Attendance at the world’s biggest art museums has plummeted

MANY MUSEUM-GOERS are accustomed to queues and crowds. In peak season the lines at the Louvre in Paris or the Accademia Gallery in Florence can be hours long; once inside, visitors must compete with hordes of fellow enthusiasts to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David. If you’re lucky, you may get to admire the work for 30 seconds before another art-lover, or a harried member of staff, ushers you along.

Such jostling is now a distant memory: like many recreational venues, galleries around the world have fallen quiet owing to covid-19. An annual survey published on March 30th by the Art Newspaper documents the toll the pandemic has taken. In 2019 the 100 most popular art museums globally enjoyed more than 230m visitors; in 2020 that figure fell to 54m, a drop of 77%. Cultural institutions were closed for much of the year by lockdowns, yet even when they could reopen, social-distancing measures limited them to 20-30% of their usual capacity. Not surprisingly, museums in places where the virus was managed most effectively suffered smaller decreases. Yet they still suffered. In Australia and New Zealand, museums attracted 53% fewer visitors in 2020 than in 2019. In North America and Europe, decline was far sharper: 75% and 72% respectively.