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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Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
People who come up with schemes like that should be swabbed until death by nose-bleeding. This is nothing but wanton cruelty inflicted on a vulnerable group of people whose crime is that they have no means of escaping it.
Excellent
Didn’t they have hospitals that practiced this kind of treatment? They were abandoned in the 1970s because they realised it didn’t work, sanatoriums I believe they were called!
Mixed news from the England branch of world folly and evil – Mrs ToF went for a blood test today, no masks in sight. On the other hand an acquaintance has a daughter with a bad cough that has lasted weeks, antibiotics no good, amid the otherwise pretty good service she was getting from the GP it was suggested she should make her take a “covid test” – likely result that she will then dutifully “isolate” if she tests positive, instead of getting on with life. At least the mum hasn’t bothered testing her up to now.
Well what I find hilarious is that for a site that’s all about ‘free speech’, there’s a hell of a lot of censorship. Not only has resident Gestapo agent, ‘Hardliner’, locked me out of the site so I can’t log in on my phone, but he’s removed part of my post in the Round-up section. Ever feel like you’re being surveilled? You probably are…Actually it’s obviously just me that’s on a special ‘list’.
”Profanity and abuse will be removed…” except anything Hardliner doesn’t like is removed. Profanity and abuse do not factor in to it. Repeatedly, and without explanation, evidently. Care to comment, Hardliner? No, course not. I’m calling you out on your behaviour so you could at least do the decent thing, but I shan’t be holding my breath….But this post will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2….
I’ve been annoyed by this as well. OTOH, this is the website of the people who run it and they decide what gets published there. That’s just the way it works.
It’s Hardlines on a power trip, that’s what it is. Being deliberately antagonising. Either that or they’re Muslim and I’m pissing them off with my anti-Islam posts, channeling my inner Geert Wilders!
But it’s the double standards with the whole “free speech” gig. What is the criteria used by which some mod deems a post *inappropriate* and worth fiddling with? Especially as none of the posts he/she’s removing of mine breach the above warning.
So given that the “profanity and abuse will be removed…” warning is just mere window dressing, and posts are getting edited/removed anyway, with not even a courteous explanation provided, then from this day forth I’m identifying as a Tourettes sufferer, because fuck it. It makes no difference.
Now bring on the swear jar!
Some years ago, Karl Lauterbach (German Mr COVID and health minister) did a photo-op with some pre-teen girls about to go to a Dangerous climate change! march he was also planning to attend and he referred to them in a very weird (according to my personal judgement) way, something like “These young girls just told me why they’re worried about climate change and now, we’ll go to a climate march together!” I mentionend that once in a comment and the sentence got deleted. No idea why.
All my relatives keep doing that, too, and they all dutifully isolate when positive. But at least, they’ve discarded the masks (I personally threw one my mother was still carrying “just in case” into the bin). I keep telling them that COVID is essentially a cold and that it will usually pass on its own quickly enough that people will rarely even consciously notice this and hope that it’ll eventually sink in.
Japan has really lost its mojo.
I know someone who nearly died of pneumonia because our great NHS ambulance service did exactly the same thing to him.