Visitor numbers at the world’s top 100 museums and art galleries plunged by 77% last year, down from 230 million in 2019 to just 54 million as the pandemic forced closure on an unprecedented scale.
The survey carried out annually by the Art Newspaper for more than 20 years is normally an upbeat one, highlighting which museums had good years and what the most popular exhibitions were, whether in London, New York or São Paulo.
The 2020 figures, published on Tuesday, were sobering, with museums and galleries ravaged by enforced closure, plummeting visitor numbers and enormous falls in revenue.
The Louvre in Paris maintained its position as the world’s most visited museum thanks largely to the tail end of its Leonardo exhibition, which drew more than 10,000 visitors a day before closing in February 2020. Over the year, the museum had 2.7m visits, down 72% from 2019 with an estimated income loss of €90m.
Alison Cole, the editor of the Art Newspaper, said it was worth remembering that “in a normal year more than 9 million people would jostle to see the Mona Lisa at the Louvre”.
Tate Modern in London, which staged exhibitions including Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman, was second in the popularity table with 1.4m visits, down 77%. It was closed for 173 days and said it lost £56m in revenue.
Cole said the impact of the pandemic on museums had been disastrous and the general mood remained bleak. “Reduced capacity due to Covid measures and a dearth of tourists mean that most large museums are looking at four years until they get back to pre-pandemic health.”
The Art Newspaper said there was a combined total of 41,000 days of enforced closure for the world’s top museums equating to “112 years of missed visits and hundreds of millions of pounds in lost revenue”.
Read more of Mark Brown’s report here: Visits to world’s top 100 museums and galleries fall 77% due to Covid