Hasta La Ideas

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” apparently aren’t the only ones setting new attendance records for themselves. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art has announced that its extremely popular and often controversial “Art in the Streets” exhibition of graffiti and otherwise inclined street artists, has set a new record for most-attended exhibit in the museum’s history (pdf). During its run from mid-April through to August 8th, a total of 201,352 visitors reportedly saw the show, with a daily average attendance of nearly 2,500 people. And like the Met’s McQueen exhibition, there was a big push at the very end, with 32,278 in its final week. The news is certain to be welcomed by its new director, Jeffrey Deitch, who is still within his first year in the job and had faced some substantial hurdles fairly early on. Finally: remember back in mid-June when the museum announced that the artist Banksy was putting up the money to make Mondays free for visitors? Apparently that helped boost the numbers quite a bit:

One of the most popular features of the exhibition, and an unprecedented gesture by an artist, was Free Mondays, the first-ever museum sponsorship by British artist Banksy. The program, which provided free exhibition admission on Mondays, drew an average 4,083 visitors each Monday. On closing day, an all-time daily high of 8,424 visitors attended, with lines stretching from the entrance of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to Alameda Street in Little Tokyo.

All of this makes you wonder if the Brooklyn Museum might be reconsidering after they decided to cancel hosting “Art in the Streets” next year.

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