During the summer vacation, the Shanghai Museum welcomes a large flow of visitors, and many parents bring their children to increase their knowledge. Photo by Ye Chenliang, reporter of this newspaper
To get to know a city, start with a museum – this summer, the museum has become one of the most popular destinations for citizens and tourists from all over the world. Taking Shanghai as an example, according to the latest statistics from the Municipal Administration of Cultural Relics, the city's 162 museums received more than 3.172 million visitors in July this year. In August, the museum fever will continue to heat up. Museums in popular tourist cities across the country have also seen a heat wave.
Correspondingly, popular venues have long queues or difficulty making reservations. Many people came with anticipation, but in the end they could not enter the door, so they could only return angrily. In response to the enthusiasm of the audience, the Nanjing Six Dynasties Museum and the Shenyang Palace Museum have announced that they will cancel the closure of Mondays within a certain period of time, so that citizens and tourists can visit every day. Hangzhou adjusted the opening hours of 52 municipal state-owned museums from July 31, and implemented staggered openings: after the adjustment, 11 museums will be open every day, 17 will be closed on Tuesdays, and the remaining 24 will remain unchanged. It is an international practice for museums to be "closed on Mondays", should it break the convention in the face of the explosive enthusiasm for visiting?
There is a large gap between supply and demand
"Set three alarms, still can't grab a museum ticket" "Tens of thousands of tickets are empty in 45 seconds, all in the next 7 days are full, it's too difficult to grab tickets!" "On major online and social platforms, posts complaining about the museum's hard to find can be seen everywhere.
On the other hand, in order to receive as many visitors as possible, major museums are constantly challenging the limit - the long queue in the special exhibition hall of the Yue Wang Goujian sword of the Hubei Provincial Museum; The visitor density of the National Museum's "Ancient China" exhibition hall is very high; The open day of the Mausoleum Museum of the First Emperor of Qin inpoured into 65,000 people every day... The reporter walked into the Shanghai Museum, a popular venue in Shanghai, and the crowd was also buzzing here. Entering from the south gate, the suitcases stacked on the right hand side are about to "cross" to the security checkpoint - the original luggage storage in the museum has long been insufficient, and the film and television hall temporarily changed to a luggage storage room is not enough, and the museum can only block out an empty space next to the security checkpoint at the entrance of the south gate to put luggage for the audience. It is close to the restaurant, and the crowds waiting in line during peak dining hours gather here, which directly affects the normal passage. "According to the area of the venue, the equipment and other calculations, the maximum daily reception capacity of our pavilion should be 8,000 people, but in order to allow more people to have the opportunity to walk in, it has now been relaxed to 10,000 people." Chu Xiaobo, director of Shanghai Museum, said frankly that in this way, not only the audience experience has been affected, but also brought challenges to the supply of supporting services for the museum, and the affordability of many facilities has far exceeded the original design. For example, seats in restaurants are limited, and spectators have to wait up to an hour during peak lunch hours to be served. The use of toilets is also a problem, and there are long queues in women's toilets, and only temporary conversion of men's toilets on a certain floor to women's toilets can be made. There were too many people, there were not enough lounge chairs, many spectators sat on the floor, and even many people sat on the stairs of the safe passage.
Closure does not mean that the museum is closed
In view of the gap between supply and demand, will the cancellation of the museum's closed day a week be effectively alleviated?
"First of all, we need to clarify a misunderstanding - in the eyes of the outside world, the closure of the museum is a day off for the museum, but it is not." Zheng Yi, professor and doctoral supervisor of the Department of Cultural Relics and Museology at Fudan University, said that for the cultural museum venue, although this day is not open to the public, there is still a lot of internal work to deal with: on the one hand, for a long time to display exhibitions, cultural relics need to be maintained and adjusted; On the other hand, frontline workers need training and learning; At the same time, venue maintenance and equipment overhaul must also be carried out to eliminate potential safety hazards. "During the summer holiday season, popular museums such as the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art often have long queues, but they do not cancel the closing days of the week due to the large number of people," she said. ”
"The closure of the museum one day a week is the result of years of exploration, which can ensure the normal, safe and scientific operation of the museum, and breaking this convention also needs to be fully demonstrated." Chu Xiaobo bluntly said that as a public cultural institution, it is the museum's unshirkable obligation to provide high-quality services for more people, but the premise is that it is safe and controllable. He took the existing People's Square building in Shangbo as an example, which is a nearly 30-year-old building, and the boilers, central air conditioning and other hardware facilities in it have been overdue and need to be inspected and maintained. The staff also has its limits. During the summer vacation, Shangbo added a night show every Friday, "open a night club, at least 50 to 100 staff need to work overtime, once a week, you can also overcome difficulties, but it is difficult to maintain it." Chu Xiaobo said. In addition, cultural relics also need rest, especially calligraphy and painting, organic matter cultural relics are very fragile, have extremely high requirements for light, temperature and humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, etc., and increasing the opening time is obviously not conducive to the prolongation of cultural relics.
"The museum colleagues are really hard and hard!" Liu Shuguang, chairman of the China Association of Museums, lamented that in order to better receive more tourists in the summer, various attempts have been made, including temporarily canceling Monday closures, implementing classification and staggered openings, extending the opening day by one hour or adding night shows. However, these measures can only be emergencies, and if the temporary becomes the norm, it will require human, material and financial support to keep up. In fact, even if the closure day of the popular museum is canceled, it will not be able to meet the demand for explosive visits during the peak season. Take the Shaanxi History Museum, which has just announced that it will be "closed on Mondays" during the summer vacation, for example, the museum receives 12,000 visitors a day during the summer vacation, which is already three times the original maximum daily capacity, and in the face of 600,000 online ticket grabs every day, opening every day and increasing the number of 12,000 people a week is actually a drop in the bucket.
Rationally look at the internal work laws of the industry
In the face of the national museum fever, Liu Shuguang believes that this must be a good thing, traditional culture and art, Chinese history and humanities are attracting national attention, but "the contradiction between supply and demand is also an objective fact." He called on all aspects of society to take a long-term, rational and objective view of museums. Cultural museum venues are professional institutions, and their internal working rules should be respected. "Museum visits are different from general attraction visits, there are certain requirements for the environment, at present, the major popular museums are released according to the highest reception capacity, the on-site environment is noisy, the sense of experience does not meet expectations, and it is also a loss to the audience."
"Don't focus on entering the museum during the summer vacation, you can choose the right time to travel at the right time throughout the year; The choice of venues can also be more personalized and diversified, don't rush to popular pavilions. In the view of Tang Shifen, secretary of the party committee of Shangbo, the venue has hot and cold, and the humanistic knowledge and literacy that people need to accumulate in their lives are not hot and cold, and there is no time to arrange it at any time according to possible resources. In fact, not all cultural and museum venues are overcrowded during the summer holidays. Mr. Fang, a citizen, revealed that when he went to visit the Mausoleum Museum of the First Emperor of Qin in July, he encountered a peak crowd, and most of the time he saw was basically the back of the head of other tourists, and in the end, he couldn't move, and could only "look" at "No. 1 pit" through the glass window from outside the exhibition hall. When I went to the Hanjing Diyang Mausoleum Museum, the experience was much better, and the exhibitions inside were done very carefully, although the geographical location was relatively remote and the transportation was not convenient enough, it was a good place to learn more about Han culture.
The "uneven heat and cold" of the museum is a necessary stage for the rapid development of the domestic cultural and museum industry. For example, Shanghai received more than 3.172 million museum visitors in July, about two-thirds of which came from the top ten popular museums. "We not only need the Shanghai Museum, the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum (including the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, the Shanghai Natural History Museum, the Shanghai Planetarium), the Memorial Hall of the First Congress of the Communist Party of China and other large museums to play the 'head geese' effect, but also need them to drive more venues to play their respective public cultural service functions, in order to 'each have its own beauty, beauty and harmony' and form a joint force." Zheng Yi believes that this is an effective way to divert the flow of popular museums, and it is also the core essence of Shanghai's construction of "museum capital" - committed to forming a museum system with reasonable layout, optimized structure, distinctive characteristics, complete functions and perfect system. For non-popular museums, it is necessary to hold exhibitions and educational activities according to their own resources and advantages, and adhere to and highlight their uniqueness. Shanghai Museum of Glass, Fengxian District Museum, Minhang District Museum, etc., far from the city center, have made useful explorations and embarked on the road of characteristic development.
"Now some museum audiences are more or less blind, especially the 'special forces' type check-in tour." Liu Shuguang suggested that local authorities should introduce the resources and characteristics of local museums, especially for less popular venues, and tourism institutions can also appropriately guide, tilt and promote. "Over the past decade, the number of mainland museums has grown rapidly, and now it has reached 6,565, ranking among the highest in the world, and more than 90% of them are free to open. I hope everyone will give the museum a little more confidence and patience, I believe it will get better and better. ”
Author丨Li Ting
Source: Wen Wei Po