My parents cried tears of frustration when I told them I was pursuing a degree in art history instead of STEM. Naturally, museums became my safe haven.

I grew up north of Boston, with the Museum of Fine Arts a train and subway ticket away. But to visit the museum, I had to pay $18 for a round-trip train ticket and an additional $10 for a child’s ticket. Once I turned 18 and the price doubled, however, my respite became prohibitively expensive.

Museums perpetuate a narrative that the art on their walls belongs to the public. At the same time, though, they need to function as businesses. In 2014, Washington, D.C., lost the Corcoran Gallery of Art when the museum entered financial insolvency. The battle between public trust and business is most evident in the case of rising admission costs. Anger against the increasing fees stems from pricing people out of attending museums and evidence of mismanagement.

The battle between public interests and business reality is particularly evident with the second-most visited art museum in the world, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, which uses public funding and sits on public land. Just this past year, the museum ended its “pay as you can” entrance fee, citing increasing business costs. New Yorkers with residential documentation are grandfathered into the “pay as you can” rule as long as they bring their New York identification.

This policy makes the museum inaccessible to immigrants without documentation or people who commute to New York from neighboring states. Museum patrons are already overwhelmingly upper-middle-class white people, and these new pay barriers represent an increased gentrification of knowledge. The gentrification of knowledge bars low-income people of color from viewing their objects of cultural patrimony, which were often forcibly taken or unfairly acquired by white colonizers. Museums seem to be rebuffing visitors who do not have the means to upgrade an admissions fee to a membership.

Beyond pricing out visitors, many critics of the Metropolitan Museum argued that a museum should not burden its visitors due to its mismanagement. Paying visitors find the idea that museums are spending their money responsibly hard to believe. Just this week The New York Times reported that the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum paid $6.7 million for a hat that scholars now believe may have never actually belonged to Lincoln. Moreover, from a personal standpoint, it is hard to justify paying for a visit when only 8 percent of museum interns receive a living wage.

At the same time, stories about reckless and disrespectful visitors damaging museum artwork seemingly support exclusivity. While we are all taught not to touch the art, not everyone is a respectful guest. In 2017, a selfie-taker smashed a pumpkin in Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room — All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” at the Hirshhorn Museum. More maliciously, in 2011, a woman at D.C.’s National Gallery of Art attacked a Paul Gauguin painting but was prevented by its plexiglass protection. Museums face large crowds, and they have to be mindful and prepared for future damage.

Accessibility and conservation are not mutually exclusive. If museums want to stop the tide of people jumping ship because they now have to pay admissions fees, museums must be more transparent to the public about affordable ways to enjoy the museum and where admissions revenue goes.

One example of maintaining accessibility is advertising free admission days. Notably, Bank of America offers monthly free days at over 200 museums for its customers. In regard to conservation costs, museums could adopt the National Portrait Gallery’s “Portrait Circle” model. This model allows members to adopt an artwork, with the higher cost of their membership covering conservation fees that would usually come from general admission fees.

There are ways of balancing conservation and accessibility, but raising admissions fees and citing growing business costs without explaining to the public what these costs are is a detrimental way to handle the dilemma.

Katie O’Hara is a first-year graduate student in art and museum studies.