Many museums around the world are returning to pre-Covid attendance
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No official statistics but rather positive impressions. In Prague, during the 26e conference of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), many have seen a return of the public, at or near the same level as before the pandemic. This is the case of the Vizcaya Museum and Gardens in Miami, which has regained its 300,000 annual visitors. Also in Barcelona, Casa Batllo, built by Antoni Gaudi, which peaked at 1.1 million visitors in 2019, expects more than 700,000 this year. At the Louvre, tourists are returning massively since in July, the pre-pandemic level was almost reached (with 95% of the public compared to July 2021). Even though Asians remain absent from Paris…
“It’s the return of the queues”, notes Emilie Girard, Scientific and Collections Director of the MuCEM in Marseille. However, some small museums are still struggling. Like the Museo de la Merced in Guatemala. “The violence that reigns in the country dissuades the public from coming”, deplores its director, Roberto Andreu. And the finest Mayan collections only attract around twenty visitors each day.
At the Ticho House in Jerusalem, Timna Seligman, its director, must, for budgetary reasons, extend its temporary exhibitions for ten months instead of five before the pandemic.
“Mass layoffs”
The great concern of museums which reigned at the start of the health crisis has however faded. According to the third survey carried out on the impact of the pandemic among ICOM members published in July 2021, the latter feared that “2% to 3% of museums close”, compared to 30% in November 2020 during the second report. The fourth inventory, expected this summer, has not been published. The number of responses remains insufficient for the results to be conclusive.
According to Peter Keller, Director General of ICOM, “The major museums have resisted in Europe and the United States thanks to aid from the States and the support of friends of museums”. Of the 104,000 museums listed in the world, only a few have closed permanently, mainly in the United States and in Arab countries, he says. “On the other hand, we are seeing massive layoffs of contract workers, particularly in cultural mediation, in the United States, Europe and Australia”he laments, fearing that a generation of these professionals will be lost.
The Covid-19 period has above all led to a change in the economic model of museums. “It is clear that public budgets will fall with the crisis, in the years to come”, dreads Peter Keller. Juliette Raoul-Duval, President of ICOM France, is one of the few to openly oppose “the culture of numbers” that has been raging in museums for two decades. “We cannot measure their success by this yardstick and consider attendance as the key to distributing public aid to museums. » It is urgent, in his eyes, to return “to more qualitative criteria and to take an interest in what a visit to a museum brings to a citizen”.
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