Brera Art Gallery launches card to visit museum and specials online

The Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan is launching the new online platform Brera Plus+, which until December 31 will expand at the multimedia level the contents of what will no longer be a simple ticket but a “free card,” a true “subscription.” The card will provide access to the museum and also to the “Brera Plus+” online content, and will be valid for a full year. Brera Plus+ is the set of content that Brera offers to enhance its art collections: innovative dialogues and exhibitions that combine together video and online exploration; concerts, masterclasses and performances in streaming (every third Thursday of the month); guided tours and online meetings with specialists, actors, writers; access to the repositories and the online restoration laboratory; Brera the night in streaming; members’ assembly. The membership will be free and will be available starting tomorrow, Sept. 15. Each cardholder (or member) will be entitled to a visit to the Pinacoteca di Brera (booked in advance), and in addition, compared to admission alone, will also have access to online content, special programs, concerts, and live streaming events.

For example, among the content accessible through Brera Plus+, a prominent place will be occupied by the two initiatives that resume the celebrations for Raphael’s year. On October 12, Performing Raphael will propose a rich and interactive excursus on the installations of the Marriage of the Virgin from 1806 to the present day, finding further development in the reconstruction of the installation conceived in 1976 by Bruno Munari (on the occasion of the Trial for the Museum) to look at the Brera masterpiece with new eyes. A path that will ideally continue on October 29 with the Ninth Dialogue New Perspectives on Perspective, a virtual exhibition that will place side by side the Marriage of the “divine painter” with the Chinese scroll Journey along the River during the Qingming, made by Zhang Zeduan at the time of the Song Dynasty (960-1279): a novel juxtaposition that will allow us to reflect on ways of representing time and space in different historical and cultural contexts.

By signing up for a membership, or a subscription, the “user” can enjoy the Pinacoteca or the Braidense Library by returning regularly, not limiting themselves to a single visit, but participating in the life of the museum, taking advantage of other services and content as well. This eliminates the concept of “ticket” and also that of “visitor,” particularly in that “hit and run” mode that has characterized mass tourism.

“Since 2015,” said in fact the director of the Pinacoteca di Brera, James Bradburne, during the press conference, “the mission of the museum has focused on fruition and not on tourism: we turned our backs on tourism, we refused to do the exhibitions, we said that pumping numbers with buses was not our goal and did not correspond to our visions. We focused on collection and collection enhancement, not mass tourism-I didn’t think that was a reliable and sustainable goal. We have seen museums that focused on mass tourism, like the Guggenheim in New York, collapse after 9/11 or other problems, and now we see the collapse of mass tourism with Covid. We can’t dream of putting it all back together, we have to work now: tourism is good, but we need engaged tourism. We need tourism that assimilates tourists with citizens: with mass tourism there is a lack of responsibility on the part of people, who behave as they would not behave at home. We must not recreate bad mechanisms but we must insist on a step forward, and that moment is now.”

“The measure of the museum,” the director added, “is not its number of visitors-I have always said that is the most irrelevant number in my professional life. Can we say that the Uffizi is less of a museum because it has fewer visitors? That Brera is less good because it has a third of the visitors? That is nonsense: we have to kill the idea that visitor numbers are the measure of museum success. How to deal with the step? We must also kill the idea of the visitor and move to the idea of the user: the visitor exists because of the physical museum visit, but the online visit is complementary to the physical visit. Museum participation is also valid when I enter the site and the content that allows me to learn more about the work. I can still participate in the museum. Thus, from ticket we have to switch to membership. The shift (from ticket to membership, and from visitor to member) represents a transformation of the concept of the museum and an opportunity to bring it closer to its community. Visitors do not have a voice, but members do. Freedom is participation.”

The idea was born to cope with the Covid emergency and to benefit from the lessons learned during this difficult time in history. Like all museums, Brera also closed during the weeks of the so-called lockdown: during this period, however, the museum, it points out, has always worked to rethink its entire offering and approach to visiting, starting when, during the lockdown, Brera was the first to put the entire experience online, so as not to lose contact with the public. A public that, the institute informs, has rewarded the museum with a full house: in July and August, 30,000 booked their visit to the Pinacoteca on brerabooking.org, with a clear prevalence of Milanese and young people (those under 40 accounted for 60 percent of the total), which confirms the success of the line drawn in recent years. During this period, first and foremost, the acceleration of processes already under development, some of which have been underway for some time, was noted. For example, the importance of online communication, which made it possible to overcome distances by meeting on different web platforms, and that of online content, not as a temporary substitute for physical presence, but as an interactive experience in its own right. The intense investment of time and energy to make the Art Gallery accessible online during the isolation proved that a museum is not only what it has, but also what it offers to the public.

Second, the implementation of all the necessary security measures for the reopening ensured that the spaces were never overcrowded. This prompted the adoption of a practice already in place in many large institutions: mandatory online booking. Originally developed by museums such as the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and the Uffizi to handle huge crowds of mass tourists, mandatory online reservations now serve to ensure that there are never queues as well as to contain contagions. These two accelerations (the parity of online content and the need for bookingonline) combined with the collapse of mass tourism, have made it possible to return to what the museum believes is the true purpose of the mission launched since January 2016: to put Brera in the heart of its city. Hence, the need to propose a new way for the public to approach the museum. “That is possible,” the Pinacoteca stresses, “by making a single, simple change, in line with the past and Braidense values. As with libraries, it is about imagining a museum that thinks of its visitors by considering them its users, inviting them to use all the services the institution offers through a card (a subscription) instead of the traditional ticket. The idea is that in a post-COVID, in some cases forcibly digital world, the museum experience (and the work of the museum) can no longer be defined purely in terms of visiting physical spaces. Instead, the museum’s identity (and its economic model) should be based on everything the museum does to enhance its collections, inside the spaces, outside and online.”

The card will be offered on a trial basis until Dec. 31, 2020. For all information you can visit the Brera Art Gallery website.

Brera Art Gallery launches card to visit museum and specials online

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