Like all cultural institutions, German museums are still suffering from Long Covid. The houses have long been open again, but the public has not yet gotten over their weaning and only comes sparingly. The still unresolved slumps in tourism, especially from China, make it worse.
The Louvre in Paris, the most visited museum in the world, is no different. The measure that the director Laurence des Cars, who has been in office since 2021, has just announced is all the more surprising: with immediate effect, the number of visitors there is to be reduced by around a third. Instead of the previous 45,000 tickets, “only” 30,000 tickets will be sold daily in the future in order to create a “more pleasant visitor experience”. This is intended to cap the annual number of visitors at less than eight million in the future, about as many as in 2022 and before that 17 years ago. In 2018, the Louvre’s most visited year to date, ten million people pushed their way through the museum’s halls.
According to Des Cars, this measure should not only benefit the visitors, who often crowd the halls in their hundreds, most closely in the one with the “Mona Lisa”, but also the approximately 2,000 employees of the Louvre, who have been protesting for years because of the overcrowding and at times even went on strike.
Laurence des Cars, director of the Louvre, can still be seen here at her previous place of work, the Musée d’Orsay.
(Photo: Alain Jocard/AFP)
According to des Cars, the Louvre is the first museum in the world to permanently reduce its number of visitors. But other museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, were also grappling – at least until the Corona lull – with the question of how to cover their constantly increasing expenses and maintain their status without going through the world’s major airports to go: getting fuller and getting bigger.
However, most German museums would be happy if they had such worries. Especially the ones in Berlin. One of the main reasons for the planned reform of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is the shockingly low level of attendance at Berlin’s museums. In 2019, i.e. before Corona, the most visited Berlin building, the Neues Museum, had just 828,000 visitors. 310,000 people got lost in the picture gallery at the Kulturforum. In the future, the Louvre will reach this amount in ten days, and with a hard door. Even the Deutsches Museum in Munich, number one in Germany, only had around 1.5 million visitors a year before Corona.