Visiting a national museum should be a poetic, suspended moment, an invitation to nourish the senses. However, more and more often, the experience is more reminiscent of a trip on public transport during rush hour. How did we get to this situation? What is the responsibility of museums and their responses to this issue? What about visitor practices and the use of social networks? Focus on the emblematic cases of the Louvre Museum and the Orsay Museum.
10.2 million visitors. In 2018, the Louvre Museum passed the symbolic barrier of 10 million entries, and the following year, it came close again with 9.6 million visitors even though the entrance via the Pyramid had been designed to welcome 4.6 million visitors per year. Over the same periods, the Musée d’Orsay experienced similar enthusiasm, with 3.3 million visitors in 2018 and 3.65 million visitors in 2019. In 2020, Covid-19 put a stop to this progression. We will have to wait until 2023 to return to an affluence approaching pre-pandemic levels. That year, the Louvre welcomed 8.9 million visitors and Orsay broke its attendance record with 3.9 million entries.
These figures reflect the communication actions implemented by these museums and by the tourist office of the city of Paris to attract ever more visitors. But where is the balance point to avoid falling into overcrowding? While museums communicate on the actions implemented to rethink spaces in order to better accommodate the public, in reality, the question of visiting comfort is often neglected in favor of economic interests.
What are the limits to visiting museums?
Establishments open to the public are regulated by two main constraints with regard to attendance. On the one hand, the operating load, which indicates a legal threshold of visitors not to be exceeded to guarantee the safety of the building and the people who occupy it.
On the other hand, the reception capacity. For cultural institutions, this is drawn up by the Ministry of Culture which suggests not going beyond one visitor per 5 m². This brings the reception capacity of the Louvre Museum to 14,547 visitors (72,735 m2) and the Musée d’Orsay to 3,371 visitors (16,853 m2). Their daily capacity is set at double, because even if there are saturated times, it is rare for visitors to enter the museum at 9 a.m. and leave at 6 p.m. (the average visit time is 2 hours for the museum). ‘Orsay and 2:30 a.m. for the Louvre Museum).
Museums cannot rely solely on this numerical data: they do not reflect the experience of the public. Visitor behavior is a parameter that is difficult to quantify, but it proves ethnographically observable, making it possible to predict the saturation of certain rooms.
In the same museum, some rooms empty, others saturated
At the Louvre Museum, the public service knows that a large number of visitors prefer to visit the Denon wing, and more precisely the 1is floor and rooms 700, 702, 703, 705, 710 and 711. The flows are captured and polarized in this wing where the main “masterpieces of the Louvre” are concentrated (The Mona Lisa, The Victory of Samothrace et the Venus de Milo) thus saturating the south of the building, including part of the Sully wing which leads to Egyptian Antiquities.
For around 80% of visitors, the Louvre experience comes down to a few works that focus on only 1/7e exhibition spaces. This characterizes a Louvre in anamorphosis, that is to say a distorted representation of a place, subsequently impacting museum practices. The spaces are saturated by visitors who accumulate experiences of places; they will have do the Louvre or Orsay, while other departments of these museums, which present just as many masterpieces, are almost empty.
An infra-organization makes it possible to “structure” the places: one-way staircase, roll-up strip, direction of visit, incentive to shift visiting times, etc. These attempts to develop the museum space, however, remain symbolic: the flows remain condensed in certain places.
Temporary exhibitions victims of their success
For the Musée d’Orsay, the phenomenon of overcrowding is mainly associated with temporary exhibitions. As at the Louvre, the occupation is in anamorphosis with a high concentration of visitors in the two temporary exhibition spaces located on the ground floor of the museum. These spaces represent approximately ¼ of the total exhibition spaces.
For example, in 2024, the exhibition Paris 1874 welcomed 722,130 visitors over 95 days of opening, or 7,450 visitors per day on average. By reducing the reception capacity per hour within the exhibition space (2000 m2), we note that this is around 830 visitors/hour, more than double that recommended by the Ministry of Culture (400 visitors/hour).
Visiting comfort is relegated to the background. In temporary exhibitions, spaces quickly become congested at the slightest significant step (information, labels, major works). The masses accumulate around the most iconic works and the general eagerness imposes a sustained rhythm of “meeting” with the works. The museum journey is experienced at the rhythm of other visitors.
Why such overcrowding?
The “desire for places” plays a key role in this overcrowding. In summary, the desire for places is driven by representations. The reputation and image of an entity have an impact on the territory: they induce dynamism, create a desire, a desire to appropriate a place and practice it.
According to my research, digital social networks amplify this phenomenon and become temporary and transitional “spaces” between cultural places and their visitors. Museums have strengthened these tools during Covid-19 to communicate more directly with the public and renew their image, increasing their attractiveness. The photos broadcast are those of an empty museum, often devoid of visitors.
At the same time, visitors also communicate on networks during or after their visit to broadcast a more personal and unfiltered experience. These appropriations of the place also create a greater desire to visit. It is moreover a desire to “have done” a place more than a discovery of this one, an approach which is similar to an accounting logic, a sort of competition where the points would be counted by interposed photographs .
By presenting their experiences of museums to their network, these different actors increase the visibility of the museum. This leads to sometimes viral communication which escapes the institution and renews practices within museums.
An ambivalent position of museums
Building public loyalty is an important point for museum management, and the diversity of communication channels serves to capture this already won over audience. The virtual museum experience and experience on site collide: the virtual-digital is no longer just a communication tool, it becomes a visiting tool, thus short-circuiting the actions implemented by museums to make a visit pleasant.
Added to this are the budgetary tensions that museums have been experiencing for several decades. Overcrowding should therefore be read through the prism of an economy of cultural institutions, which, through the communication of exhibitions or popular events, attract visitors, but not only that. They attract large groups who seek to benefit from the good reputation of these museums to host private events. This corporate sponsorship modeled on the American model requires large museums to self-finance up to 67% for the Orsay and Orangerie Museum (2022) and 56% for the Louvre Museum (2022). This economic model does not necessarily allow innovation to rethink its accessibility in space and time, but to achieve a budgetary balance in the current socio-economic context.
However, certain avenues are being considered to find a balance between viable economy, socio-cultural interest and renewal of museum practices. The Louvre Museum now offers two “late nights” with an opening until 9 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays, compared to a late night at the Musée d’Orsay on Thursdays (9:45 p.m.). Thus, extending these hours to other days would make it possible to further smooth out museum attendance, particularly for a local public. For the Louvre Museum, there is also the idea of depolarizing the entrance to the Pyramid, which in 1989 was not designed to absorb such attendance. These new accesses would also make it possible to rework the link between the Louvre and the city of Paris: the museum would no longer be a fortress into which visitors would enter through its center, but a place which would integrate into the network of the city.
Until then, a piece of advice: if you want to visit the Louvre in peace, put away your phones and head towards less popular rooms, but full of treasures, like the second floor of the Sully wing (notably the impressionist works in room 903), or oriental antiquities on the ground floor of the Richelieu wing (rooms 227 to 230).
