So how are the world’s top museums doing in the aftermath of Covid and the ongoing pressures of economic slowdowns, rising inflation and wars around the world? The Art Newspaper runs an annual survey of visitor numbers, and the bottom line is that in 2022 – for most people, the first full year without pandemic restrictions – the world’s 100 most popular museums clocked up 141 million visits between them.
It seems people are returning to the same places as before: the top ten in the list – museums in Paris and London, Rome and Seoul, New York and Washington – account for nearly 40 million of those visits. The Musée du Louvre retains its top spot, with an impressive 7.7 million visitors even though some restrictions on visitor numbers are being imposed (and its 2022 attendance represents a whopping 173 percent improvement on 2021).
In fact the contrast with 2021 is generally good all round, with double the number of visits in total. All of the museums for which data was available recorded at least some improvement on the year before.
But the better comparison is probably with 2019, the last full year before the pandemic hit. Total attendances in that year were 230 million. On average, and excluding the four museums that opened last year, attendances were down by 20 percent between 2019 and 2022; that was exactly the figure for the Louvre, as it happens.
That average hides some big variations. The Chinese Covid restrictions hit attendances there, and Russian museums have obviously suffered from the war in Ukraine – the Kremlin was 72 percent down on 2019, the biggest drop among the 100 museums in the list. The eight London museums listed were on average 39 percent down on 2019 – a Brexit effect? – and the Tokyo and Washington museums didn’t do any better, down 44 and 36 percent respectively.
An increase in MoMA attendances kept the overall New York fall to 21 percent. And the nine Paris museums averaged just one percent down on 2019, thanks largely to a stellar performance by Fondation Louis Vuitton.
Who else did well against 2019? Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts recorded 746,972 visitors, 47 percent more; the Royal Castle in Warsaw (1.8 million) was 40 percent up. MMCA Seoul also had 1.8 million, a 27 percent improvement.
So are the visitors coming back? In general it would seem so, though for most museums there’s a long way to go to get to pre-pandemic levels; tourism generally is recovering only slowly, for instance.
And what the Art Newspaper survey can’t cover is the quality of the visits. Many museums took lessons from the pandemic about what kind of experience they should offer to visitors. It would be instructive for instance to see how online ‘visits’ have changed; maybe more people are getting to use museums, just in different ways. And how do visit lengths compare? Is museum curating and exhibit organisation changing to enrich the visitors’ experience enough to keep them interested for longer? In short, are basic visitor numbers a good enough measure for museums these days?
Incidentally, the Louvre Abu Dhabi is in the top 100 at No.98. Attendance in 2022 totalled 622,399, a third down on the 2019 figure of 975,483, but the total is recovering nicely from last year (up 130 percent).
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