{"id":20312,"date":"2013-07-01T11:49:18","date_gmt":"2013-07-01T19:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/?p=20312"},"modified":"2013-07-01T14:03:27","modified_gmt":"2013-07-01T22:03:27","slug":"m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/?p=20312","title":{"rendered":"M"},"content":{"rendered":"
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via Karsten Moran for The New York Times<\/p>\n

The \u201cFrench Connection\u201d was in theaters. The Mets and the Yankees finished in fourth place. The city referred to itself as the Big Apple for the first time in advertising campaigns. And that same year, 1971, the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced a colorful piece of metal as its admission ticket, a tiny doodad that came to occupy a large place in the reliquary of New York City, along with\u00a0Greek-themed coffee cups<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> I \u2665 NY T-shirts and subway tokens.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Now the Met\u2019s admission button will go the way of the token. Citing the rising cost of the tin-plate pieces and the flexibility of a new paper ticket system using detachable stickers, the Met will end the buttons\u2019 42-year run on Monday, the same time it switches to a seven-day-a-week schedule instead of being closed on Mondays.<\/p>\n

\u201cI regret it slightly myself,\u201d said Thomas P. Campbell, the museum\u2019s director. \u201cOne of my assistants has a whole rainbow of the colored buttons on her desk.\u201d But he and Harold Holzer, the museum\u2019s senior vice president for public affairs, who oversees admissions and visitor services, said that the buttons had become an antiquated luxury.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe realize, without sounding crass, that it\u2019s a beloved brand and a beloved symbol,\u201d Mr. Holzer said. But the price of the metal has risen, he said, and the number of manufacturers the museum could go to for competitive prices has dwindled. \u201cIt just became too expensive. We saw that it was inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Metal admissions buttons are fashion accessories for visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but not after Monday.<\/p>\n

Over the years of its existence, the button became an accidental tourist totem \u2014 evidence not only that the city had been visited but also that high culture had been revered. And the button became a kind of art object in its own right, described once by Met curators as a kind of coin with a \u201cmultilayered tissue of readings and meanings.\u201d It has been recycled into artworks like\u00a0Ji Eon Kang\u2019s \u201cDress<\/span><\/a>,\u201d made from hundreds of the buttons assembled like chain mail. Its design has been incorporated into Met mugs and T-shirts. And it has been collected by the hundreds by a certain kind of Met devotee. (Collecting all 16 colors could also help you slip into the museum without paying the suggested $25 admission price; the colors are changed daily in random order.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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The current design,\u00a0bearing an \u201cM\u201d adapted from a 16th-century woodcut illustration based on a Leonardo<\/span><\/a> drawing, figures in the Met\u2019s sense of its own identity, including the museum\u2019s internal newsletter, which uses the button in its nameplate. Even the announcement that the Met would be open seven days a week borrowed the familiar iconography; it showed a line of six shiny buttons representing the days of the week, with a seventh added for Monday.<\/p>\n

The buttons were introduced a year after the Met instituted a suggested-price admission system, replacing paper tickets and stickpins, and they seemed to capture the spirit of the new admissions policy, acting as a souvenir instead of a receipt.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat badge became the un-ticket,\u201d said Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. \u201cYou weren\u2019t paying to get into the museum; you were making a donation. And in exchange you got this beautiful little thing that also has a control function.\u201d<\/p>\n

Museums around the world followed suit, with metal (or, increasingly, plastic) badges\u00a0now standard issue<\/span><\/a> in many institutions. The Met\u2019s own badges have evolved too, in terms of text and typeface (an \u201cM\u201d set in Bodoni and the initials \u201cMMA\u201d are among past iterations), as well as color. Hundreds of shades have come and gone, and those now in use are known by idiosyncratic in-house nicknames \u2014 Mole, Hubba Bubba, Piglet, Poupon. The one-inch badges \u2014 known in the admissions-button industry as litho tabs \u2014 are made by\u00a0Kraus & Sons<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> a manufacturing company based in Chelsea that also created the museum\u2019s first banners in the 1960s.\u00a0To keep up with the more than six million people who visit each year, the museum orders 1.6 million of the buttons four times a year, Mr. Holzer said, and they now cost about three cents per button, up from two cents only a few years ago. The new paper tickets will cost only about a penny each, and they will give the museum the space to promote shows, new and soon to close, and, Mr. Holzer added, a space \u201cto sell to corporate sponsors\u201d for advertising.<\/p>\n

The tickets will also be easier on the environment, though the Met does ask patrons to drop their buttons in a bowl on the way out the door, for placement in the city\u2019s metal recycling system.\u00a0The new ticket-stickers will incorporate a version of the Leonardo \u201cM,\u201d evoking the button. But in an era in which physical objects seem to be rapidly dematerializing into the digital, the loss of a durable little chunk of the Met will undoubtedly be missed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sad,\u201d said Monica Mahoney, a 46-year-old fashion designer who recently moved to Los Angeles from New York but was back on Thursday and paying a visit to the museum, as she often does. \u201cEveryone now will keep these, like they keep subway tokens. But it\u2019s just a memory of New York.\u201d<\/p>\n

But other patrons say they will suffer from no postbutton nostalgia. \u201cThey always fall off,\u201d said Malcolm Roberts, 66, a retired teacher who grew up in Brooklyn but now lives in Lakewood Ranch, Fla. \u201cAnd then, walking around the museum, I would feel like the emperor \u2014 naked. If it\u2019s the difference between buying a Monet and keeping these, they can buy the Monet.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It started with the phone booth which was downsized to the phone pole, ushering in the systematic replacement of the authentic and the real being by crap, or “virtual”. I guess it’s\u00a0“progress” and I’m an Old, but I’m not sure where it all ends.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via Karsten Moran for The New York Times The \u201cFrench Connection\u201d was in theaters. The Mets and the Yankees finished in fourth place. The city referred to itself as the Big Apple for the first time in advertising campaigns. And that same year, 1971, the Metropolitan Museum of Art introduced a colorful piece of metal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-haunted-attic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20312"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20389,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20312\/revisions\/20389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teensleuth.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}