Exhibitions that fill soccer stadiums

The director of the Prado Museum, Miguel Zugaza, likes to measure show attendance by comparing it to the crowds at the Camp Nou soccer stadium, which is home to Barcelona FC and has a seating capacity of 100,000. To fill imaginary stadiums is the unofficial goal of the heads of Spain's great museums, and the fact is - contrary to olden times - that growing numbers of people are choosing art shows as the best way to spend their leisure time. This trend is not specific to Spain. The exhibition Leonardo da Vinci. A Painter in the Court of Milan, which opened last Wednesday at the National Gallery in London, was booked solid until December 24 just 24 hours after tickets went on sale.

In Spain, visitor numbers are growing exponentially. In 2010, attendance at national museums grew eight percent compared with the previous year. So far this year, growth stands at 11 percent, and that is without even counting the holiday season, which always means a spectacular rise in museum visits.

The latest survey on Spaniards' cultural habits picks up on this trend, and notes that 90 percent of visits are made for non-professional reasons.

Enrique Varela, deputy director general of the state museums department, explains that the average new museum-goer is a woman aged around 42 with a higher education and a job. For these women, going to a museum is clearly a social activity that is done spontaneously with their partners, children, relatives or friends. Varela also reveals that, according to a study that the Culture Ministry will release in December, culture in general and museums in particular work as a refuge ? an emotional, esthetic, ideological or intellectual haven removed from the uncertainty and bombardment of information that we are subjected to on a daily basis.

The Velázquez show that the Prado Museum organized between January and March 1990 was an unprecedented event in Spain in terms of the massive interest it created - the lines stretched all along the Paseo del Prado. For the first time, the venerable gallery registered more than 500,000 visitors - or five Barça stadiums, as Zugaza would say - a figure that no museum had ever dreamed of beforehand. The Prado recently announced that it would be opening seven days a week, no longer closing its doors on Mondays.

But 21 years later, and particularly in the last decade, things have changed greatly in favor of culture. Museum directors, while devoted to the mission of disseminating their permanent collections, found an additional goldmine in temporary exhibitions. Besides the mass audience shows that Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York for 30 years, complained about at length, the exhibitions that have triumphed in Spain also compete on the world's most-visited lists.

Topping the charts in positions one and two is the name of Pablo Picasso. Picasso. Tradición y vanguardia, held jointly at the Prado and the Reina Sofía between June 6 and September 25, 2006 attracted an audience of 785,189. The second show enabled visitors to the Reina Sofía to view an essential portion of the holdings of the Picasso Museum in Paris. Nearly 548,000 people saw that show between February and May 2008. Juan Muñoz, Sorolla, Manet, Goya, Tintoretto, Gauguin, the impressionists and Antonio López occupy the following spots.

What are the necessary ingredients for an art show to draw massive public attention? Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía, believes that rather than seek high attendance figures (which he is also interested in), the main thing is to create mediation structures so that visitors can "understand the story of the exhibition." He adds that people like to go and see artists whose names they are already familiar with.

"They come to recognize art, rather than to get to know new art." Although in Picasso's case, he believes that his work has the ability to surprise viewers time and again. When he is programming shows, Borja-Villel admits that he keeps audiences in mind, but that the main thing is the story.

"The public is not just the majority," he argues. "I seek a public made up of a multiplicity of minorities. In my three years at the helm of this museum, we've managed to draw an additional 1.5 million visitors."

So will Picasso continue to reign supreme in the exhibitions of years to come? "Probably so, because in the collective imagination he is perceived as a sacred, superior being. It is the same with Van Gogh."