Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum make $784 million economic impact for New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Pablo Picasso: ‘Au Lapin Agile’
1905
oil on canvas
image: www.metmuseum.org
© Heirs of Pablo Picasso / ARS (Artists Rights Society), New York

Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum make $784 million economic impact for New York The Metropolitan Museum’s concurrent presentation of three acclaimed and widely attended special exhibitions over the summer 2010 season—Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú, and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity—generated $784 million in economic activity]]>

December 21 2010, source: Metropolitan Museum
Thomas P. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum, noted: “We are delighted that the Metropolitan’s outstanding collections and exhibitions continue to be such an exciting draw for visitors to New York, generating significant revenues for the City and the State during particularly challenging times. Summer at the Met has become, and will continue to be, a season of varied, appealing, and important exhibitions—required viewing, we hope, for museum visitors from both around the corner and around the globe.”

Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view from April 27 through August 15, 2010, drew 703,256 visitors. Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú, shown from April 27 through October 31, 2010, attracted 631,064. American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity, on view from May 5 through August 15, 2010, drew 335,759 visitors.

The survey of visitors to Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú, and American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity is the most recent of a series of audience studies undertaken by the Metropolitan to calculate the public economic impact of its special exhibition program. In 2007, the Museum found that the concurrent showing of Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde and Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 had generated $377 million in economic impact; in 2004, its El Greco retrospective had generated $345 million in economic impact, and in 2000 reported that visitors to Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids had generated some $307 million. A 1997 assessment estimated the economic impact of its exhibition The Glory of Byzantium at $184 million.

Using a scale of 1 to 10 to determine how important seeing one or more of the three exhibitions was in their decision to visit New York City, 28% of visitors surveyed in the study gave a rating of 8 or higher. Forty-seven percent gave a rating of 8 or higher to visiting the Metropolitan Museum in general. The economic impact is estimated to be $220 million for just those individuals who indicated that seeing the exhibitions was important in their decision to visit New York City and $368 million for those who wanted to see the Museum in general, yielding tax benefits of $22 and $36.8 million respectively.