Europe's Big-Bucks Museums

It costs about $10, it’s a big-budget production, it’s not too taxing on the mind, the snacks are overpriced, and it’s a perfect way to escape the heat of summer for 90 minutes of frigid air-conditioning. That’s right—I’m talking about the museum blockbuster, that particular brand of glitzy exhibit put up each June and July in the world’s most renowned museums.

Long, snaking lines for admission to the latest art shows prove that the summer blockbuster phenomenon isn’t limited to the movie house. More people visited museums in England in 2005 than went to football matches, and according to the U.K. Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, museum attendance is consistently highest in July and August, rising nearly 25 percent higher than the preceding months.

Summer tourism naturally accounts for part of the phenomenon, but local residents also have time off, and therefore the leisure to visit museums. The ones I visited this summer seemed well prepared to cater to this special audience.

In Berlin, the Neue Nationalgalerie—housed in Mies van der Rohe’s great modernist shell—gutted its permanent collection and put up a massively advertised show of French impressionist and post-impressionist art from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Tickets were expensive and lines were long, but Berliners flocked to the exhibit. Everyone seems to love 19th-century French painting. It’s instantly recognizable, aesthetically unobjectionable, and easily digestible for the casual viewer.

Likewise, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) put on a show of Edward Hopper paintings this summer. Hopper is one of the most beloved American painters—probably for his austere but tender portraits of archetypical American life—and his work lends itself more to speculation than to analysis (“Just what is that woman in the red dress doing at that diner so late at night?”).

I don’t mean to say that these works don’t reward careful examination, but rather that they don’t require it: it would be hard to imagine the tremendous show of Weimar painting, “Glitter and Doom,”—displayed at the Met last winter—being put up in the summer, simply because it demands so much more analysis than a casual museum-goer is willing to give.

Rather, summer exhibitions feel like summer movies, complete with high-budget special effects (for example, Salvador Dalí, at London’s Tate Modern), easily digested storylines (Hopper, at the MFA), and big-name stars (Cezanne and Picasso, at the Musée d’Orsay).

Granted, you snack on a 12-dollar turkey-and-avocado sandwich instead of 4-dollar popcorn, but you enjoy the A/C for two hours and walk out into the bright sunlight all the same at the end. Perhaps you’ll discuss the experience with your date (“So, did he really die in the end, or is he still alive?” “Why on earth did he cut off his ear? I don’t get it”), but soon you’ll stop worrying and forget it all.

Hollywood glitz certainly wasn’t lacking in the London art scene this summer. You could have caught a glimpse at the Tate Modern’s Dalí exhibit, which highlighted his Hollywood aspirations. Or you could have strolled over the to White Cube Gallery and taken a gander at Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted platinum skull, “For the Love of God,” which recently sold for three-quarters of the budget of “Transformers.” See? Even the box-office revenues at the great European galleries were on par with the latest Michael Bay flicks.

—Staff writer Alexander B. Fabry can be reached at fabry@fas.harvard.edu.