The American art museum — one of the republic’s most enduring instruments of public education and cultural authority — endured a year of fire, political paralysis, and institutional tumult in 2025 and emerged, according to the most authoritative annual accounting of global museum attendance, diminished in certain quarters yet remarkably durable in others. The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of the world’s one hundred most-visited art museums, released April 4, documents a landscape in which natural disaster and governmental dysfunction inflicted severe damage on publicly funded institutions in Los Angeles and Washington while the nation’s largest privately governed museums continued their post-pandemic recovery and, in several cases, reached historic heights.
The most dramatic losses were concentrated in two cities and traceable to two distinct calamities. In Los Angeles, the January 2025 Palisades fire — one of the most destructive natural disasters in that city’s history — forced the Getty Villa to close for approximately six months, according to NPR and The Art Newspaper. The villa, a custodian of some of the Getty’s most important antiquities from ancient Greece and Rome, saw attendance plummet nearly sixty percent year over year, with the institution recording just 188,952 visitors for all of 2025, according to figures published in The Art Newspaper’s survey. The Getty noted in a statement to NPR that the steep decline was attributable entirely to the fire-related closure and was not reflective of diminished interest since the museum reopened last June; attendance upon reopening, the institution said, remained steady.
On the opposite coast, the record forty-three-day federal government shutdown last fall shuttered the Smithsonian complex, the National Gallery of Art, and other federally funded cultural sites in the nation’s capital for weeks during peak autumn visitation. The consequences, as documented in the survey, were severe. The National Gallery of Art lost more than a quarter of its audience compared to the previous year — a twenty-eight percent decline, according to ARTnews’s analysis of the data. The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian each saw attendance drop by nearly fifteen percent, according to NPR. The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum suffered the steepest relative losses, with audiences reduced to close to half of their pre-COVID size, according to NPR and The Art Newspaper.
The Art Newspaper attributed the severity of those Smithsonian declines not solely to the shutdown but to a broader institutional turbulence. The two museums sharing a building on the National Mall, the report observed, experienced a particularly volatile year marked by prolonged disputes with the administration over programming, the withdrawal of artists from exhibitions, and high-level resignations. The Smithsonian’s secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, had asserted in 2025 that the institution would continue with its own internal programming audit rather than comply with the White House’s review, according to reporting by The Art Newspaper.
Yet the survey’s portrait of American museum life is far from uniformly bleak, and the institutions that fared well tell an instructive story about the sources of institutional strength. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — the world’s fifth most-visited art museum — attracted more than six million visitors in 2025, an increase of approximately five percent over the prior year, according to NPR and The Art Newspaper. The Met’s gains were bolstered by the reopening of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, and blockbuster programming such as the exhibition “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” proved a significant draw, according to NPR. Even with the shutdown’s toll, the National Gallery of Art still ranked second among American museums in total visitor numbers, according to NPR.
The Art Institute of Chicago experienced close to a fifteen percent rise in attendance, according to The Art Newspaper’s data. The Museum of Modern Art in New York registered a modest increase over 2024, with NPR attributing part of the gain to the Jack Whitten retrospective. In Boston, a single exhibition — “The Power of Names: Van Gogh” at the Museum of Fine Arts — accounted for more than a quarter of the museum’s annual attendance, which was up overall by seven percent, according to NPR. The show, co-organized with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was described by NPR as one of several Van Gogh and Impressionist exhibitions that proved to be major successes in Washington, Los Angeles, and Boston alike.
The most striking narrative of growth, however, belonged to the American heartland. The Cleveland Museum of Art welcomed more than 800,000 visitors in 2025 — the highest attendance in the institution’s nearly one-hundred-and-ten-year history, according to Todd Mesek, the museum’s chief marketing officer, who confirmed the figure in an email to NPR. Mesek attributed the record to sustained investment in exhibitions, public programs, and the museum’s longstanding commitment to free general admission. He noted that the ticketed special exhibition “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” generated the museum’s highest attendance for a single show in more than twenty-five years, according to NPR. The Cleveland and Toledo museums of art both experienced jumps of more than twenty percent, according to NPR and The Art Newspaper.
Other regional institutions outperformed as well. The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art nearly doubled its attendance, according to NPR. Several museums managed to surpass their pre-COVID benchmarks from 2019, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as reported by NPR.
The American findings, the survey noted, appeared generally modest when set against global trends. The Louvre in Paris — the world’s most-visited museum — attracted more than nine million visitors in 2025, a gain of close to five percent despite a year roiled by a high-profile jewel heist and the resignation of its director, according to NPR and ARTnews. The Vatican Museums welcomed 6.9 million, according to ARTnews. In East Asia, growth was explosive: the National Museum of Korea in Seoul saw a seventy-two percent surge in attendance from the prior year, rising to 6.5 million visitors — a leap the report called one of the largest rises in absolute numbers in the survey’s history, according to NPR and ARTnews. Shanghai Museum East, which opened in 2024, improved from 4.2 million to 4.6 million visitors, according to Artforum and ARTnews. More than two hundred million visits were made to the top one hundred museums worldwide, according to The Art Newspaper — still below the 230 million recorded in 2019 but a vast improvement from the 54 million of the pandemic year 2020.
For the United States, the survey’s data yields a lesson that transcends any single year’s ledger. The institutions that weathered 2025 most successfully were, almost without exception, those that combined bold curatorial ambition — Van Gogh in Boston, Murakami in Cleveland, fashion at the Met — with operating models insulated from the disruptions of federal funding disputes. The museums that suffered most were those that, by virtue of their dependence on federal appropriations, could be rendered inaccessible to the American public by a political impasse in which they had no agency. Whether that vulnerability constitutes an acceptable cost of public stewardship or a structural hazard to the nation’s cultural patrimony is a question the survey’s numbers make increasingly difficult to defer.