Met Museum Breaks Attendance Record
Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago. 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†(pictured), 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. The increasing number of visitors has never bothered me: the place is so vast that I can always find a gallery of Old Masters with nobody in it. Bliss.
