Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
450,000+ visitors from 2006-2007 at the MIA. So...two museums in or very near the top 20 highest attended in the country? That seems awfully good to me, but what do I know?
That's not even bringing the Weisman into the equation...
Well no. You are just speculating now. We only know that none of the MPLS museums is in the top 17 in the US or top 100 in the world by attendance -- according to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia list may be flawed or outdated but that's the only ranking I was able to find. We don't know how many other museums can claim attendance between 400k and 500k (or
even more). I suspect many.
The link below shows the following attendance for a number of museums that don't even crack the top 100 by Wikipedia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art - 800k
Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) - 860k
Cleveland Museum of Art - 630k
Detroit Institute of Arts - 590k
St Louis Art Museum - 480k
Why are these not on the Wiki list? i dont know. Point is there could be 20 other museums claiming attendance between 400k and 500k (depending on the source). And this is just art museums! What about science, natural history, music, etc.? So I wouldn't rush to put Minneapolis on the level of Philadelphia and DC. I am not yet convinced it is ahead of Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Attendence is a terrible metric to judge museums. Museums are best judged by what is in them, not by how many people go to them. A better metric is collection size but that isn't perfect either because it doesn't allow for qualitative differences and because generalist museums have much larger collections than specialist museums. I have been to a lot of museums though, I feel comfortable in saying that the MIA collection isn't full of fluff.
Anyway I posted this in another thread a while ago, I bolded some of the ones that have been in the discussion here:
Quote:
I made a list of some art museums by the size of their collection, obviously size and quality are not the same thing:
Metropolitan Museum of Art - 2,000,000+ Museum of Fine Arts Boston - 450,000 Museum of Modern Art - 300,000+ Art Institute of Chicago - 260,000 Philadelphia Museum of Art - 225,000 California Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco) - 124,000 National Gallery of Art - 110,000 Los Angeles County Museum of Art - 100,000 Baltimore Museum of Art - 90,000 Minneapolis Institute of Art - 80,000 Denver Art Museum - 68,000 Museum of Fine Arts Houston - 62,000 Detroit Institute of Art - 60,000 Indianapolis Museum of Art - 54,000 Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford) - 50,000 Cleveland Museum of Art - 43,000 Portland Art Museum - 42,000 New Orleans Museum of Art - 40,000 Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh) - 35,000 Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City) - 33,500 St Louis Art Museum - 30,000 Toledo Museum of Art - 30,000 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - 27,000 Milwaukee Art Museum - 25,000 Munson Williams Proctor Institute (Utica, NY) - 25,000 Seattle Art Museum - 25,000 Birmingham Museum of Art - 24,000 Dallas Museum of Art - 24,000 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (Richmond) - 23,000 Phoenix Art Museum -18,000 Utah Museum of Fine Arts - 17,000 Corcoran Gallery (Washington DC) - 16,000 Speed Art Museum (Louisville) - 12,000 High Museum of Art (Atlanta) - 11,000 Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha) - 11,000 Memorial Art Gallery (Rochester, NY) - 11,000 Walker Art Center (Minneapolis) - 11,000
I couldn't find numbers for the J Paul Getty museum in LA or the Guggenheim in New York. I made 10,000 pieces the cut off. This isn't all inclusive, I probably missed some museums but I will add them if anyone mentions them. This list is a work in progress.
Last edited by Drewcifer; 02-17-2012 at 10:53 AM..
Attendence is a terrible metric to judge museums. Museums are best judged by what is in them, not by how many people go to them. A better metric is collection size but that isn't perfect either because it doesn't allow for qualitative differences and because generalist museums have much larger collections than specialist museums. I have been to a lot of museums though, I feel comfortable in saying that the MIA collection isn't full of fluff.
Anyway I posted this in another thread a while ago, I bolded some of the ones that have been in the discussion here:
Sorry, I dont buy it. As you yourself noted, size is not the same as quality. Are we to believe that Washington has only one of the 30 best museums in the country when it has 5 of the 15 most visited? Attendance is not a perfect measure but when it comes to quality it's as good as we've got. Museums that are highly regarded get a lot of traffic. Those that are not, do not. The fact that none of the MPLS museums are able to crack even 500k - even though they are free - tells me more about their quality and reputation than the size of the collection.
Those are art museums, Washington has 2 high quality art museums - the National Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery.
You have never been to the MIA so you have no basis on which to rate its' quality. Basing it on attendance is absurd but obviously I can't convince you of that. Museums aren't judged on "sales" the way businesses are. Numbers are a bad way to judge museums, to really judge them you have to go there.
Look, along time ago, in my earlier life, I majored in art. I have a degree in it. I grew up in upstate New York and Chicago. I have been to almost every major art museum on the east coast. I have traveled a fair amount so I have also been to many others in the US and also in Europe. The MIA is a world class museum, the Seattle Art Museum and the High Museum in Atlanta are not; but based on attendence you would claim that they are. Conclusion: your criteria is suspect.
Last edited by Drewcifer; 02-17-2012 at 11:51 AM..
Those are art museums, Washington has 2 high quality art museums - the National Gallery and the Corcoran Gallery.
You have never been to the MIA so you have no basis on which to rate its' quality. Basing it on attendance is absurd but obviously I can't convince you of that. Museums aren't judged on "sales" the way businesses are.
Sorry pal but your logic is flawed. Are you saying that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is better than the National Gallery when it doesn't even get 20% of the traffic of the latter? Perhaps "better" is not the right word because it's difficult to make an objective assessment of quality when it comes to museums. Museums are not cars. "Highly regarded" is a better one. And I'd say that a museum that gets 5m a year is more highly regarded than one that can't even crack a million.
As I have said repeatedly attendance is not a perfect indicator of quality but it is better - and more objective - than the size of collection. The list of the most visited museums in the country corresponds much better to what most people would consider the best museums in the country than the ranking by collection size that you posted.
And I don't know what you consider high quality - that's subjective - but Washington has 5 of the 15 most visited ART museums in the country (according to Wiki). And that doesn't even include The Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, which according to one of the sources gets more than 800k a year.
Anyway even if we go off of your list I see nothing to suggest that MPLS is in the league of DC/Philly/SF. The Museum of Art in Philly has almost 3 times the collection of MIA. SF has two museums in top 25. Washington is considered possibly the top museum city in the country. Like I said, MPLS certainly deserves to be in the next tier but let's not get carried away.
I never said that Minneapolis was in the same class as SF/DC/Philly.
You are doing this like the guys who judge art by how much it sells for. I suspect that you love arguing more than you love art, so there is really no point in this discussion.
I never said that Minneapolis was in the same class as SF/DC/Philly.
You are doing this like the guys who judge art by how much it sells for. I suspect that you love arguing more than you love art, so there is really no point in this discussion.
Well I was only responding to this (slightly over the top) assessment:
Quote:
Originally Posted by rogead
Minneapolis stands solidly above similarly-sized cities (Denver, Seattle), and larger cities (ATL, DFW, DET) in its performing arts profile. While Minneapolis falls short of NY, CHI, BOS, or LA; there is no hyperbole or exaggeration in suggesting that the city compares well with SF, DC, HOU, and PHI in regards
to fine/performing arts. People working in the performing arts industry would probably emphasize that even more than I have.
I never said that attendance was a perfect indicator but merely that based on the available evidence there is no basis for this conclusion. It seems you do not disagree so I don't know why you are arguing with me.
Also Drewcifer -- just to be clear, I am not dismissing collection size altogether. Of course, a tiny museum is not the same as a major art museum even if it gets more visitors (which can be caused by other factors such as tourism). But by the same token you can't tell me that MIA must be better than the Cleveland Museum of Art just because it has an 80k collection vs. 40k in Cleveland.
I am sure that neither the most visited ranking nor the collection size ranking correlates perfectly with quality. But if i had to pick one i would go with the former - at least as far as perceived quality.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
