All About the Benjamins?

I mentioned that I saw Janet Cardiff speak at the Hirshhorn last week. She gave a great lecture, about which I'll definitely post more, but I wanted to get straight to the business that Blake Gopnik wrote about for WaPo and Tyler Green pursued here and here. When I first read that the Hirshhorn would only be allowing ID card–carrying students, invited guests, and supporters (who have donated $100 or more) to hear the artist, I was as confused as the next guy: A lecture by an internationally renowned artist surely falls under the purview of the Hirshhorn's educational mission. There's nothing wrong—at all—with providing programming and other incentives that express appreciation for support. But an informational artist talk simply doesn't belong under that classification.

After first glance I assumed that the response to the lecture was so overwhelming that the directors were forced to cap the demand to keep with the supply. Wednesday night proved that false: The lecture hall was roughly three-quarters filled—not bustling, and definitely not exploding out into the hallways, as you might expect if the seating situation were so dire that it called for an intervention. I imagine that the Hirshhorn event planners are competent people. I really doubt that they so wildly overestimated the number of attendees that they thought the fire marshall would be stopping by.

The event directors called a late audible, announcing that plebians who arrived would be given remaining seats beginning 10 minutes before the start of the lecture on a first-come, first-serve basis. (Tyler witnessed.) This policy is even more restrictive—are people who don't live close in or on a Metro line really expected to make the evening trip in the hopes that fewer contributors showed up than anticipated? Sure, we take risks on our evening plans—going to the concert without tickets, going to the restaurant sans reservation—but not often on events that we already subsidize with our tax dollars.

To be sure, the Hirshhorn deserves wild applause for its new emphasis on artist-driven programming; Cardiff's words drawn on water is an enormous feather for the District's cap, and every "Directions" show has been exciting. While I'm sure that public funding alone isn't enough to float all the Hirshhorn's projects, the museum's educational mission strikes me as more an obligation than a priority, and should be administered by a different hand than manages the general ledger.