Visitor Figures 2020

Visitor Figures 2020: top 100 art museums revealed as attendance drops by 77% worldwide

The Art Newspaper's annual survey shows how the pandemic had a devastating impact on museums around the world—but there were some silver linings

Emily Sharpe and José da Silva. With additional reporting by Martin Bailey. Research conducted by Federico Florian and Victoria Stapley-Brown

How New York’s MoMA became the world’s most-followed museum on social media

Rob Baker, the director of marketing and creative strategy at the Museum of Modern Art, shares his secrets to Instagram success

While US museum attendance nosedived in 2020 amid pandemic, disparities in reopenings yielded a few surprises

Huntington Library in California and Crystal Bridges in Arkansas ascended to the top of our visitor figures list

Podcastspodcast

Has the drop in visitors changed museums forever?

Exhibitions editor José da Silva breaks down the results from our Visitor Figures 2020 survey and digital expert Chris Unitt explains how museums have pivoted to digital

Going viral, the right way: what it's like running the world’s best museum social media accounts during a pandemic

We asked the people behind the Royal Academy’s Twitter, the Met’s Instagram, the Uffizi’s TikTok and the Van Gogh Museum’s Facebook account what 2020 was like for them

British Museum hit hardest by 2020 lockdown among UK’s big museums

Major UK institutions lost 78% of their visitors due to the pandemic last year, our research reveals

Can museums really make digital visits pay?

As venues experiment with selling virtual exhibition tours, talks and workshops online, the key to success may be an emphasis on the expert, bespoke and exclusive

Curate-it-yourself: French museums take to social media to ask the public what they want to see in their galleries

Spurred on by the pandemic, several institutions are inviting art lovers to choose works for display

Who were the most Googled artists in 2020?

Search data from 84 countries last year shows that Leonardo, Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo were among the world's most popular artists

Instagram overtakes Twitter as most popular platform for museums during Covid-19 pandemic

Our global Visitor Figures survey reveals huge growth in followings online as physical doors shut to the public in 2020