The museums of Los Angeles and London are still short of their 2019 crowds. Most of Paris’s are ahead
Visitors in 2025 against 2019 at each city’s leading art museums, in percent
- New York2 museumsGuggenheim Museum
- London9 museumsRoyal Academy of ArtsWallace Collection
- Paris7 museumsLouvrePetit Palais
- Los Angeles3 museumsLACMA
- Berlin6 museumsNeues MuseumHamburger Bahnhof
The numbers
| City | Museum | Visitors in 2025 against 2019 |
|---|---|---|
| New York | Whitney Museum | −14% |
| New York | Guggenheim Museum | −40% |
| London | British Museum | +3% |
| London | Tate Modern | −26% |
| London | National Gallery | −31% |
| London | V&A | −15% |
| London | Somerset House | +2% |
| London | National Portrait Gallery | −7% |
| London | Tate Britain | −36% |
| London | Royal Academy of Arts | −40% |
| London | Wallace Collection | +27% |
| Paris | Louvre | −6% |
| Paris | Musée d’Orsay | +4% |
| Paris | Fondation Louis Vuitton | +47% |
| Paris | Petit Palais | +53% |
| Paris | Musée du quai Branly | +25% |
| Paris | Musée de l’Orangerie | +10% |
| Paris | Musée Picasso | −6% |
| Los Angeles | Getty Center | −8% |
| Los Angeles | LACMA | −17% |
| Los Angeles | The Broad | −16% |
| Berlin | Neues Museum | −37% |
| Berlin | Hamburger Bahnhof | +45% |
| Berlin | Alte Nationalgalerie | +7% |
| Berlin | Altes Museum | +40% |
| Berlin | Gemäldegalerie | −36% |
| Berlin | Bode-Museum | −27% |
Only museums open through both years and counted alike: so not the Met, MoMA, the Centre Pompidou or the Getty Villa. Sources: The Art Newspaper’s visitor surveys; the museums’ and their governing bodies’ own figures for both years (see How we counted).
From the report
Five art cities, compared in charts
New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles and Berlin, measured against each other: how many galleries and how far apart, which night they open, what a museum ticket costs and how many people buy one, the fairs, the auction rooms, and the galleries and artists the cities share.
More from this report23
- Five art cities in numbers, October 2026
- The leading galleries of Los Angeles opened there a generation after New York’s
- Seventeen galleries have a space in both New York and Los Angeles, more than link any other two cities
- No gallery is in all five cities. Seven are in four, and 25 more in two or three
- The four largest galleries keep 14 spaces in New York, and five each in Los Angeles, London and Paris
- Half of London’s galleries stand within 1.2 km of one point. In Los Angeles it takes 7.6 km
- In Manhattan the next gallery is 20 metres away. In Los Angeles, 256
- Chelsea has 71 galleries and Tribeca 64. Outside New York, London’s Mayfair has the most, 52
- New York opens its shows on Thursday, Berlin on Friday, Los Angeles on Saturday
- On one Thursday in September, 85 gallery shows opened in Manhattan
- In New York, 95% of the gallery shows on view opened in September
- A gallery show runs about six weeks. Berlin gives it seven
- Four in five London and New York gallery shows are solo shows. In Berlin, two in three
- Paris’s galleries are showing 23 of the world’s top-selling modern artists this autumn, London’s 20. New York’s are showing 13
- Fifteen artists are in gallery shows in both New York and Paris this autumn
- The Louvre drew 9.0 million visitors in 2025, half as many again as the Met
- Paris and London have seven each of the world’s 100 most visited art museums. Berlin has none
- A New York museum ticket costs $30. In London, all eight leading museums are free
- London’s British Museum was founded in 1753, more than a century before the Met
- New York, Paris and London each hold more than a dozen art fairs a year. Berlin holds three
- Paris’s three largest fairs, all held under one roof, the Grand Palais, each drew more than 70,000 visitors
- The United States sells three times as much art at auction as the United Kingdom, and five times as much as France
- Of the 100 highest auction prices of 2025, 68 were paid in New York, 15 in London and six in Paris. Los Angeles and Berlin had none