The Art Newspaper’s annual roundup of international museum attendance numbers for 2012 found a lineup of heavyweights whose positions haven’t changed much - the Louvre is still the world’s most popular, with 9.7 million visitors, topping the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in second place with 6.1 million. But the survey found a surprising bump in an out-of-the-way place: the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, opened in late 2011 in Bentonville, Ark., by the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, brought in 565,488 visitors in its first full year, more than double the number the museum expected.
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which is going through a rocky period - with board defections and explorations of possible mergers - experienced a dip in attendance. But its 2012 number - 218,558 visitors - mostly reflects a return, after its blockbuster “Art in the Streets†show in 2011 (which drew more than 200,000 visitors), to the kind of attendance it has seen for most of the past decade.
The newspaper reports that the most popular single exhibition in the world last year was the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum’s show of Old Masters lent by the Mauritshuis - including Vermeer’s rock-star “Girl With a Pearl Earring†- which drew more than 10,000 visitors a day.
