Five art cities, compared in charts

How many galleries a city has depends on who is counting. On View’s maps have 277 in Manhattan, 175 in London, 148 in Los Angeles County, 144 in Berlin and 125 in Paris: the galleries we list, not a census. The dealers’ own associations count differently, since each chooses its members. The Art Dealers Association of America has 132 members with a Manhattan address and 25 in Los Angeles. The French galleries’ committee lists 264 galleries in Paris, twice as many as our map of it. Berlin’s association has 83 members, though the city’s economics department credits Berlin with a quarter of Germany’s 700 professional galleries. London’s dealers’ society counts its members across the whole country; the nearest thing to a count there is London Gallery Weekend, in which 120 galleries took part in June.

How old is a city’s gallery scene? One measure is the year its leading galleries opened there: the 60 galleries that On View’s guides to New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles and Berlin name. New York’s twelve are the oldest. Pace has been there since 1963, Paula Cooper since 1968 and Marian Goodman since 1977, and the middle one of the twelve opened in 1988.

Berlin’s twelve all opened between 1991 and 2008. None was there before the Wall came down, and four came from Cologne: Max Hetzler in 1993, Esther Schipper in 1995, Sprüth Magers and Buchholz in 2008. Los Angeles is the young one. Nine of its twelve leading galleries were opened by galleries from elsewhere, seven of them since 2016, and the middle year is 2016; our report on the city follows that arrival year by year. London grew its own first. Seven of its twelve were founded there, from Lisson in 1967 to Thomas Dane in 2004, and the five from elsewhere arrived from 2000 on: Gagosian in 2000, Hauser & Wirth in 2003, Pace in 2011, David Zwirner in 2012 and Thaddaeus Ropac in 2017. Paris is both things at once: Templon (1966) and Chantal Crousel (1980) beside seven galleries from elsewhere, three of which have arrived since 2019.

For all that, the five cities share few galleries: 32 have a space in more than one of them. Seventeen of them link New York and Los Angeles, fourteen New York and London and twelve New York and Paris; ten link London and Paris. No gallery is in all five. Seven are in four: Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, Perrotin and the design gallery Carpenters Workshop in New York, London, Paris and Los Angeles, and Pace and Sprüth Magers in New York, London, Los Angeles and Berlin. London is tied to the others by sixteen galleries, Berlin by five.

The largest galleries are a class of their own, and they have made their choice of cities. Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth and Pace have 44 exhibition spaces open to the public between them, in 16 cities and towns. Fourteen are in New York and five each in Los Angeles, London and Paris (with Gagosian’s hangar at Le Bourget airport); Hong Kong has three. Berlin has one, the former petrol station that Pace has shared with Galerie Judin since 2025.

The counts say less than the shapes. Put the 869 galleries of On View’s five maps on the ground, every city at one scale, and Manhattan’s are a streak up the island, those of London and Paris a knot, and those of Los Angeles fill a square 32 kilometres across and spill over its edges.

The circle on each map holds half the city’s galleries. Its radius is 1.2 kilometres in London, the smallest of the five, 1.4 in Manhattan, 1.8 in Paris and 2.7 in Berlin. In Los Angeles it is 7.6, and one gallery in ten is more than 23 kilometres from the middle.

The same difference can be walked. In Manhattan, where galleries stack up in the same buildings, the nearest other gallery is 20 metres away at the median, and 96% of galleries have another within 250 metres, three minutes on foot. In Paris the nearest is 51 metres off, in London 111 and in Berlin 141. In Los Angeles it is 256, and fewer than half the galleries have a neighbor within those three minutes: a gallery afternoon there is planned by district, as our guide to its galleries is.

Every city’s galleries gather in a few neighborhoods, and the largest of those are in New York. Chelsea has 71 galleries on our map and Tribeca 64. London’s Mayfair, with 52, has the most of any district outside New York, ahead of the Upper East Side (44); Berlin’s Mitte has 36, the Marais 33 and Saint-Germain-des-Prés 28. Three neighborhoods hold 65% of Manhattan’s galleries and 62% of those in Paris, but 26% in Los Angeles, whose 148 galleries are spread over 44 neighborhoods; the largest, the Arts District, has 15.

Galleries open their shows on the same evening as their neighbors, and each city has settled on its own. Of the 347 New York gallery shows on our list that give a first day, 41% begin on a Thursday and 29% on a Wednesday. Los Angeles opens on Saturday: 62% of its shows. Berlin opens on Friday (45%) and Thursday (28%). Paris divides between Thursday and Saturday, and London between Thursday (30%) and Friday (31%).

The Paris row has an oddity: 19% of its shows begin on a Monday. They all begin on the same Monday, October 19, when 31 shows open that the galleries have kept for the week of Art Basel Paris. The season’s big nights are easier to see as dates than as shares. On Thursday, September 10, 85 gallery shows opened in Manhattan, the evening after 69 others. In Berlin 47 opened on Friday, September 11 and 40 the day before, in Berlin Art Week. In Los Angeles 34 opened on Saturday, September 12 and 33 the Saturday after. London’s busiest days are still to come: 19 shows open on Friday, October 9 and 17 the day before, the week ahead of Frieze London.

September is when it happens. Of the gallery shows on view in Manhattan on October 5, 95% had opened in September; in Berlin 90%, in Los Angeles 86% and in Paris 85%. London is the exception, at 70%: many of its galleries keep their new shows for October and the week of Frieze.

Once open, a show stays up for about six weeks. The median run is 45 days in New York and in Paris, 46 in London and 43 in Los Angeles; Berlin gives a show a week longer, 51 days. New York is the most regular: 87% of its shows run between five and eight weeks, and 3% last three months or more, against 14% in London.

And it is, most often, one artist’s show. In London 84% of the gallery shows on view are solo shows, in New York 83%, in Los Angeles 75%, in Paris 73% and in Berlin 67%.

Which artists a city’s galleries are showing can be counted too. On View keeps a list of every artist named in the shows it lists: 538 in New York’s gallery shows this autumn, 345 in London’s, 289 in those of Paris, 269 in Los Angeles and 221 in Berlin. Set against two published rankings, the list shows where the market’s largest names are on view. One is the Hiscox Artist Top 100, of contemporary artists by their sales at auction; the other the Artprice100, the artists whose work sells for the most at auction, of whom we count the 91 born since 1860. New York’s galleries are showing 15 of the Hiscox hundred, London’s 15 and those of Paris 13; Los Angeles has 6 and Berlin 4.

On the Artprice list, which is mostly modern painters, Paris and London are far ahead: 23 of the 91 are in the gallery shows of Paris and 20 in London’s, against 13 in New York’s. The reason is the calendar. Paris’s galleries keep their modern group shows for the week of Art Basel Paris, and one evening, October 19, opens L’insaisissable nature du réel at Mennour, with six of the 91 in it, and Face à face at A&R Fleury, with five.

The artists travel more than the galleries do. This autumn 46 artists are in gallery shows in more than one of the five cities, 15 of them in both New York and Paris, eleven in both London and Paris, and five in both New York and Los Angeles: the galleries tie New York to Los Angeles, and the artists tie it to Paris. Glenn Ligon is in gallery shows in four of the five cities at once, among them a solo show at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, and until October 11 in the fifth too, in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

The crowds first. The Louvre counted 9.0 million visitors in 2025, more than any other art museum in the world in The Art Newspaper’s yearly survey, and half as many again as the Met, which counted 6.0 million on Fifth Avenue. Between the two comes the British Museum, with 6.4 million, fourth in the world, and London has two more above four million: Tate Modern, with 4.5 million, and the National Gallery, with 4.1 million. Paris has the Musée d’Orsay, with 3.8 million, and three more museums above 1.4 million; New York has MoMA, with 2.8 million. No museum in Los Angeles or Berlin reaches a million and a half. The Getty Center drew 1.3 million and Berlin’s most visited, the Humboldt Forum, 634,000.

Of the hundred most visited art museums in the world, seven are in Paris and seven in London (with Somerset House, an arts centre the survey counts among them), three in New York (the Met, MoMA and the Whitney) and three in Los Angeles County (the Getty Center, the Huntington and LACMA). Berlin has none. Its museums are many and none of them is large: the houses of its state museums counted 3.6 million visits between them in 2025, fewer than the Musée d’Orsay alone, and the Pergamonmuseum has been shut since October 2023, to reopen in part in June 2027.

Not every museum has its crowds back. Against 2019 the Louvre is 6% down, and most of Paris’s other museums are ahead, the Petit Palais by 53%. London’s are mostly behind: the National Gallery is 31% down, Tate Modern 26% and the Royal Academy 40%, while the British Museum is 3% up and the Wallace Collection 27%. Los Angeles has not recovered. LACMA, a building site until this spring, is 17% below 2019, The Broad 16% and the Getty Center 8%. New York’s Guggenheim is 40% down. In Berlin the Neues Museum has lost more than a third of its visitors while the Hamburger Bahnhof has gained 45%.

What it costs to go in differs more than what is inside. All six of New York’s leading museums charge an adult $28 or $30; at the Met only residents of New York State, and students of three states, may pay what they wish. In Los Angeles four of the seven charge nothing: the Getty Center, The Broad, the Hammer and MOCA. LACMA charges $30, or $25 to residents of the county, and the Lucas Museum, which opened on September 22, charges $25.

London is free. All eight of its leading museums let anyone in without a ticket and charge only for their exhibitions: the Royal Academy’s in October costs £24 to £26. The rest of Europe is cheaper than New York, with one exception. Berlin’s state museums charge €14 or €16, about $16 to $18. In Paris the Musée d’Orsay is €14 at its desk, and the Petit Palais and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris show their collections free. The exception is the Louvre, which charges residents of the European Economic Area €22 and everyone else €32, about $36: the dearest ticket in the five cities. The full price also falls on fewer people in Europe. France’s national museums admit residents of the European Economic Area under 26 free, and Berlin’s state museums are free to 18.

The museums are older than the galleries by centuries. The oldest on this chart is London’s British Museum, founded in 1753, which opened its doors in 1759; the Royal Academy followed in 1768. The Louvre opened in 1793 and Berlin’s Altes Museum and Gemäldegalerie in 1830. The Met was founded in 1870 and the county museum that became LACMA in 1910. The newest of the 37 on this chart is the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles, which was eleven days old on October 3.

New York, Paris and London are the fair cities. In the twelve months to October 3, New York held 15 art fairs with a count of exhibitors on record, Paris 14 and London 14; Los Angeles held four and Berlin three. New York’s largest, the Armory Show, had about 230 galleries at the Javits Center in September. Seven of the others crowd into one week of May, around Frieze New York, which with 68 galleries is smaller than Frieze Los Angeles.

Paris has three large fairs and holds them all in one building. Art Paris in April (165 exhibitors), Art Basel Paris in October (206 galleries) and Paris Photo in November (222 exhibitors, 43 of them publishers) fill the Grand Palais in turn, and each drew more visitors than any fair in New York, Los Angeles or Berlin: 87,275, 73,000 and 75,000. Art Basel Paris returns on October 23 with 211 galleries announced, and at least seven smaller fairs open around it that week.

London’s fairs gather in one week of October. Frieze London (166 galleries in 2025) and Frieze Masters (123) share a tent in Regent’s Park and counted 90,000 visitors between them, and 1-54, PAD London and Minor Attractions open the same week. Frieze London returns on October 14 with 172 galleries announced. The rest of the year has the London Art Fair in January (120 galleries) and Photo London in May (131 exhibitors, 43 of them publishers).

Berlin has had no large fair since art berlin ended in 2019. It has Positions, with 96 galleries in the hangars of Tempelhof airport in September, and two events that are not fairs: Gallery Weekend in May, when 57 galleries opened shows in their own rooms, and Berlin Art Week in September, which counted about 200,000 visits across the city. London has a gallery weekend too, since 2021: 120 galleries took part in June.

The auctions are another matter: they are in New York. Of the $11.1 billion of fine art that Artprice counted at public auction in 2025, $4.7 billion was sold in the United States, most of it in a few weeks of May and November in Manhattan. The United Kingdom sold $1.5 billion, nearly all of it in London, France $945 million and Germany $378 million.

New York’s salerooms made 68 of the year’s 100 highest prices, the eleven highest among them. The first, $236.4 million for Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer at Sotheby’s in November, is the second-highest price ever paid at auction; the highest, $450.3 million for Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, was paid at Christie’s in New York in 2017. London’s salerooms made 15 of the hundred, the highest of them $43.8 million for a Canaletto at Christie’s in July; the most ever paid at a London auction is £85.3 million ($108.7 million), for Klimt’s Dame mit Fächer at Sotheby’s in June 2023, the auction record for Europe.

Paris is the third. Artprice ranks it third among the world’s cities, with $844 million of fine art sold in 2025, behind New York and London ($1,396 million) and ahead of Hong Kong. Six of the hundred highest prices were paid there, the highest of them €32 million for a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar at Drouot in October 2025. The most we found paid at a Paris auction is still the $51.3 million that Picasso’s Les Noces de Pierrette made in November 1989.

Berlin has one auction house of weight, Grisebach, where Max Beckmann’s Selbstbildnis gelb-rosa made €23.2 million in December 2022, the most paid at auction in Germany. In Los Angeles the large houses keep offices and show what they will sell elsewhere. Of Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Bonhams, all four hold auctions in New York and three in Paris, and Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams in London; Bonhams alone holds them in Los Angeles, and none does in Berlin.