Moco Museum is a privately-owned modern and contemporary art 'museum', now with spaces in Amsterdam, Barcelona and London. In this article, I think about the economics of these privately run spaces, and the positives and negatives.
Moco Museum was founded in 2016 by the former art dealers and gallerist couple, Lionel and Kim Logchies-Prin. The first Moco was opened in Amsterdam, close to the iconic Van Gogh Museum, followed by Barcelona in October 2021 and most recently in London in August 2024. They are, from all reports, doing big business. It has been estimated that around 650,000 people per year visit Moco Amsterdam. Many of its guests are said to have never visited a gallery or art institution before.
The bottom floor of Moco London features this installation by the American visual artist Daniel Arsham. The artist has been the subject of a solo exhibition at Moco Amsterdam.
My thoughts on Moco London
I visited Moco London over a weekend in September. It was a Saturday afternoon and the museum was busy but not crowded. For two adults, it was about £20 each to visit, which is expensive - it's more expensive than the Louvre in Paris (at €22), which covers about 650,000 square feet, 33x bigger in size than Moco London. The crowd was diverse in age and cultural backgrounds and it was pretty cool to see – I'm so used to visiting galleries and auction houses in London where the crowd is, let's say, less heterogeneous.
Moco London covers three floors and we went through it in about 40 minutes, although they say it might take up to 1.5 hours (and yes, maybe if you read all the descriptions on the walls). It was a wide-ranging collection from NFTs and digital art, to blue chip artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring and Banksy (and even a Picasso loitering awkwardly near a fire exit). All of the works are on loan from collections and, allegedly, may be for sale although that's definitely not the focus here.
The layout, interiors and descriptions are geared towards social media and making things very Instagramable. I commend them for that. I'm so sick of stuffy, white-walled galleries and the unapproachable atmosphere of fine art establishments these days.
I must admit I had pretty low expectations going into Moco. I can't begin to trust the effusively positive reviews on Google because their marketing campaign is very effective. For example, Moco Amsterdam is rated 4.2 out of 5 (with 21,000 reviews), Moco Barcelona is rated 4.3 (with 9,000 reviews) and Moco London is sitting at 4.7 (with 250 reviews). Actually it's quite fun to look through the one and two star reviews and they pretty accurately summarise my thoughts on Moco: "a commercial product, like expensive fast food", "I wished they had more art pieces", and "Overpriced and small. Go to the Tate".
I'm all for making art more accessible – that's basically my whole reason for setting up @goodnightgallery – but this is already being provided by existing institutions in London, and who offer a competing experience for free or for a lot less than Moco charges. I want people to enjoy art, but not to feel ripped off in the process or short-changed. It's also adopting a strange middle ground position between an immersive art exhibition (like the terrible immersive van Gogh shows) and a classical gallery. The mix of art and artists felt too disjointed, like they were trying to cover a hundred plus years of modern and contemporary art in a space that simply cannot do that effectively.
The economics of Moco London
Moco Amsterdam B.V. is a private company and I couldn't find any financial statements online, so I've given my best estimate of financial performance below.
An analysis of the economics of the new Moco Museum in London.
Starting with revenue, and assuming that it will attract 650,000 visitors a year (as the Amsterdam location did in 2021) and charge an average ticket price of £15 (which, depending on the day of the week, tickets are £17-21 for adults and £15-19 for students), this implies ticketing revenue of £9,750,000. Let's conservatively add another quarter million for sales in the gift shop, and their annual revenue could be about £10 million.
For expenses, the big ticket items to me would be the following:
Art: All of the art in the Moco Museums is on loan from private collections and the financial arrangements are not disclosed. Many collectors may be willing to loan their work to Moco in return for the exposure that it gives the work, although whether this has any value is questionable (as it's not a recognised institution). Allegedly, Moco can and has facilitated purchases of the work on show, functioning as a de facto art gallery. In addition, some of the less well-known artists in the museum have likely loaned their work for free in exchange for exposure. Overall, I'm assuming that the cost of actually borrowing the art is notional, let's say £500,000.
Employees: The Moco Museum group is said to have around 100 employees, although that's spread across all three museums. I saw about 10 employees working in the museum on the day that I visited. Applying the average salary for a shop assistant in the UK, of £30,801, and assuming that there's 20 employees on the roster, that's about £600,000 for the temporary staff. And then assigning 1/3 of the permanent employees to the London museum, and giving them a higher salary of £40,000, that's £1,400,000 for the permanent staff.
Rent: Situated at 1-4 Marble Arch in London, this is prime real estate. The 20,000 square foot retail premises is probably costing around £200 per square foot, or £4,000,000 per year. A massive dent into the budget.
Insurance: Would I want a hoard of kids and art world newbies around my million dollar Banksy? Probably not without knowing that there's a decent insurance policy, which is usually around 0.1 to 0.5% of the value of the insured art. The collections are Moco are pretty impressive, especially the Basquiat's, and so I'd put the value closer to half a billion in art, which conservatively imputes an insurance cost of around £2,000,000 per year.
I'm already at £8,500,000 per year in annual costs and I haven't even included the most relevant cost being -
Marketing: Moco Museum markets like crazy. They even branded a number of London's iconic black cabs with their shade of pink and plastered with the Moco name. They have an affiliate program to reimburse influencers who drive ticket sales. They have partnered with advertising agencies like Multivitamin Studio (case study) to optimise their marketing campaigns. It's hard to gauge how much Moco Museum spends per year on advertising, but averages for the industry suggest this could be around 10-15% of revenue to as high as $21 per customer (see Shopify's estimates here). Conservatively placing it at 1/4 of ticket sales, results in an average marketing spend of almost £2,500,000.
And yes that wipes out all of Moco's profit in London and even puts them into the red, which makes me think it's currently a break-even enterprise at best, with the hope of achieving profitability with scale and as the brand becomes more popular and established. It shows how building these spaces is not for the faint hearted. Yes the ticket price is high, but their expenses are too and, aside from marketing (which is the most direct contributor to revenue), cannot really be minimised further.
Positives and negatives
We have seen a rise in the number of private art institutions - think Fotografiska and the Unauthorised Banksy exhibitions, as well as teamLabs and the Immersive van Gogh shows. Some of these are truly great, pushing art to new levels (teamLabs is a great example of this), whereas others feel completely exploitative (the Unauthorised Banksy shows basically serve as the only place works from him stolen off the street continue to be shown).
The Moco brand is somewhere in between. For what it is, it's done well and is reaching out to a new audience for art. But for established art lovers, it's just not it.
Disclaimer: This is just a back of the napkin estimate and I do not have publicly available sources to support the analysis, so please read it for illustrative purposes only.
George
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