Get your black turtlenecks out and ready, public galleries across China get ready to open their doors to all

By the end of 2012, no one in Shanghai will have to pay to see the city's public art.

China’s museums and memorial hall dropped their entrance fees for visitors in 2008.

Even though this is taking away a key source of revenue from public galleries, the ministries said that city-level finance departments should increase their “investments to art galleries and libraries so they could run without charging, while also enabling them to improve basic public cultural services,” according to the state-run Xinhua news report.

Taking things one step further, the Chinese government said it will also allocate new funds to subsidize the construction and operation of art galleries and libraries in the country’s less developed central and western regions.

While public art galleries have never been the driving force in Chinese art, this is still a step forward for the arts (and art lovers) in China, and part of an overall push in the Middle Kingdom to support state-approved arts projects.

“Art museum construction in China is currently undergoing a booming stage,” said Fan Di An, the conservator of the National Art Museum of China, at the opening of the Jiangsu Provincial Art Museum last September according to Jing Daily.

First it was the museums, and now galleries are following suit and going gratis -- or they will be by 2012.

The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Finance released the news on Thursday that Chinese citizens won’t have to pay to enter the country's public art galleries by the end of 2011, and they’ll be free for all by 2012.