The Academy demands: "Free admission for artists to Austrian federal museums!"
IAA Card to be recognised at the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Albertina. The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna also advocates, in the sense of promoting artists, that artists with the International Artists' Card of the IAA receive free admission to all Austrian federal museums.
The fact that the International Artists' Card of the IAA (International Association of Art) is not (or no longer) recognised in the federal museums KHM and Albertina is shocking and contradicts a fruitful exchange between artists, museums and recipients with regard to a contemporary art discourse. As educational institutions, museums are places for artists to gain knowledge, to research, to question their own artistic practice and to critically engage with what is on display. Making it more difficult for artists to access museums, however, also deprives museums of a productive source of friction.
Moreover, it is a desideratum that art students have free admission to the Albertina and the KHM.
Since many of the students of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna have preliminary studies, they are already older than 25 or 26 and thus even have to pay the full entrance fee, or do not have the possibility to get the U25 annual ticket of the KHM for 27,- Euros. Museum visits are an important part of the artistic and academic teaching at an art university.
There is no art museum without artists!
Ingeborg Erhart
Vice-Rector for Art and Teaching, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna