Big Beyonce boost for Paris museum
The world’s most popular museum, the Paris Louvre, received over 10 million visitors in 2018, a record which it partly attributed on Thursday to a Beyonce video shot against the backdrop of the Mona Lisa and other famous works.
Some 10.2 million people visited the museum last year, a 25% increase over 2017, which its president Jean-Luc Martinez also linked to a stunning tourism recovery in Paris after a slump caused by a spate of terror attacks.
But Martinez also gave some of the credit to pop power couple Beyonce and Jay Z, who shot the video for their hit Apeshit in the galleries of the former royal palace.
The wildly popular clip, which has been viewed 147 million times on YouTube, went on to form the basis of a tour designed by the Louvre that takes in the 17 paintings and sculptures featured in the video.
“The Beyonce clip and the opening of the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi had people around the world talking about the Louvre. And one of the consequences is this spectacular rebound in the visitor numbers in 2018,” Martinez told France Info radio.
A €60m (R985m) revamp of its reception areas and ticketing system also helped the venerable museum, one of Paris’s best-known landmarks, which was founded after the French Revolution, manage the influx.
The overhaul was chiefly funded by an agreement between France and the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, where the Louvre opened an outpost in Abu Dhabi to great fanfare in November 2017.
In 2017, the Louvre just edged ahead of the National Museum of China to remain the mostvisited museum in the world, with 8.1 million visitors compared to 8 million for the Beijing gallery and 7.3 million for the Metropolitan museum in New York.
While the French remain the biggest patrons of the Louvre, which is also home to the Venus de Milo, foreigners accounted for three-quarters of the intake.