The art of avoiding the museum crowds

As visitor numbers at cultural sights return to pre-pandemic levels, Nick Trend proposes ways to ensure a quieter visit

The recent news that visitor numbers to major sights and museums are returning to pre-pandemic levels – and in some cases exceeding them – is a mixed blessing. However, I have a fix for those who want to try to avoid the worst of the ever-increasing crowds.

First, some background. According to a survey by The Art Newspaper, many of the world’s top 100 museums have recorded significant rises in admissions since 2019. Some of the most eye-catching have been in New York, where numbers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are up 10 and 43 per cent respectively over 2019. In Florence, the Uffizi hit record levels, with 2.7 million visitors in 2023 – up 15 per cent on 2019 – while the Galleria dell’Accademia also broke its record of 1.7 million annual visitors, reaching more than two million last year.

In Paris, five major museums registered record levels: the Musée d’Orsay (up 6 per cent on 2019), the Musée de l’Orangerie (up 20 per cent), the Petit Palais (up 25 per cent), the Musée du Quai Branly (up 27 per cent) and the Musée d’Art Moderne (up 220 per cent). Perhaps more strikingly, all but three of the top 100 museums worldwide saw 2023 visitor numbers rise compared to 2022.

Such institutions measure their success in such numbers. I can see the temptation to do so, especially if your revenue stream depends on paying visitors, but I wonder if this approach isn’t flawed. It feels to me that, in the relentless pursuit of attracting more tourists to museums, we risk killing the thing we love. At the busiest times in the most popular galleries and museums, it is not possible to appreciate the art or artefacts in any kind of meaningful way. How can people stop, look, think and reflect if they are in a jostling scrum?

Not only do sheer numbers make seeing a picture or sculpture properly impossible, but the changing behaviour of visitors makes things worse. I am thinking of the apparently insatiable desire to take photographs and the intrusive posing by social media influencers in front of major works of art.

One or two museums are trying to address the issue. In June, the Louvre announced that, “to facilitate a comfortable visit”, it would cap daily admissions at 30,000 (equivalent to the entire population of Felixstowe). And it says that the recommended booking of a time slot also helped even out numbers through the day. But I fear a more general will to address the issue is not high on the agenda of most museums.

So what can art lovers do about it? Visiting between November and February means you are much more likely to find quieter galleries. But it’s not a great time to stroll in the parks and visit other outdoor attractions. So I have another suggestion: Google. If you search for the attraction you want to visit, the results will throw up a separate panel on the right-hand side of the page. At the top is information about the sight – address, opening times, website, etc. But scroll down that column and, half buried near the bottom, is a graph: “popular times”.

According to Google, this uses “aggregated and anonymised data from users who have opted in to Google Location History” – in other words, it counts the number of mobile phones in the vicinity over the previous few months – to come up with an average for each hour of each day of the week. You can use the graph to see which are the quieter times of the day and week.

Some of the results are obvious – early morning and the end of the day are quietest, while afternoons are usually busiest. But there are significant differences. In Florence, Thursday is the quietest day at the Uffizi, with about 40 per cent fewer visitors than on a Saturday, while Wednesday is a good day to visit the Accademia. And the widget also shows live information, so you can see if it is a good or bad time to pop into a museum spontaneously.

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j The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is now receiving 43 per cent more visitors than it did in 2019