‘Fake IDs’ allow Reid Hall students museum access

Reid Hall is the only educational institution I’ve ever encountered that openly falsifies documents for its students.

Although the program directors probably wouldn’t be willing to forge students’ signatures or bump up our grades at the end of the semester, they don’t mind telling a little white lie on our Reid Hall ID cards.

“You’ll notice that each of your cards identifies you as an art history student,” Brunhilde Biebuyck, director of the Columbia-Penn Program in Paris, told us as she distributed our student IDs during orientation. “That’s so you can get into museums for free.”

As Columbia students, free admission to museums is de rigueur, thanks to the Arts Initiative’s Passport to NY program. But Paris’ system is a little trickier. Paris museums are divided into three categories—national, city, and private. Each group has its own admission fee policy and its own administrative system.

Admission to the permanent collection of city museums, like that of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, is always free, and admission to all museums is free on the first Sunday of every month.

Private museums, like Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, can charge pretty much whatever they want. Although they often provide discounts similar to those available at national museums, they hardly ever offer free admission.

National museums, including the Louvre, are heavily subsidized by the state, and therefore offer free admission to schoolteachers, the unemployed, artists, disabled visitors, and students under 26.

If you did a double take when reading that museums offer free admission to massive, vague groups like “artists,” “disabled people,” and “the unemployed,” you aren’t alone.
Standing in line to get into the Fondation Cartier-Bresson last week, I thought I must have misheard when I eavesdropped on the following exchange between a young man and the gallery’s front desk employee.

Young man: Hello, one ticket for the Robert Doisneau exhibition, please.
Employee: Certainly. Six euros.
Young man: I’m unemployed.
Employee: Do you have your certificate?
Young man: Yes, here.
Employee: OK. One euro, please.

As an American, the notion that a private museum would routinely offer such large discounts to the unemployed, or even to artists registered with certain government-recognized groups, is inconceivable. Imagine the Museum of Modern Art having a separate line for everyone who’s been laid off recently.

But then again, such a policy is also quintessentially French.

France has a long history of subsidizing and prioritizing the arts. Today, the Ministry of Culture spends more than 75 times the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, the most recent data available on the French government’s website, the Culture Ministry’s budget was 2.7 billion euros, with another 10 billion donated by private organizations. The NEA’s 2003 budget? $115.7 million.

The French government’s massive financial support of the arts has created a rich museum culture, particularly in Paris. In an earlier draft of this article, I attempted to divide Paris’ museums into categories that were more entertaining and Columbia-relevant than the fairly dry trio of national, city, and private. I likened national museums to blockbuster lecture courses, historically oriented museums to core classes, and personal and private collections to seminar classes.

I ended up getting rid of this long, drawn-out metaphor, however, because it seemed to oversimplify the Paris art scene. What has struck me most about Paris’ museums in the last month—and what the Reid Hall ID policy and the French government try so hard to underscore—is their diversity.

Thanks to Reid Hall and the French Culture Ministry, I can now visit as many museums as I want without going broke.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story referred to the NEA as the Nuclear Energy Agency. It actually refers to the National Endowment for the Arts.