The World's Most Popular Art Museums and Exhibitions in 2025
Museums are popular. Rare collections and headline exhibitions command long queues. Last year proved no exception. The top five art museums worldwide (Musée du Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the National Museum of Korea, The British Museum and The Met) together attracted some 35 million visitors last year.
Each year, the Art Newspaper publishes a survey of the most visited art museums and exhibitions across the globe. In our blog below, we take a look at some of last year's most popular museums and exhibitions.
If you didn't make it to the shows or were lucky enough to go and want to relive the experience, we have included links to the exhibition catalogues and museum guides where available.
Most popular art museums
With some 9 million visitors in 2025, The Musée du Louvre was the most popular art museum in the world.
The Vatican Museums came in second with some 6.9 million visitors, the Met took third place with 6.9 million visitors, just ahead of the Vatican Museums.
In the UK, The British Museum, the Tate Modern and the National Gallery all made the top ten most popular museums worldwide attracting 6.4 million, 4.5 million and 4.1 million visitors respectively.
The reopening of the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery drove notable increases in attendance there compared to last year, demonstrating again what the sector has always known: capital investment and significant exhibitions move the needle more reliably than almost anything else.
If you are planning a visit to any of this great museums or want to enjoy the works without the queues, do take a look at these excellent museum guides:
1) The Louvre: All The Paintings
2) The Vatican: All The Paintings
4) Masterpieces of the British Museum
4) The Metropolitan Museum of Art : Masterpiece Paintings
Image: Cover of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Masterpiece PaintingsMost popular exhibitions
Temporary exhibitions continue to act as a significant draw.
Shanghai Museum's exhibition, On Top of the Pyramid: The Civilisation of Ancient Egypt attracted some 2.8 million visitors over its 13 month run.
Over half of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 2025 visitors attended its Ruth Asawa show. An exhibition focused on Van Gogh’s portraits of the Roulin family in Arles brought in more than a quarter of the MFA Boston's total visitors for the year.
In Europe the Anselm Kiefer exhibition shared between the Stedelijk and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam proved a hit drawing 340,000 visitors in total. The Met Museum's Superfine: Tailoring Black Style, MoMa's Jack Whitten and the Van Gogh show at the National Gallery of Art proved also proved extremely popular.
Which museums and shows did you visit last year?