Museum Raising Non-European Prices at Record Visitor Numbers; The Math Appears Sound; The History Is What It Is
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
PARIS — The Louvre is increasing admission prices for visitors from outside the European Union starting January 2026, a decision made as the museum reaches historic visitor numbers. The Louvre, which is the most visited museum in the world with approximately 8.9 million annual visitors, contains approximately 35,000 works assembled through royal patronage, revolutionary confiscation, Napoleonic military campaigns, and purchases across several centuries. It now charges more for non-European access to this collection. The pricing structure is not the most interesting aspect of the collection’s history.
The Collection’s Origins
The Louvre’s most famous works arrived through mechanisms that ranged from the commercial to the military. The Venus de Milo was purchased from Greece in 1820. The Winged Victory came from Samothrace in 1863 under French diplomatic auspices that the Greek and Italian governments have assessed differently than France has. The Egyptians who built the objects in the Egyptian antiquities collection were not consulted about their eventual Parisian relocation. The collection is genuine and extraordinary and its assembly reflects the specific assumptions about cultural property that prevailed in the centuries of its accumulation.
The Pricing Logic
Charging non-EU visitors more than EU visitors reflects the principle that residents and their taxes support the institution and therefore receive a preferential rate. This is a reasonable principle that produces its intended outcome: lower effective costs for French and European visitors, higher revenues from the international visitors who constitute a significant share of the 8.9 million annual total. The pricing is economically logical and consistent with the museum’s role as a publicly funded institution serving the French public.
The Mona Lisa visitor experience at the current price point involves navigating a crowd of several hundred people to view a painting approximately the size of a large laptop from behind a barrier at a distance that makes the subtlety of the painting’s technique visible only in photographs taken on phones that the crowd is also holding up. The new non-EU pricing will not change this experience. It will change who is in the crowd. Whether the change improves the experience depends on the visitor’s tolerance for crowds of different sizes and compositions.
More: The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Paris continues in May. The sun is out. The terrasses are full. The cultural institutions are producing the programming that they produce. The transport disruptions are occurring and being managed. The tax returns are being filed with the assistance of the lawyers who have been provided for this purpose. The political commentary is ongoing. The diplomatic notes are being filed. The invention competition is awarding its prizes. The whole apparatus of French civic and cultural life is running at the pace of a city that has been running at this pace for a very long time and has developed the specific competence of doing so without appearing to work very hard at it. This is what Paris in May looks like. It looks like this every year. It is worth seeing every year.
