Room for manoeuvre ... detail from Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
It might help the atmosphere at a sports event or a rock gig, but there's nothing like a crowd to ruin one's enjoyment of a painting. Space and silence are more or less essential requirements for contemplation to be rewarding - as anyone who's ever joined the scrummage around the Mona Lisa at the Louvre knows, a crush can be enough to put you off a picture you thought you liked.
All of which might begin to explain the abortive plan by New York's Neue Galerie to introduce "congestion pricing" after it acquired Gustav Klimt's luxurious, gilded portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer for an eye-popping £73m in a blaze of international publicity.
The plan to raise prices on Wednesdays from $15 to $50 was rapidly abandoned after visitors took exception to such naked elitism, but it's unlikely the plan would have worked anyway.
The supposedly separate realms of art and commerce are, of course, intimately bound together. We are inclined to assume that anything expensive must be good, and the more expensive the better. There's always a queue for a famously pricey art work, and you'll need to get the crash barriers in once something is declared too expensive to sell ("priceless").
We'd all like to know for certain whether or not a work of art is any good, but there's no way to escape the subjective judgment we build into any experience of beauty. Amid such confusion, the apparently objective valuation provided by the market offers a consoling illusion: this sold for a bunch of money, so it must be good.
A similar price-value equation is made with the price of exhibition tickets. Anyone winded by the experience of slogging around a crowded blockbuster at the National Gallery - like the mob-handed Titian exhibition - can always recover by resorting to the light and air invariably available in the free parts of the museum. (And it's not just visiting treasures which draw the punters: most of what's on show in the current Tate Constable exhibition at a tenner a pop can be seen for free in much emptier permanent collections the rest of the time.)
It seems unlikely that the Neue Galerie's price hike would actually have increased crowds - but it certainly wouldn't have thinned them all that much.
