A Bad Year for Museums Also

The number of visitors at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest has decreased by 90% compared to last year, according to the Director General of the museum, László Baán. He said that there was a similar decline in all museums of international scale worldwide.

Last year, a total of 11,563,000 tickets were sold for nearly four thousand exhibitions of 700 Hungarian museums. In 1991, the number of tickets purchased exceeded 12 million, and since then there has been a year when the number of visitors has barely risen above 8 million.

Museum directors told the Hungarian station InfoRádió that the attendance dropped to a fraction, but their operation is not endangered by the situation.

"Across the continent, museum attendance is 5-10% of what it was before. International tourism has ceased, the elderly who are usually more frequent museum visitors nowadays have the good reason not to leave their home very often, organized school groups that visited museums have disappeared and temporary exhibitions have become impossible," László Baán said.