Customer numbers on the world’s largest museums of artwork have largely returned to their pre-pandemic ranges, an unique survey by The Artwork Newspaper has discovered.
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered museum customer numbers to plummet the world over as establishments shut their doorways and folks have been compelled to remain inside. The variety of individuals visiting the most-visited 100 museums fell from 230 million in 2019, the final full pre-pandemic 12 months, to simply 54m in 2020. Since then we’ve seen a sluggish restoration, with 71m guests in 2021 and 141m in 2022.
Though the whole variety of guests to the highest 100 museums was 176 million in 2023, our survey exhibits that most of the world’s largest museums are actually near their 2019 customer numbers. The Musée du Louvre is as soon as once more the most-visited museum in our survey with 8.9 million guests, simply 8% under its 2019 determine. The British Museum in London had 5.5 million guests (7% down on 2019), the Prado in Madrid 3.3 million (5% down) and the Vatican Museums in Rome 6.8 million (2% down).
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam attracted 2.7 million guests, the identical as in 2019, 654,000 of whom noticed its blockbuster exhibition of Johannes Vermeer.
Different main world museums acquired extra guests in 2023 than they did pre-pandemic. The Musée d’Orsay in Paris was up 6% on 2019, to three.9 million, and the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence was up 15%, to 2.7 million. Each have been file figures for the museums.
Just lately opened museums such because the Louvre Abu Dhabi, M+ in Hong Kong and the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo had their greatest ever years. The latter is now the preferred artwork museum in Scandinavia. London’s Nationwide Portrait Gallery and Younger V&A each reopened to file customer numbers.
Nonetheless, some museums are nonetheless struggling to draw the identical variety of guests as earlier than the pandemic. London’s Nationwide Gallery had the largest absolute fall in customer numbers of any museum in our survey – it acquired 3.1 million guests in 2023, a fall of two.9 million from 2019 (down 48%). Nonetheless, the museum’s Sainsbury Wing was closed all through 2023, decreasing gallery house and the variety of entrances. It is because of reopen in 2025.
Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool additionally did poorly (each down 40% from 2019, with 1.1 million and 399,000 respectively in 2023) whereas Tate Trendy’s restoration was extra tepid (4.7 million visits, down 22% from 2019), as was the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (3.1 million, down 21%).
Chinese language state museums often launch their figures later within the 12 months, so weren’t included within the report.
The Artwork Newspaper’s annual survey is probably the most complete worldwide examine of museum customer numbers. Analysis was carried out by way of e-mail and cellphone throughout February 2024 and makes use of figures reported by the establishments themselves for the previous calendar 12 months.
The complete report, together with the checklist of the highest 150 most-visited artwork museums on the earth, will probably be printed within the April subject of The Artwork Newspaper.
