Museum Attendance Up In 2011

Attendance at museums was up in 2011.

The Louvre drew more than 8.8 million visitors last year — a 5% increase from a year earlier. Far more Russians and Chinese visited than ever before, but Americans remained the most numerous.

The Museo del Prado, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, which together form the triangular Art Walk in Madrid, also broke attendance recvords in 2011. The Prado itself saw just shy of 3 million visitors, plus another 864,000 who attended the two Prado International exhibitions held in St. Petersburg and Tokyo.

And … lest you think attendance is up only at the world’s top museums, special exhibits at regional museums have been drawing record crowds. The Detroit Institute of Arts, for example, has broken recent attendance records with their Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus exhibit. An exhibition that explored the history of graffiti and street art brought record-setting crowds into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, attracting 201,352 visits over 81 days.

At the same time, sadly, the AP reports that Bosnia's oldest and most prestigious cultural institutions have begun closing their doors as a result of long-standing disputes among politicians from its three ethnic groups, and dwindling state funding. In 2011, the seven institutions — among them the 125-year-old National Museum whose collection includes the famed 600-year-old Jewish manuscript known as the Sarajevo Haggadah — received virtually no funding from authorities in the Balkan nation and can no longer finance their work or even cover their utility bills.

"Rafael Moneo has done something very odd, even unorthodox, to the Prado, Madrid’s world-renowned city-centre art gallery,” The Guardian newspaper reported in an article dated May 1, 2007. Over the past five years, the architect has overseen construction of a major new extension to the 18th-century neoclassical building that is surprisingly serious and well-crafted. “Flying in the face of 21st-century orthodoxy, he has avoided the temptation to design an ‘iconic’ (in other words, showy) gallery that might have rivaled Frank Gehry’s phantasmagorical Bilbao Guggenheim,” said the London newspaper.

"Those 'cool-seekers', as Madrid guidebooks have it, who are hoping for an all-singing, all-dancing extension to the Prado may well be disappointed by Moneo's quietly heroic work. Here, an architect of the first order has chosen to let the art that will be on display steal the show. What he has created over long years is a building of immense skill, craft, solidity and intelligence, which redefines a part of Madrid's city centre and makes the Prado itself a far more immediate gallery than it has been for some while."

The expansion was sorely needed. A few years ago I had the unpleasant experience of waiting in a v-e-r-y slow-moving line for upwards of an hour, outside -- in the pouring rain -- while their seriously inadequate and decidedly officious post-9/11 security efforts were exerted -- one visitor at a time – in a tiny log-jam of a foyer. Once inside, the experience was absolutely worth that discomfort, but how lovely I imagine it will be now that the space -- and undoubtedly the security process – have been enhanced. I so enjoy the sense of luxury about Madrid and about the Prado -- that dreary cattle-call entry was disappointingly unwelcoming and incompatible with that sense of elegance.