Tate attracts 7.7m in a year
The Tate’s place as one of the great cultural success stories of the past decade has been confirmed by a set of extraordinary visitor figures: 7.7 million people passed through the doors of its four English galleries between April 2006 and April 2007.
Tate Modern was the real star: 5.2 million of those visitors went to the gallery on London’s Bankside, and three quarters of a million of them slid down Carsten Höller’s helter-skelters, last autumn’s wildly popular Turbine Hall commission. Tate Modern became the second-most visited tourist attraction in Britain, after Blackpool Pleasure Beach.
Three times as many visited Tate Modern as Tate Britain. “It is partly because of the excitement of the building itself,” said Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, “and partly its position in London by the Millennium Bridge. And clearly there is a huge interest in new developments in art all round the world. But what’s remarkable is that we’ve also had a steady increase in visitors and new audiences to Tate Britain.” Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said there were “no long faces at Tate Britain”, pointing out that last year’s Holbein in England was the second-most visited exhibition in its history.
Read full article (The Guardian, September 21, 2007)
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