THE Dallas Art Museum had high hopes for its exhibit of King Tut, the gold statutes, et all from 1300 BC Egypt. It planned on about one million guests based on how the exhibit did in Chicago and LA. Guess what, attendance is not as expected. If you log on to the museum site, one has to buy tickets at $56 a couple and that is M-Thursday, Fri-Sun twenty bucks higher, for half hour increments during the day. Apparently the museum assumed it would be standing in line crowds. This has my wife wondering if the exhibit tour is only a half hour long, not a bad question.
Hope fades to fear, now the museum is hoping people coming to the Cowboy game might attend, are they smoking something here or what? The exhibit runs until May and estimates are now scaled back to 800,000. The reason all this matters is that the museum has purchased the exhibit for a fixed cost not a percent of the gate whatever that turns out to be. The slowdown in the economy is blamed for the problem.
Perhaps you thought I was kidding on my description of socionomics and the American fascination with vampires. IN the same Dallas paper, it is reported that Stephanie Meyers Twilight series has now sold over 7 million copies, and of course the movie is a smash hit, HBO has another with the Sookie series entitled True Blood. P T Barnum said one can never go wrong underestimating the taste of the public, or something like that,
If Angelina Jolie were autographing a book at the Museum would that help, of course it would. And it may be that scheduling events like that would rescue the Tut show. It was no accident that Obama scheduled voter registration drives before and after rock concerts, you gotta go where they go.
The Black Swan book mentions the importance of the outlier, the unexpected event. While this happened to the Tut exhibit, I will bet the Cowboy playoff game, like the Twilight series, is a sellout today. Failing to anticipate a change in the economy was one problem for the Museum. The second was assuming the public would have the same yearning for culture exhibits that the Museum Board possesses.
We will be discussing Point of View in Ethics class, an all important consideration in estimating what the public is liable to do.
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