Last year, the main New York City tourist attraction, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, generated $946 million in tourist spending in New York. Such a number comes from a visitor survey conducted by the Museum’s market research office. As it turned out, approximately 54% of the interviewed people reported that visiting the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibitions of fine art played a crucial role in their decision to visit New York City. We are talking about three summer exhibitions that were a great success last year: “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends,” “The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe,” and certainly “China: Through the Looking Glass.” So let’s go through it all point by point!
According to the recently released survey, the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art welcomed 6.3 million visitors during the period from July 2014 to June 2015. It has become the largest number since the Museum began tracking this statistic over forty years ago. So this is truly a new record for an already blockbuster museum! It is also noteworthy that 26% of fine art lovers were New York residents, and the other 74% of visitors came from outside the Big Apple. Moreover, 2.5 million visitors were attracted by the already mentioned summer exhibitions of fine art. As for the massive number of $946 million – this is the total sum brought to New York City’s Budget by tourists who were attracted by the following Metropolitan Museum’s exhibitions.
“Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends” is a captivating exposition of experimental oil paintings and drawings by John Singer Sargent. This celebrated American artist created portraits of famous people, many of whom were his close friends, in informal poses, for instance, in the act of performing, singing, or painting. These masterpieces of canvas art depicting Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, Judith Gautier, and other leading figures in the creative arts of the time are highly charged while being very intimate and sensual. So it’s not surprising that this unique New York exhibition of outstanding paintings attracted 254,750 visitors from different countries.
“The Roof Garden Commission: Pierre Huyghe” outdoor art exhibition held in New York during the period from May to November was visited by 483,208 connoisseurs of modern art. This rooftop art installation created by the French artist Pierre Huyghe is a kind of an investigation, the way the author thinks about the links between science, history, and the environment. However, such a large amount of visitors is explained not only by people’s craving for contemporary art but also by stunning background and decorations.
“China: Through the Looking Glass” is the most popular among New York’s exhibitions for the last summer. It attracted 815,992 visitors. It’s nothing surprising about that because vintage and new Haute Couture dresses placed next to Chinese antique masterpieces to show the impact of Chinese culture on the Western world and contemporary art are a real miracle.