People hours, not "museum" hours

The Brooklyn Museum is going to expand its hours 3 nights/week, according to "Brooklyn Museum to Extend Hours" in the New York Times. From the article:

... staying open until 6 p.m. on Wednesdays and 10 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. (It is currently open until 5 p.m. on those days.) To offset the change, the museum will open an hour later, at 11 a.m. ...

“Clearly there’s a need for more opportunities post-5 o’clock, whether it’s families with kids getting out of school, or people coming from work, or younger people going on dates,” the museum’s director, Arnold L. Lehman, said in a phone interview. “We wanted to make a change that would better accommodate a very broad-based audience.”

He said that the museum would organize programs for Thursday and Friday evenings, like lectures and films. “It’s not going to be a duplicate of First Saturdays at all,” he said, referring to a popular current program, on the first Saturday of every month, which involves music and dancing and has a party-like atmosphere. The Thursday and Friday evening programming will be “much more relaxed and very gallery-oriented and education-oriented,” Mr. Lehman said.

The museum will hire a few extra people in visitor services and the store to accommodate the new hours, he said, “but in both instances our hope is that our suggested admission will more than cover whatever costs we have.”

One of the ideas I've written about since around 2002 is the idea of extending hours for the Smithsonian Museums at least one evening each week.

These are the kinds of issues that could be grappled with in a cultural planning effort for the city. While the national museums and cultural institutions are for the most part insulated and disconnected from local cultural policy, by engaging in a process at least the issues and opportunities could be raised, even if it will take decades to make change happen.

Note though that the New York Times reported in June that the "Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds." Maybe they are doing it wrong. Maybe the audience for art and culture just isn't as big as we want it to be.

From the article:

When it opened a new glass entrance in 2004 meant to beckon the masses, the Brooklyn Museum said it hoped to triple attendance in 10 years by concentrating on a local audience. It had stopped worrying about competing with Manhattan museums or about its image — despite its world-class collections — as a poor man’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Instead, the museum invited the neighborhood to view its McKim, Mead & White Beaux-Arts building as a community resource and openly celebrated popular culture with shows like its recent photographic history of rock ’n’ roll.

But six years in, the effort to build an audience is not working. Attendance in 2009 dropped 23 percent from the year before, to about 340,000, though other New York cultural institutions remained stable.

Almost a quarter of the attendees were people who came for First Saturdays, free nights at the museum that include music, dancing, food, cash bar, gallery talks and films. ...

Mr. Lehman says he takes pride in the fact that even though the Brooklyn Museum’s audience hasn’t grown, it has become younger and more diverse. A 2008 museum survey showed that roughly half of the attendees were first-time visitors. The average age was 35, a large portion of the visitors (40 percent) came from Brooklyn, and more than 40 percent identified themselves as people of color.

Sounds to me like they need to focus significant effort on what direct marketers call conversion and renewals...