Thank you to everyone for your suggestions. Staff at the museum have read last week's Museum issue in the New York Times and we did see the article regarding the Martini Fest which was a rental the Milwaukee Museum hosted. Our evening hours would not be a rental and would be mission centered on provided open hours to a broader audience. We are focusing on providing gallery tours with a social component such as film or performance series that we would offer regularly and specifically as adult programming. I was seeking specific information how other museums facilitate operations beyond the normal museum hours. Thank you for your responses.
-----Original Message-----
From: Museum discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of L Dewey
Sent: Thursday, April 06, 2006 10:43 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MUSEUM-L] Museum Evening Hours
happy hour at the museum is not mission-centric, but it can be amusing.
you'll want to drape the paintings.
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Editorial: Art, please — hold the vodka
From the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Feb. 28, 2006
The breathtaking Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum can be
a wonderful setting for many social events. Happy hour shouldn't be one
of them.
But when something is called Martinifest, should anyone really be
surprised that, as the Journal Sentinel's Mary Louise Schumacher
reported, "people threw up, passed out, were injured, got into
altercations and climbed onto sculptures"?
A beverage manager for one of the vendors said Martinifest "was a
phenomenal idea" with "poor planning." No. It was a phenomenally bad
idea with poor planning.
Even with good planning, the idea of holding a semiformal event at the
art museum in which guests can drink as many martinis as they like for
$30 is an engraved invitation for trouble. The sponsor, Clear Channel
Radio, a large national corporation that owns six radio stations
locally, has staged about half a dozen other events at the museum in
the past four years.
A local programming director for Clear Channel said that in hindsight
the price of Martinifest, in which restaurants and nightspots took
part, was too cheap. While that almost goes without saying, the idea
was flawed from the start. Rhetoric aside, the draw that night for many
folks clearly was not the art or the setting but the booze that, by
many accounts, was being poured as fast as some people could guzzle it.
Several vendors ran out of martini mix and reportedly started pouring
straight shots of vodka.
Little wonder then that at one point four young men at the Feb. 11
event climbed onto a tall bronze sculpture of a goddess-like woman or
that another man jumped from an outside terrace and was taken to a
hospital.
Some observers think the sheer size of the crowd might have caused much
of the trouble. But when the lure is a night of unlimited cocktails for
$30, what else would you expect but wall-to-wall attendance?
The idea of holding social events at the museum or other venues in town
is not unusual, especially given that there is an understandable demand
for such settings for social events and that the venues themselves
obviously can benefit from the additional revenue.
But the institutions obviously need to use common sense as well as
specific criteria in renting out their spaces.
David Gordon, the museum's director, said in a written statement that
in five years, the museum "never had any problems with rental events."
But as Gordon added, this "was not an appropriate event to be held in
the museum."
No doubt. Judging from some people at the event, common barrooms see
less boorish behavior.
From the Mar. 1, 2006 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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