A new survey has highlighted the damaging impact of lockdowns on museums and art galleries across the world, with visitor numbers at the top 100 institutions plunging by 77% last year. The annual survey conducted by the Art Newspaper usually gives praise to the year’s most popular exhibitions, but its latest report makes for more sombre reading.
In an ordinary year, more than nine million visitors jostle for position in front of the Mona Lisa or Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and half a million fashion-forward members of the public turn out for the spring opening of the Costume Institute’s annual exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. But there was nothing ordinary about 2020 and the widespread devastation caused by the global Covid pandemic. Our annual survey reveals that last year overall attendance of the world’s 100 most-visited art museums dropped by a staggering 77% in 2020 – from 230 million in 2019 to just 54 million as museums worldwide were forced to close. …
Of the museums we polled, more than 280 provided the number of days they closed last year because of the health crisis. On average, museums were shut for an extra 145 days, which adds up to a staggering 41,000 days in total – more than a century’s worth of museum visits missed last year. …
European cities saw a steep decline in international tourism last year, especially during the lucrative summer months. Paris received just 5% of its usual number of tourists last summer, according to a report by the UN’s World Tourism Organization. The French capital’s three major art museums – the Louvre, Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Orsay – saw a 73% drop in attendance overall, down to 4.5 million from 16.5 million in 2019. Around 2.7 million visited the Louvre, which, despite a 72% dip, is the most-visited museum in our survey. This admirable figure was helped by its once-in-a-lifetime Leonardo exhibition, which closed in February. It drew more than 10,000 visitors a day, making it the museum’s most-visited show ever. Despite this, the Louvre reported losses of around €90 million in 2020. The Fondation Louis Vuitton was closed for a whopping 226 days and had just 253,000 visitors, down from 800,000 in 2019.
The past year has been no better for British museums and galleries.
On average, UK museums saw a 77% drop in attendance, and were closed on average for more than half of 2020. When institutions eventually reopened, all major museums had restrictions on visitor numbers. Although they varied, most museums were typically only able to operate at around 20% to 30% of normal capacity.
The steep decline in footfall contributed to huge financial losses. The self-generated income of the Tate’s four museums fell from £94 million in the 2019/20 financial year to an estimated £38 million for 2020/21, a 60% drop. Similarly, the Victoria and Albert Museum saw a 63% loss of income, with its self-generated funds falling from £64 million to £24 million. The BM would not supply its raw figures, but a spokesperson says that income generated by visitors has plummeted by more 90% of the budgeted sum. The National Gallery emerged relatively unscathed, losing only £14 million, according to a museum spokesperson. It is important to note that, as well as reflecting loss of income through attendance (tickets sales, retail, etc.), these figures also include donations, which can be generated without getting people through the door. Most fortunate was the National Portrait Gallery, which had already planned to close for major building works in June but brought this forward by three months because of the pandemic.
The cultural and educational loss caused by these closures will have been – and, indeed, continues to be – immense.
Worth reading in full.
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done and dusted
open up!
the ‘third wave’ in europe is a myth
https://euromomo.eu/
Who would want to visit those places while they have muzzle mandates in place?
Not me. There may be a few small places that manage to escape from government, insurance or self imposed coronanonsense measures but not many.
Check out this story here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/56566256 about pilots for spectator sport. It says all restrictions are due to be lifted by 21st June but also has lots of statements from Dowden about getting people back to stadiums “safely”, one way systems, looking at how people travel to events, ventilation, whether they mix. So the idea of packed stadia with maskless people, and travelling on a crowded train to a match, is just not on the government’s roadmap.
Yes – the inadequate sociopaths who have found a warped significance for themselves aren’t going to let go easily.
I went to the National Gallery and Tate Britain last September – it felt completely soulless
Although I am a member of both galleries I still had to book online – galleries were empty and sad – We need to get back to normal
Going to galleries and exhibitions in London was one of the joys of my life pre Covid. But I am absolutely NOT visiting if I have to wear a mask and/or social distance. It takes away the very essence of what art is supposed to be about.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Money drying up? no problem, de Piffle has a printing press and is mates with a billionaire or two.
So they have made any sort of day out spectacularly unpleasant especially if you have kids in tow.
If it carries on like this and the economy 20% smaller, the cutback in state spending which as a proportion of GDP will also have to be smaller, will have to consider closing white elephants that are no longer popular with the public.
We’ve put up with the nonsense of lockdown for over a year now. It seems foolish (on a certain level) to rush reopening by a month or so now.
I say that not because I believe lockdowns in general are effective. They aren’t. But any slight uptick in infections is going to be seized upon by the panic-mongers in a demand to return.
That, essentially, is what is happening right now in Europe. There has been a slight uptick in infections in Europe, which is giving ammunition to the merchants of gloom here in Britain.
Better, now, to stick it out for another ten weeks. Let the public get thoroughly sick and tired of the restrictions. Let the public really begin to loathe the panic mongers. Only then can we enjoy a true release from the unjust imprisonment we have all suffered the past twelve months.
There will be no true release for a very long time – maybe decades. In a free, democratic, law-governed country, freedom is not granted by government, it is a right that cannot be taken away under any circumstances save the fairly universally accepted ones for people committing serious crimes that have been considered as such for most of human history. It’s delusional to think that June 21st will see a return to normal – it will be very different. There will be no mass realisation that we’ve been had, that it has been a huge mistake. A lot of people still just accept that closing down normal life is a reasonable response to a novel virus of not very great seriousness, historically or societally speaking.
That may be true. But I think that philosophically Boris Johnson and the rest of the Conservatives know damned well that Lockdown has been a shitshow.
The problem they had originally is that Britain’s tabloid media, aided and abetted by the useful idiots in Britain’s scientific community, wouldn’t let them get away with a “Herd Immunity” strategy. And Johnson lacked the moral courage to stand up in Parliament or on TV and tell people the truth. He had to be seen to doing something, even if that something was worse than useless.
Having created all this fear, Johnson et al are looking for an exit strategy. They are too cowardly to “rush” out of lockdown. And so we must all endure another two months of the British Government, the media, and populace, going through a tedious Kabuki drama.
We’ll get there. But I don’t think Johnson’s heart is in perpetual lockdown. And he won’t let Chris Whitty and the shitheads on SAGE get control of the narrative again.
Has he any will of his own?
Johnson is no master Statesman. And he has next to nothing in the way of principals or courage.
But he has the journalist’s (and showman’s) eye for the bigger story. And I think he knows that the verdict of history is not going to be favourable to Lockdowns. He knows, economically, socially, and probably politically Lockdown isn’t sustainable. I just wish he’d had the guts to tell Fergusson and Whitty to shut the fuck up ten months ago.
We also have to recognise that looming over Covid is the spectre of Brexit. Brexit is the reason, for instance, that European countries are deciding that the Astra-Zeneca vaccine isn’t quite right. If a few thousand French and Germans die of covid while waiting for the “perfect” vaccine to become available, then that’s a price the EuroCrats are willing to pay to stick it to perfidious Albion. But Brexit plays the other way too. Covid has done a nice job of disguising the horror movie that’s unfolding for small businesses in the UK. And covid, along with Brexit, is moving Britain closer to breaking apart than at any time in its history.
It’s boring and frustrating as hell. But give it till June. Let Boris placate the imbeciles on Sage and at the Guardian. Resentment and anger at Lockdowns has been growing for months now. It just needs to percolate a few weeks longer before the panic mongers recognise that their rotten jig is up.
They used to say that a bank loan was like an umbrella that the owner lends to you until it rains, and then snatches back.
Doesn’t that describe our so-called ‘human rights’ exactly?
But there is no sign of the public changing their fundamental brainwashed state in my observation.
Bucking the rules a bit – perhaps – but they still believe the pile of shit that they’ve been sold as gold-dust.