The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, home to the nation's costliest art exhibition tickets, has raised the bar by offering a $75-a-person VIP ticket to "Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," more than double the already controversial top price of $30.
What does an extra $45 get you? Not relief from the crowds ogling the ancient treasures from Egyptian tombs, and no extras, not even a catalog. Instead, you gain access to a shorter line to get inside, and at any time on the chosen day. Buying a lower-priced ticket requires a specific time and puts you in a longer line -- sometimes for an hour or more.
One hundred VIP tickets a day are available, even when regular tickets are sold out. But buy the special tickets online, through Ticketmaster, and you pay a $7.50 "convenience charge" plus a delivery fee of $2.50 by e-mail to $25 by UPS, bringing the total to between $85 and $107.50. No fees are added to tickets bought at the museum box office.
King Tut -- A photo caption with an article in Thursday's California section about VIP lines for the King Tut exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art said regular ticket-holders "must stand in line for an hour or more" before gaining entrance. The average wait ranges from half an hour to an hour, according to the museum.
Tut ticket prices sparked an art-world controversy when the peak was $30, a new high for an art exhibition in the U.S.
The closest thing to the VIP ticket cited by art professionals, including Jeremy Strick, director of L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's $50 "Member Mondays," which admit members when the museum is closed to the public. The Met declined to book Tut because it didn't want to change its policy of charging no more than a "suggested" $15 admission fee.
The Tut prices were set by the backers of the show: AEG, the sports and entertainment presenter that developed Staples Center, and Arts and Exhibitions International. They worked with National Geographic and Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to bring an array of valuable objects from the tombs of King Tut, his relatives and 18th Dynasty (1555-1305 BC) contemporaries to the United States.
