Tate Modern may officially be the world’s most visited modern and contemporary art museum, but the critics are circling after it reported a budget deficit six months ago.
As The Art Newspaper reports, some have pointed the finger at the London museum’s programming and curatorial strategies for its financial woes, while claiming that Tate’s programing is to blame for a decline in foot traffic. Domestically, it is back to 95 percent of the pre-Covid level, but it’s down at 61 percent internationally.
However, research shows that the picture is more nuanced, with Brexit and socioeconomic shifts also impacting footfall.
TAN’s annual visitor report, published in April, outlines how visitor numbers at Tate’s institutions last year was considerably lower than in 2019, which was a year of record highs. In 2024, Tate Modern witnessed 25 percent fewer visitors in total compared to before the pandemic and Tate Britain was down 32 percent. Tate St Ives witnessed an almost 40 percent drop in attendance. Tate Liverpool is closed until 2027.
While some blame Tate’s exhibitions for fewer visitors, TAN’s research—which combines government figures, university enrollment and tourism stats, Arts Council and Art Fund surveys, and Tate’s own internal research—found that “footfall is shaped as much, if not more, by external socioeconomic factors, national and international.”
Tate said that “while attendance by domestic audiences is close to 95 percent of pre-Covid levels—there has been a marked drop in overseas visitors to Tate institutions, especially in people from Europe aged 16 to 24. This age group, Tate says, is a key demographic for the group and for art museums as opposed to ‘museum museums.’”
As per TAN’s annual visitor report, Tate Modern accounts for around three-quarters of the group’s total annual visitors. And while the museum has seen fewer people walk through its doors of late, it still remains the world’s fifth most visited art museum. The Louvre, Vatican Museums, the British Museum, and MoMA are ahead of it (in that order). Tate Modern has been the most visited modern and contemporary art museum since 2014, aside from in 2021, when the Centre Pompidou in Paris and MoMA pipped it to the post.
Liam Darbon, Tate’s director of audiences and innovation, and his team scrutinized the demographic shifts within the museum group’s visitors over the past 10 years. These shifts correlate with demographic shifts among visitors to the UK at large, said.
“The biggest finding for Maria Balshaw, Tate’s director, is the decline in young visitors from the EU, specifically in the 16-24 age bracket,” TAN reported. “Young people of that age group are a primary demographic for the museum group, accounting for one in six visitors to Tate Modern and Tate Britain.”
Balshaw said “the figures speak for themselves. Tate Modern alone welcomed 609,000 visitors from Europe, between ages 16 to 24, in 2019-20 but then 357,000 in 2023-24. And if you think about that age of person: they are profoundly affected by the combination of Brexit changing their educational and work opportunities and then Covid profoundly affecting the end of their studies and the way they choose to live their lives. They are, in general, also travelling less.”
Research by the UK’s Office of National Statistics highlight how the number of visitors from the EU barely moved from 2015 and 2019 from 24 million each year. By 2023, though, it had fallen to around 22 million. Ross Bennett-Cook, a travel and tourism expert at the University of Westminster, told TAN, “Young people are facing the cost of living crisis a lot more than Boomers and older generations. Gen Z and Millennials are the group who face the biggest strain when it comes to travel.”
While audiences vary between the different Tates, Darbon said these demographic shifts are noticeable across the group. He also said that “the 16-25, 16-35 market is where you see the visitation shift away from a classic museum into an art gallery space.”
“In other words,” TAN reported, “to his mind, young adults are more important as a demographic to art galleries than to so-called ‘museum museums,’ and the loss of young EU visitors is therefore more impactful.”
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