Henry Samuels’s Telegraph blog has these interesting figures for French museum attendance (all bullets are quotes from Samuels:

• Figures for museum attendance in France reached record highs in several cases last year. The Louvre attracted a staggering 8.5 million visitors – 200,000 more than in 2007. Admissions have rocketed 67 per cent since 2001.
• One of the cultural smash hits turned out to be the storming of Versailles by America’s “king of kitsch,” Jeff Koon’s, whose exhibition brought in one million visitors – a record for the palace of the Sun King.
• The Pompidou Centre, meanwhile, had an excellent year, attracting 2.75 million visitors, a rise of more than six per cent, while visits to the various museums run by the Paris town hall rose by a third to three million.

Culture Lifts French Gloom (Telegraph)