Night at the Museum

By Chris Bagley

The last bit of color was fading from the Saturday evening sky, and the lighted gothic spires of Vienna’s Rathaus were beginning to stand out. Birgit and Daniela, both 26, were standing in the line that extended across Heroes Plaza near the city center, waiting to pay for the tickets that would let them into a series of Vienna’s most upscale locales, including several that normally collect €10 ($16) at the door. A cold, soft wind was carrying American pop music from a corner of the plaza.

It wasn’t a night of clubbing or a pub crawl. The two young women and thousands of other Viennese on the Heldenplatz were among the first of the 427,000 people who poured through Austria’s museums during the Lange Nacht der Museen (Long Night of Museums) on Oct. 4. All-inclusive €13 tickets bought a cultural smorgasbord that stretched from 6 p.m. until 1 a.m.

Some visitors explored the Joseph Haydn House and the Jewish Museum in Eisenstadt near the Hungarian border. Others slipped through the soap factory and the town historical archive in Lustenau on the Rhine River 400 miles to the west. Innsbruck-area residents had the Museum of Nativity Miniatures and the Typewriter Museum within driving distance. In all, 610 museums and galleries participated nationwide.

Art aficionados, beer buffs and clock collectors can revel in citywide museum crawls in Paris, Amsterdam and a slew of German and Swiss cities. Since its launch in 2000, Austria’s nationwide Lange Nacht has eclipsed all of them, in terms of both visitors and participating museums. That’s all the more impressive when you consider the country’s size: The museumgoers this year represented more than 5 percent of its 8.3 million residents.

"It’s cool that there’s a lot going on in the city tonight," Daniela said.

Birgit agreed. "It’s a good atmosphere."

Observers of Europe’s arts and culture scene trace the origin of museum nights to 1997, when Berlin put on its first such event. A key goal was to draw in people who don’t otherwise visit museums, whether they spend most Saturday nights knitting at home or listening to punk music in an underground bar. The semiannual event caught on, and Berlin held its 23rd museum night on Aug. 30, drawing about 40,000 visitors.

Austria’s Lange Nacht, organized by Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), the national broadcaster, is no longer limited to museums. This year, Austria’s leading association of manufacturers hosted a chocolate exhibition in the Vienna palace that serves as its headquarters. Private art galleries have signed on in increasing numbers. At least two of the hosts this year were private residents who showed off antiques and other collections in their homes.

ORF representatives say it’s all much bigger than what they had imagined eight years ago. For ORF and the 100 or so museums that participated in 2000, the decision to take part was "like jumping into cold water," said Elisabeth Mayerhoffer, who led the effort in her role as ORF’s marketing director.

Many of the museums have come to put on special demonstrations for Lange Nacht or debut longer-term exhibits in association with the event.

Perhaps the biggest change this year was a heavier focus on future museum fanatics. About 175 locations set up special exhibits for children; ORF handed out prizes to kids who visited three or more.

That presented a dilemma, Carolyn Heiss said halfway through a visit to Vienna’s Bestattungsmuseum (Funeral Museum). Heiss, her two children and three of their friends had already visited the Roman Museum, more than a mile away in the city center. It was pushing 9 p.m., and Heiss said she wanted to put the kids to bed in time to head back out to the Museumsquartier, where separate museums were exhibiting the paintings of American realist Edward Hopper and of Christian Schad, a German whose early works were confiscated by the Nazis.

But the kids weren’t quite ready to pack it in. Veronika Heiss and Franziska Wilheim, both six, had just laid down together in a coffin to have their picture taken and trotted over just long enough to pronounce the experience "fun" before zipping over to another offering.

Upstairs, guides in Habsburg-era funerary garb were explaining burial practices for the royal family and for ordinary citizens. The museum itself was once Vienna’s municipal funeral center.

ORF pays several hundred people to staff the event, directing visitors from one museum to the next. The broadcaster and regional transit authorities set aside 50 busses to drive special routes. And ORF promotes the event heavily on its national television and regional radio stations, requiring it to forgo revenue that it would normally receive from outside advertisers. ORF is an autonomous arm of the national government; most of its programs rely on taxpayer dollars to supplement advertising revenue, which has eroded steadily in recent years.

Austrian museum representatives also say they get little or nothing back from ORF, which sells the all-inclusive tickets. Of a dozen Austrian museum professionals interviewed for this article, most say the night is well worth their costs because the new visitors return throughout the year. At the Salzburg Museum, which encompasses seven city-owned museums, about one-third of the 2,600 visitors last year were first-timers, spokeswoman Tanja Petritsch estimates. "I’m certain [Lange Nacht] has been a great opportunity for people to have a look at the museum landscape," she says.

Innsbruck resident Ines Sendner said last year’s Lange Nacht was a chance to discover a contemporary art gallery that she enjoyed enough to return for an exhibition of works by Jonathan Meese, a German performance artist and painter. She visited at least as many museums in the course of last year’s event as in a typical year, she said.

Lange Nacht is less beneficial for the Albertina, one of Vienna’s most prestigious houses of art. It’s another seven hours of wages and electricity and the visitors don’t pay, spokeswoman Verena Dahlitz says. The Albertina held back from participating until 2006; by then, Lange Nacht had gotten so big that it would have looked bad to not join in, she says. If there’s any benefit, it’s media attention to the fact that the Albertina has come out on top of the visitor counts, she adds. Last year, about 13,000 people squeezed through in the course of seven hours, compared to 4,000 or 5,000 on a healthy Sunday. The Museum of Natural History came out on top this year, with 12,737 visitors.

As a result, Lange Nacht draws sporadic complaints from visitors who say the crowds make for too much waiting outside museums and distract from the exhibits inside. "This is shaping up to be the Long Night of Standing," one young man quipped on the Heroes Plaza, about halfway through a 20-minute wait for his ticket.

That didn’t bother Ursula Siegl, who was standing nearby with her husband and two children. The Siegls rarely visit museums in Austria, other than a small handful in and around their town just outside of Vienna in the course of three previous Lange Nachts. The main question this time was how many they’d be able to squeeze in before 1 a.m., she said.

"We’ll see how long it takes us to get through the line," she said. L

Chris Bagley is a reporter for theNorth County Times newspaper in Escondido, Calif. He recently spent two months in Austria on a journalism fellowship.