Ten dollars. That what you should be paying to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. There were 6.3m other visitors there last year and that’s what they paid on average. That’s also a record level of attendance for the Met which is the United States’s top museum:
The Met, which announced the figures late Monday, said it was the fourth year in a row that the museum had drawn more than 6 million visitors, keeping it in a rarefied group that includes the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, which both attracted slightly larger numbers, and the Louvre, the world’s biggest draw with more than 9 million in each of the last three years. The Met’s total, which includes visitors to both the main building on Fifth Avenue and the Cloisters in Washington Heights, was pushed up in part by the highly popular “China: Through the Looking Glass,” an exploration of China’s influence on Western fashion; it has drawn more than 350,000 visitors, many of whom are reflected in attendance numbers for the fiscal year that ended June 30.
But the Met’s increase was more a reflection of the popularity of its overall exhibitions program: Over the last year, 20 shows drew more than 100,000 visitors each. The percentage of international visitors increased, to 38 percent of overall attendance, up from 36 percent the year before; in 2014 the number of international visitors to New York City topped 12 million, a record. The museum, which resumed a seven-day schedule in July 2013 after more than 40 years of closing on Mondays, remained the city’s most-visited attraction for both domestic and international audiences, as it has been for many years.
Metropolitan Museum Draws Record Crowds (The New York Times)