The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had 1.7 million fewer visitors in 2022 than before the pandemic, according to The arts journalis the last Visitor figures investigation. Last year, the museum’s main building on Fifth Avenue welcomed more than 3.2 million visitors compared to nearly 4.9 million in 2019, a drop of 34%. (The museum “implemented a new digital program” for counting visitors in 2020, which means the 2019 figure has been retrospectively revised to make comparisons fairer.)
The Met is not alone among major New York institutions to experience a drop in attendance compared to 2019, with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (down 42%), the Whitney Museum of American Art (down down 19%) and the Brooklyn Museum (down 17%) all still below their pre-Covid numbers. Only the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) grew by 10%, but that’s because its 2019 figure of nearly 2 million visitors was below normal as the museum was closed for four months of work.
The Met is generally the most popular American museum in our survey, but in 2022 it was propelled to number one by the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, which had nearly 3.3 million visitors. However, the Met figure does not include visitors to The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan (196,000 visitors in 2022), which are separated in our survey to give a more representative attendance figure. If the two Met venues were combined, their attendance would exceed that of the NGA. The Met was then followed by MoMA in third place (2.2 million visitors) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in fourth place (1.1 million visitors).
A Met spokesperson says visitor numbers for this year are improving, however. “The return of our visitors has greatly exceeded our forecasts, especially in recent months. For 2023, our local and national visitors are over 95% of pre-Covid levels, and overall we benefit from 78% of our pre-Covid audience. »
In 2022, tourism in New York was 85% of pre-pandemic level and is expected to recover further in 2023. “The number of international visitors is slowly increasing, starting with the closest areas,” says the Met spokesman. “We are very optimistic for 2023.”
