The 82nd edition of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s flagship biennial is set to open on March 6, and for the first time, it will be free for anyone 25 and younger.

The novel admission policy, put into place just over a year ago thanks to a $2 million donation from the artist and Whitney trustee Julie Mehretu, is an extension of the museum’s Free Friday Nights and Free Second Sundays programs, which launched in January 2024 under director Scott Rothkopf.

“We learned from younger visitors at those events that free admission was more important to them than to any other age group,” Rothkopf told The Baer Faxt. He explained that the museum upped the age threshold from 18, under the previous policy, to 25, so it could “reach not just students but people in their early careers for whom the cost of living can be a real barrier to cultural participation.”

So far, Rothkopf’s plan has worked. The Whitney has seen a 300% increase in visitors from the 25-and-under demographic since the program was put in place. When factoring in all three of its free admissions programs, the museum’s total attendance has risen by 20%, while the average age of its audience has dropped by nearly 10 years.

In an era when museums, like legacy institutions of all kinds, are fighting for the attention of younger generations, these numbers are significant. What effects, if any, they will have on the reception to the Whitney Biennial—always a bellwether event of some kind—could be even more revealing.

“At the end of the day, this is about access to art that’s relevant and alive. It’s about the democracy of ideas and maybe even the future of democracy in a bigger sense,” Rothkopf said. “When people worry about whether there’s an audience for art in the future, I think this proves strongly that there is if we can just lower barriers to participation.”

The estimated cost, in dollars, of opening The Artists’ Garden (TAG) Art Museum, a private cultural institution in a Jean Nouvel-designed building in Qingdao, China, in 2022. The investment (1.6bn yuan) went bust in less than three years. TAG announced its closure in July 2025, making it an object lesson in one of the key challenges facing Chinese private museums.

“TAG embodied the logic of using cultural prestige to anchor real estate developments,” Cathy Fan wrote at Artnet News. The museum, which spanned around 183,000 square feet of interior space across 12 connected galleries looking onto the Yellow Sea, was just one part of an ambitious building complex meant to supplement a new satellite campus of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, the nation’s leading art school.

The only problem? State officials canceled the latter project in 2021 as part of a larger decision to keep pre-existing educational institutions from growing beyond the provinces where they were founded. The about-face in academic policy effectively cut off the influx of people and resources meant to sustain the TAG Art Museum before its doors even opened.

Although the museum teased (unspecified) reopening dates in its closure announcement, it looks like a privately-funded victim of a public policy reversal bigger than the arts. And in that sense, this Chinese story could very well travel elsewhere, too.

—Tim Schneider / The Gray Market

Anon ASKed: Are we really seeing a big shift in the art market and its collector demographics? Are younger collectors stepping in, chasing low- to mid-range works, or are older ones still running the show with A-plus blue-chip deals? In other terms, is the art market organically becoming more democratized?

Josh Baer for NoReserve: I think we are confusing younger with newer. Anecdotally, what we're finding is that newer collectors are willing to be more historical than I would've imagined. Some of these collectors are buying contemporary art and old masters, but I also see new collectors buying American art of the west—that’s interesting. I even see 40-year-olds buying second-rate impressionist works, which is kind of mystifying. I think there are many factors going on simultaneously; there's not one overriding thing at play other than the fact that there's so many people interested in art.

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