Global Museum Visitors Still Below Pre-Pandemic Levels
London art museums performed especially poorly, while a select few European museums were able to best the number of visitors they received in 2019.
The Louvre. © 2021, Musée du Louvre, Nicolas-Giraud.
The total number of visitors to the world's top 100 museums reached 176 million in 2023, according to a survey conducted by The Art Newspaper.
That's a significant rise from 141 million in 2022, but still below the 230 million visitors received in 2019, before the pandemic.
The world's most-visited museum, The Louvre, received 8.9 million visitors, missing its 2019 mark by 8%. The British Museum fell short by 7%, Madrid's Prado by 5%, and Vatican Museums by 2%.
U.K. art museums performed especially poorly. London's National Gallery was down 48% on 2019 as its Sainsbury Wing was closed for renovations, while the Victoria and Albert Museum saw a drop of 21%.
Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool were both down 40%, with Tate Modern receiving 4.7 million visits, down 22% from 2019.
A spokesperson for Tate pointed out that Tate Britain and Tate Liverpool were both closed for parts of 2023.
'Tate Britain was at 87% of its pre-Covid average and Tate Liverpool was at 73% for the periods of 2023 when they were each fully open,' they said.
Bucking the trend were Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which saw the same number of visitors as in 2019, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which cleared its 2019 number by 6%, and Florence's Galleria degli Uffizi, which was up 15% to a record 2.7 million.
China's state museums release their visitor numbers later in the year, and were not included in the report, but they're unlikely to be stellar. Pandemic-related closures were still commonplace in 2022, and key institutions—including OCAT, which had multiple spaces in China, and Guangzhou's Times Museum—closed permanently in 2022.
The Art Newspaper did not share visitor numbers for U.S. museums, but in 2022 the Metropolitan Museum of Art was down 34% on 2019, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum down 42%, and the Whitney Museum of American Art down 19%. —[O]
