they can afford, that’s not right.
To be sure arena and stadium facilities’ construction is largely publicly-financed, and then people still have to pay to see games and concerts, but museums are institutions created to promote the dissemination of knowledge and cultural enlightenment, which puts them in an entirely different category.
You people are a bunch of cheap MFers. It’s funny, Suzanne Tobias told me ADAMANTLY yesterday that it is ridiculous to believe that the Eagle contributes to the cheapskate mentality in this town.
Well, here’s more evidence to prove my point– this blog focuses not on the show itself and that we will get it first in the US–it focuses on the COST, which IS NOT OUT OF LINE FOR WHAT THEY PAY ANYWHERE ELSE.
What is out of line is all the yokel handwringing over it.
Here’s how these things work:
You want quality culture and art. It costs money! It’s paid for by:
1. TAXES AND FEES THAT ALL ARE CHARGED (the Smithsonian model). This way those without means can benefit too. Good luck passing this in Wichita!!!!
2. PAY AS YOU GO FEES. Good luck doing this in Wichita!!!!
Or, you could just have nothing. Which is why the rest of the world considers this such a wasteland.
Randy, I know your blog’s heart in the right place, but the only way to get the cheapo monster to go away is NOT TO FEED IT.
Walk on by.
$20 is fine, if one is going by himself, but who does that? If you go with the whole fam damily it starts to add up.A $5 RiverFest button is fine, until you have to buy one for everybody in the family.
I don’t find anything of quality at Exploration place. One long hallway of playground equipment followed by some exhibits that looked up they were put up by 8th grade science classes.
The occasional visiting exhibit is good, but not that great compared to the world class museums I’ve visited all over the world.
I plan to go. I plan to take the “monsters” as well.
Just as our Zoo is a crown jewel of Sedgwick County so Exploration Place has the potential of being the same. It will take travelling exhibits to do that and that will cost money.
Republican, it is supposed to be primarily a kids’ place.I have visited similar chidren’s museums in Kansas Citt, Charlotte, NC, and Denver– some focus younger and have more interactive things, but only Discovery Place in Charlotte rivals ExP for variety. While taht musuem has more–it includes an aquarium that is inherently more interesting than the kansas bio/geo section of EP– Charlotte’s building is not an architectural masterpiece like ours is.
Thanks, Randy. Well put.
A membership is well worth the initial investment–and when costed out over the year is truly a bargain for the entertainment and learning opportunities that come with Exploration Place. Even if you choose not to attend the traveling exhibitions, there are plenty of other options to keep kids entertained on multiple visits.
When EP was in trouble and attendance had fallen way off, many said that we should take a market-based approach: if no visitors, then close the museum. Simple. Well, now that new programming has generated visitors and revenue, what’s the beef? Let’s give it a chance.
From an economic perspective, let’s also not forget that top quality exhibitions will attract visitors (and their money) to Wichita.
The fact that the discussion on cost has surpassed that of the quality of programming is troubling.
For those of you who talk about how great a city Wichita is to raise a family, but then criticize the attempts to bring high quality cultural opportunities to Wichita’s citizens that yes, come at a price, I have to ask…isn’t having cultural opportunities a “quality of life” factor?
I have never been to Exploration Place, as I didn’t have children until now, but they are still newborns, so it will be awhile before I get a chance to take them to Exploration Place. I’m sure it’s a great place.
Exploration Place has turned around tremendously once they got that new director in there. Naysayers around here say that we cannot support our facilities like Cowtown, Exploration Place and etc. Many people called Exploration Place a white elephant. But it just goes to show what good leadership can do to really turn a place around and get people excited about coming there. Exploration Place is a success story for sure.
I thought MPS made some good arguments. We did infuse a lot of money into EP a couple of years ago, and we do have a lot of kids from working class families that can’t afford to pay the high admission fees. Do they have memberships based on income? Kind of like the Y? As MPS pointed out, EP is totally different than an arena, Century II, or the Coliseum. It should be accessible to all of the citizens of Wichita and the surrounding areas.
Couldn’t agree more, Joe and Dilettante.
TDT, they COULD have those staggered admission rates IF the citizenry would enable the City Council to create more opportunities for funding. But every time any possible taxes or surcharges are mentioned people around here get all bent out of shape, no matter what the benefit. Remember the discussion on the rental car surcharge that would have created permanent funding for arts and cultural institutions in the city, an elective tax if ever there was one? They knew it would never pass. Well, without that kind of funding, higher ticket prices are what you get!
If you want everyone to go for free, it can be done, but it takes recognizing that we’ll all have to chip in a buck, even those who don’t go, knowing that the end result is a better community.
A few notable additions to MPS’ comparison with the Museum of Natural History in NYC:
The $14 is actually SUGGESTED ADMISSION. This means the museum is publicly funded and does not actually depend on the admission, which ultimately is a donation.
And…
The $14 charge is a BASE CHARGE. Other special exhibits, such as IMAX films, are in addition to that charge. ExP’s base charge, which is of course is not suggested because it gets nowhere near the same amount of public funding, is $8. Special Exhibitions bring the suggested total to $21 for non-members, $10 for members at the NYC museum.
It is nice to have the luxury to not have to pay. Maybe MPS will contact the museum in NYC and learn how it is they can do that….but then MPS might have stop complaining about having to “bail out” the museum, because we’d be “bailing it out” annually.
So you’re saying delsol, if I plunk down fifty cents on the counter at Exploration Place, they must give me an admission ticket because the admission price is just suggested?
delsol, will you bail me out of jail, when I pass the threshold and enter into the museum because I didn’t pay their suggested price?
No, Republican, that’s not what I said.
Maybe you could try reading the whole post, though you might notice that my post at 11:04 refers to an earlier post by MPS at 6:57, and you may have to read that one too.
Delsol,
Maybe NY can charge a cheaper rate because of the amount of traffic. Lower rates x more people might exceed hirer rates x fewer people.
SolDevVB,That’s very possible true. They likely have more substantial corporate/private sponsorship, too,so there may not be more public funding for the NYC museum than ExP in raw dollars–and ExP may get a higher percentage of its budget from public funding.
Unfortunately, public funding for the arts and culture institutions in ICT is not guaranteed… there’s a large amount of money that Mayans and the CC approved a few years ago that will expire ibn 2008, I think. THe proposed rental car tax was intended to be a permanent solution to funding WAM, ExP, the Zoo, and other organizations, but that too was flawed because it would not have increased the real dollar total over time.
Read more about the Arts Council’s continuing effort to create sources of permament funding:
http://www.wichitaarts.com/Organizations/ArtsCouncil.htm
delsol – I am not advocating that everyone go for free. In fact, the people who can afford it should pay the full price. However, I truly believe that a family living in poverty, and the working poor, should be able to apply for a reduced cost membership if they are interested.
Good points TDT – and I would make similar ones for the Zoo. I know that the Zoo does school trips; I don’t know if EP does. If they don’t then they should.
I don’t know how they would do ’sliding scale’ memberships given their budgetary constraints. I know the Y does but that is subsidized by ‘full-freight’ members like me. And, that is as it should be in my view. Perhaps some way can be found to get that at EP AND at the Zoo.
Well, of course, I agree with you, TDT, although I think everyone should be able to go to museums for free, because they are about learning! Why should only those who have the money have access to the Cosmosphere, the Louvre, or EP? Access to education is a basic right…. The Smithsonian, and MPS’ Museum of Natural History in NYC, cost nothing, as do many other museums. Most do have some kind of charge at some point.
What I’m trying to spell out is that these things cost money, and the money has to come from somewhere. Where? A combination of sources is always best. In the present climate, EP has chosen to use a pay as you go approach, because that seems to work best for Wichita, at the moment–because no one will get behind increased taxes or fees to defer costs, and because private sponsorship isn’t enough (yet).
delsol wrote: “The $14 is actually SUGGESTED ADMISSION. This means the museum is publicly funded and does not actually depend on the admission, which ultimately is a donation.”
Actually, it really is “suggested”. You can walk into the Museum of Natural History, spend all day, and never pay a dime, unless you’d like to go to the IMAX or one of the special exhibitions.
How do they do it? They are extremely well endowed as well as having an established membership program, plus substantial corporate sponsorship. And that’s just part of what they do to keep themselves viable.
So you want to make it so that EP can offer lower entrance fees? Write to Carl Brewer about supporting proposed permament arts funding, which also supports EP, Botanica, and the Zoo, among others. Arts Council President Joan Cole has been working on this for three years now. Contact her through CityArts and John D’Angelo to find out when the next Arts Council presentation to the City Council will happen. http://www.wichitaarts.com
Or…as jmd indirectly implies…get a membership at EP. THe more members they have, the less they have to charge for special shows.
I really hate to cheapen the good discussion on here, but…
“They are extremely well endowed”
was too good for my junior high humor to pass up.
I hear ya, brian. Feck.
Here’s the one I couldn’t pass up:? ?”will you bail me out of jail…”Posted by: Republican | June 14, 2007 at 11:08 AM
LOL
whiskey tango foxtrot kinda stoopid question is THAT?!?
Hellzno, doofus. Never take an animal outta its natural habitat, that’s my motto.
Republican should go to jail for claiming to be a world-traveller but not apparently knowing that many museums have suggested admission.
(among other things to lock him up for) :)
delsol,
You misspoke on “TAXES AND FEES THAT ALL ARE CHARGED ( the Smithsonian model).” The Smithsonian (actually four or so separate museums of different themes) is no-charge admission, except for movies in the Lockheed Martin IMAX theater. Admission to the National Gallery of Art, also located on the Washington Mall, is free.
I’m a zoo lover. Sedgwick County Zoo is a low-second-tier facility. San Diego Zoo and Wildlife Park are as good as it gets. You have to pay $30 for an adult, for admission to each facility. It’s another $90 to ride a truck in the Wild Animal Park amidst the free-ranging animals and hand-feed rhinoceruses and see gazelles and giraffes in really up close and personal. Also $5 per cup of nectar mixture to have lorikeets land on your arm and feed from your hand. Is it worth it? Absolutely. 25% of admissions fees maintain the facilities. 75% goes for research to save endangered species.
St. Louis Zoo is a world-class zoo, #2 behind SD in the U.S. One of the world’s top half-dozen zoos. Admission charge: ZERO. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Free.
Could StLZ charge visitors? Absolutely. But their operating plan is different from SDZ/WAP. The vast majority of SDZ/WAP visitors are distant-traveling tourists, who are spending beaucoup bucks on West Coast vacations. STLZ is designed mostly for Missourians.
Omaha (Omaha is one of the U.S.’s top five zoos), KC and OKC are better than Sedgwick County Zoo. Admission for adult/children: $10.75/$7, $9.50/$6.50 and $7/$4. Sedgwick: $10/$6. Sedgwick is overpriced. It should charge about $6/$3.
Nelson-Atkins is a fabulous world-renowned art and ancient artifacts museum in Kansas City.Spend a day there, and get your mind blown. Admission: free.
Gilcrease in Tulsa, a first-tier American museum, a top-two exhibitor of American art: free, except for traveling exhibitions which are $7per adult / free for children in tow with the adults.
The Getty in LA houses America’s most-valuable collection of arts and ancient artifacts. It’s one of the world’s top three art museums. Admission: FREE. If you park in the lot, it’s $8 per car. At 4 people per car, that’s $2 per person.Wichita Art Museum, a second-tier American, third-tier world museum, $5/$2. Overpriced, except on Saturdays, when admission is free. God bless WAM for giving something away, given its heavy public-taxpayer subsidization
It’s not just a matter of taxpayers’ subsidization, which Sedgwick County Zoo and WAM receive, it’s wealthy people’s leaving legacy endowments to their communities’ posterity. Something Wichita’s wealthy haven’t done. The Koch brothers alone have a combined net worth over $13 billion. Would it seriously hurt them in the pocketbook donate $500 million–less than 4% of their combined net worth– to give Wichitans first-tier publicly-accessible cultural institutions?
Things are what they are here. A few years ago, David Geffen gave UCLA $200 million to help build a new medical center. He was not a UCLA alum, nor an LA native. He was at the time about as wealthy, ca. $4 B net worth, as Charles Koch, not a WSU alum, but a Wichita native. Mr. Koch donated $6 million to refurbish Levitt Arena at WSU. For every million dollars Mr. Geffen donated, Mr. Koch donated 30 thousand dollars. To one public university that he never attended, not in his home town, Mr. Geffen gave away 5% of his wealth, while Mr. Koch gave away to one public university, in his home town .15% of his wealth. Five dollars to 15 cents. From equal pocketbooks.
delsol, the rental car surcharge is an “elective” tax?
I suppose it is if you choose not to fly to Wichita for business or pleasure.
MPS – good points. However, I would say that our zoo ranks higher than you put it.
And our zoo does get at least some gift support as evidenced by the naming of exhibits.
It’s also quite sad that the idea that people should pay for their own entertainment and education is not even seriously considered.
We should consider that these taxes like the ones on rental cars and hotel rooms, which are often considered “good taxes” because the are paid primarily by out-of-towners, are really quite harmful.
I and the company I work for pay thousands of dollars each year in these taxes. It is quite disappointing to see a hotel bill swell by 12 percent or more in tax, or to see a car rental bill with many lines of taxes, surcharges, and recovery fees.
On EP and Codex, EP might want to exclude freeper vandals. That’s why I suggested a $5 sub-adult admission in August. Anybody who can afford to see a movie at a Warren, can see and 3D-interact with Codex for the same price, if late-season prices are lowered. I may pay $83 including taxes, for two parents and a college student, after the initial rush, but that’s way too much money for most Wichitans. Especially, because you can get the Codex Atlanticus book and CD, to play with at home for $34 plus shipping:
https://www.leonardo3.net/leonardo/post.php?lingua=eng
Let’s see, $80 for 3 hours studying Codex, vs $40 unlimited time. I think I’ll buy the book and software.
Go to SD Zoo, especially outside the tourism season. When we lived there, my wife and my high-school best friend’s wife went up to the proboscis monkey and brown bear exhibits in November, and saw full, unsheathed boners, as close as the exhibitionists could get to the ladies. Then my best friend and I, both males, went up, and the show-offs put their members away.Weird, but true.
We went to Sedgwick Zoo to the Orangotan display. When we entered the Orangs hid behind snow sleds. They were in yuckky cages. Hid themselves from humans. That’s sick. In SD, they had a large outdoor enclosure and came out to see humans.
In the glass-roofed enclosure at Sedgwick, the birds were mostly hiding. They didn’t even keep the windows clean to let light in.
San Diego Wild Animal Park created a 1000-acre Serrengetti recreation. Sedgwick County Zoo has 20-acre enclosures.
San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park allow all animals to live outdoor year-round. St. Louis Zoo couldn’t do this, due to cold winter weather, so they created climate-controlled large enclosures for primates in the 80s. Then Omaha did. Sedgwick built one 20 years later.
I want to go on record noting that I am for any kind of funding that makes the museums able to operate and low cost for visitors. As long as they don;t get too comfortble–EP was poorly run before, and needed a shake-up. Whatever people want to do that makes it so the city will stop complaining about having to pay for anything aty all, and we still get better instiutions and shows than we have had.
Philanthropy. Donations. Membership. Public Funding. Tiered Rates. Special rates for special exhibitions. Yes. Whatever works, as long as what we get is quality.
MPS’ points are well-taken, except that WAM is not a second-tier US institution, it’s substantially lower than that. Its exhibitions are extremely similar in content and theme–downright repetitive–and often pooorly presented. It wastes an unbelievable amount of space. It does a poor job with programming. Its permanent collection is mediocre at best. It does have a good restaurant, though.
http://www.jstor.org/view/15436322/ap030069/03a00080/0
The Telfair in Savannnah, Ga is far better, in a much smaller city. The Knoxville Art Museum in Tn.–off-the-charts better than WAM. The Philbrook and Gilcrease in Tulsa are both better.The Richmons, Va. Virginia Musuem of Fine Art is considered one of the top 50 in the country. The Ulrich is actually a very good campus museum, closer to second-tier for campus art museums.
But we can spend zillions for an Arena.
Good Lord, Folks, you’re trying to compare institutions that have been around for years with institutions that are less than 40 years old
*National Zoo–founded 1899*St Louis Zoo–founded 1904*San Diego Zoo–founded 1915*Sedgwick County Zoo-founded 1971
Most of you seem to want world class facilities without having to support them or wait for them to grow. It don’t work that way folks!
We have a fine zoo, have had a membership for years, and still go on a regular basis. I can remember when it was all just a dream on paper, then the children’s farms were built, and little by little it’s coming together.
Went to the San Diego Zoo, a few years back and was sorely disappointed at the conditions that the animals lived in…small cages, no room to move around(The entire Zoo is right at 100 acres–SCZ started with 160, and there’s plenty of room to grow!) Even the pandas had less room to move around than the majority of our animals. I was very disappointed.
Why not get some of those creation museum exhibits on loan? They should really draw a Kansas crowd.
Probably better people watching than going to Wal-Mart at 2AM.
jmd,
So what you’re saying is Sedgwick Zoo is great, for being built 60 years behind the times.
You missed the 2000-acre San Diego Wild Animal Park. I went back to SD in August 2005. Skipped the Zoo. Paid for two people to take the $90/person truck ride to hand-feed rhinoseri and giraffes who free-roamed in a 1000 acre enclosure. That’s a little bit bigger than Sedgwick Zoo’s 20 acre enclosure: a 50 acres to Sedgwick Zoo’s 1 acre ratio for free roaming fauna.
I’m not saying zoos are great. I’ve been to Seaworld several times. But, I’ve much more enjoyed body surfing with southern fur seals, after which my driver said. “You know, they’re much better wave riders than you are.” (Yeah, well I could do this better if I were in the water every day. I haven’t been body surfing in a month.)
Swimming 30 feet away from a baby gray whale because it came to explore a couple humans in San Diego. Watching dolphins do 360 flips surrounding my rubber Achilles boat in the Sea of Cortez.. Seeing a baby Humpy “spyhop” right next to me in Alaska. Now that humans are not killing these amazing marine mammals, they want to explore and make connections with humans.
In Hawaii, we used to feed bread and ahi bits to reef fish. They’d surround us, and some would give us leg nips: not injurious, just enough to make us aware of their presence.
But then some goody-goody halfwits made this illegal. They didn’t understand that hand-feeding fish generated a connection between humans and fish, and a desire among human feeders to protect the fish. Bottom line: I got the joy of making connections with God’s creatures that you can’t do anymore, but I wish you could.
I’m not saying zoos are great. I’ve been to Seaworld several times. But, I’ve much more enjoyed body surfing with southern fur seals, after which my driver said. “You know, they’re much better wave riders than you are.” (Yeah, well I could do this better if I were in the water every day. I haven’t been body surfing in a month.)
Swimming 30 feet away from a baby gray whale because it came to explore a couple humans in San Diego. Watching dolphins do 360 flips surrounding my rubber Achilles boat in the Sea of Cortez.. Seeing a baby Humpy “spyhop” right next to me in Alaska. Now that humans are not killing these amazing marine mammals, they want to explore and make connections with humans.
In Hawaii, we used to feed bread and ahi bits to reef fish. They’d surround us, and some would give us leg nips: not injurious, just enough to make us aware of their presence.
But then some goody-goody halfwits made this illegal. They didn’t understand that hand-feeding fish generated a connection between humans and fish, and a desire among human feeders to protect the fish. Bottom line: I got the joy of making connections with God’s creatures that you can’t do anymore, but I wish you could.
Actually! The Sedgwick County Zoo is considered the top 13th Zoo in the USA.
Joe! I wasn’t sure the specific rank but it is definitely a ‘destination’ in the zoo world. My mother was involved with ZooAtlanta and was jealous when I took her to ours.
When I said I didn’t think that zoos are great, I meant keeping animals in small enclosures. I mentioned seeing an orangutan hiding himself behind a children’s ski sled. A lot of zoos have caves for the animals to hide in, and if you go to any zoo, including San Diego, during crowd times, half the animals are in their caves.
The for profit drive-through wild animal parks of the 60’s like “Lion Country USA”, which inspired the San Diego Zoo to create the free-roaming-animal park in rural SD County, are much more humane.
When I mentioned Sedgwick’s being “overpriced”, I take that back. Public zoos were originally outgrowths of menageries owned by rich men for their own entertainment. The primary mission of public entertainment has changed to educating the public and using admissions fees to breed endangered species for hopeful reintroduction of offspring back to their native habitats. Sedgwick does this. It’s worth paying for.
At Seaworld San Diego, they have a guy ride on the back of a killer whale. In the finale, the trainer treads water and the orca zooms up from the bottom of the pool and pushes the trainer twenty feet above the water, standing up. Once in a blue moon Shamu does his own trick, swimming up to the water-treading trainer’s foot, clamping down on it, and taking him to the bottom of the pool (40 feet deep) and holding him there for minute or two. Animal acts don’t get more thrilling than this!