Museum Attendance

The Art Newspaper recently released its list of museum and exhibition attendance.  According to the report, many of the listed museums have seen a slight jump in attendance figures.  The Louvre remains #1 with 9.7 million visitors followed by the Met with 6.1 million. New private museums such as Crystal Bridges in Arkansas financed by the Walton family and Museo Soumaya financed by Carlos Slim have done very well.

The Art Newspaper reports

The ranks and position of the top ten most visited art museums in 2012 showed little change from the year before. However, the Louvre in Paris, which opened a wing of Islamic art, received almost a million more visitors, keeping it at the top of the list, well ahead of its peers.

The opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York of its Islamic Galleries, as well as galleries devoted to American art, helped it increase its visitor numbers (6.1 million visitors up from 6.004 million in 2011, although the 2012 figure includes the Cloisters, which benefited from a show of the Lewis Chessmen).

Tate Modern’s excellent year was all the more impressive as London hosted a competing attraction, the Olympic Games, in 2012. Tate Modern moved up one place to fourth, ahead of the National Gallery, London. Around 5.3m ­visitors headed to the Bankside museum (up from 4.8m in 2011), of which 2,912 people a day came to see the Damien Hirst retrospective and around two million experienced the ­inaugural performances, video and installations in the Tanks.

New museums that recorded impressive visitor figures include the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, which is free to enter thanks to Walmart’s sponsorship. The $317m campus, designed by the architect Moshe Safdie, is home to a fast-growing collection founded by the Walmart heiress, Alice Walton. Her museum attracted 565,448 visitors in 2012, more than double the number expected.

Another new, private museum, which is also free to enter, proved a popular if not immediate critical success. The Museo Soumaya, which is housed in a shiny tower in a suburb of Mexico City, attracted 833,196 visitors in its inaugural year. The museum was built, and its fast-growing collection formed, by the world’s richest man, the telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim.

Source: The Art Newspaper