Last year was not a quiet one for Paris museums — with a still-unsolved theft of five paintings from the city's Museum of Modern Art, a debate over the same institution giving an X-rating to a Larry Clark retrospective, and the refusal of Avdei Ter-Oganyan to show his work in the Louvre's Russian exhibition despite Russia's withdrawal of its demands that the artist be censored.
But the first brouhaha of 2011 has already produced results. Growing public discontent over the restrictive hours of city-run museums led the French newspaper Le Figaro to compare Paris-controlled museums to Soviet institutions earlier this month. Now, the city has announced a new plan for streamlining museum bureaucracy, though it will not go into effect until 2012.

While Paris's best-known museums are state-run — such as the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, and the Musée Picasso — 14 of its cultural institutions are run by the city, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Petit Palais. Analyzing the results of a report ordered earlier in the year by Paris mayor Betrand Delanoë, journalists at Le Figaro found that the bureaucratic nature of Paris museums made them extremely rigid, restricted the number of ticket sales, and discouraged arts patrons, who feared that their donations would enter the city's coffers and be used toward other ends.

But the biggest gripe with Paris's museums has been their opening hours. City council member Thierry Coudert told Le Monde that he had been trying to get the city to rethink museum hours for two years with no success. Coudert concluded that "reconnecting the hours of the municipal administration with the lives of consumers is taboo for the city of Paris.... Faced with this dead-end, the people of Paris have to organize their leisure activities around the schedule of an administration that hasn't changed in 50 years."

The 14 Paris-run institutions close their doors between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., and only the Museum of Modern Art and the Petit Palais have extended hours — on Thursdays, for temporary exhibitions only (the Museum of Modern Art until 10 p.m. and the Petit Palais until 8 p.m.). Visitors have complained of three-hour waits to enter, and in December, a Le Figaro poll showed that 83 percent of respondents wanted to have extended evening hours, which would bring Paris-run museums in step with institutions such as the Louvre and the Grand Palais.

Change is finally coming. Paris's culture department has announced plans to make these 14 institutions a separate public agency that will have its own budget and be free from the red tape of the city's bureaucracy. Christophe Girard, deputy culture director for the city, said in a press conference that the old structure was "inherited from the past and a source of too much inertia."
It is expected that one of the first items on the agenda of the new agency will be a re-consideration of museum hours.

In addition to facing a rigid bureaucracy, Paris-run museums that try to extend their hours must also deal with frequently intransigent unions. Fabrice Herrgott, director of the Museum of Modern Art, told Le Figaro that extending hours was a voluntary agreement on the part of museum personnel and required long negotiations with the unions. Nevertheless, his museum has managed to establish a special closing time of midnight for the popular Basquiat show on the last two Fridays in January.

Yet labor challenges remain. Responding to the 2012 restructuring, the Supap-FSU union has already come out against extended museum hours, issuing a statement that "in order to make city of Paris museums competitive with the Grand Palais and the Louvre, staff who are underpaid and live outside the city are going to see their work conditions and living conditions get worse." The same union issued a strike alert when the multi-million-euro theft of paintings from the Museum of Modern Art last May led to increased night shifts at the institution, citing "unacceptable" pressure on its members.

This was a banner year for attendance at French national museums, with the Louvre setting a new record for the third year in a row with 8.5 million visitors. The Pompidou Center logged over 3.1 million, and the Orangerie museum saw a 22 percent increase in attendance. The Grand Palais established special extended hours for its record-setting Monet show, which was open 24 hours a day this past weekend before closing on Monday. Actress Jodie Foster was among the brave souls waiting in the cold to enter the show, Reuters reports. 

Among Paris-run institutions, the Museum of Modern Art reports a very healthy number of visitors — over 290,000 — to the Basquiat retrospective that opened on October 15 (the show continues through January 30). Perhaps with more flexible hours, these numbers may grow even higher in 2012.

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