ARE BLOCKBUSTER SHOWS DUMBING DOWN THE ART WORLD?

Art galleries and museums worldwide recorded a sharp rise in visitor numbers last year thanks to blockbuster shows featuring artists such as Manet, Matisse, and Miró, Richard Jinman reports in The Guardian. But some experts believe the proliferation of these crowd-pleasing megashows is reducing the diversity of exhibitions and may squeeze smaller, more academic shows out of the market. Heading the list of the world’s most visited shows was “Treasures of a Sacred Mountain” at the Tokyo National Museum, which was seen by 7,638 visitors a day. The El Greco exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art was the second most visited show with 6,897 visitors a day, and an exhibition of work from New York’s Museum of Modern Art attracted 6,568 people a day when it opened at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie.