Making Art Lovers Pay

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art has probably made itself popular with no one by announcing it will soon impose a mandatory admission fee of up to $25 on visitors who don’t live in New York State. But given financial realities — a multimillion-dollar deficit that will not disappear by itself — the new policy, announced on Thursday, is as understandable as it is regrettable.

For decades, the Met followed a pay-as-you-wish tradition, suggesting a $25 payment from every adult but not requiring it. If you wished to put up much less, so be it. In recent years, the share of museumgoers paying the full freight shrank as the suggested price rose to $25 from $12. In 2004, 63 percent of adults paid in full. In 2017, the figure shriveled to 17 percent. The system simply “isn’t successful anymore,” said Daniel Weiss, the Met’s president and chief executive. He said his institution is the only major museum anywhere that relies on voluntary fees and doesn’t get most of its revenue from the government.

So starting in March, non-New Yorkers will have to pay $25, though students and the elderly will be charged, respectively, $12 and $17. The only exceptions are students from Connecticut and New Jersey. Pay as you wish remains in place for them. The same goes for New Yorkers. In effect, they will be carded, forced to produce identification — a driver’s license, a library card, a bank statement — that shows their address.

The new system is in line with prices charged at some other institutions, like the Museum of Modern Art. It’s not expected to produce torrents of new money for the Met, though. Mr. Weiss put the projected extra revenue from non-New Yorkers between $6 million and $11 million. New York City’s government — which has given the new policy its blessing and contributes more than $27 million a year to help cover the museum’s operating expenses — spends $6 million every 35 minutes or so.

It’s tempting to ask if the Met couldn’t have found other sources without compelling some visitors to pry open their wallets. Indeed, some are already asking. Among those giving the change a thumbs-down are The Times’s chief art critics, Holland Cotter and Roberta Smith.

Still, one can sympathize with the museum, even if some of its financial woes are of its own creation across the years. Mr. Weiss calls the new revenue both “meaningful” and dependable. It’s hard to imagine vast numbers of foreigners or out-of-staters, already paying sacks of cash to tour New York, refusing to set foot in the Met because $25 will now be demanded instead of requested.

We’re going to keep an eye out, though, for scam artists. Can’t you just see enterprising souls hanging outside the Met and hawking fake New York IDs?