Which art/craft shows and museums are the largest, and does it really matter?
By Cameron Meier
SA Editor
Everyone loves to claim that their art show or museum is the biggest or the best. While no one can definitively refute a qualitative claim, you would think that size could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by simply applying a certain criterion of measurement. Well, think again.
When researching this subject, I found that there are countless ways to classify size, and endless versions of the truth. Not only do some shows and museums exaggerate their attendance and square footage to make themselves seem larger, but many openly admit to not knowing their own statistics. At least in the latter instance, their honesty is refreshing — although their ignorance is a bit surprising.
In putting this article together, I turned to many sources. I scoured the Internet (often one of the worst places) and libraries, called and e-mailed show and museum personnel, and referred to Guinness World Records. However, I found that no definitive list of the largest shows or museums exists.
So, what I present here amounts to a best guess, based upon the aforementioned sources, my original research and my own visits over the years to all but one of the museums that I mention in this story. I wish I could say that I have been to all the shows I mention, but I have instead relied on police crowd statistics and information from past issues of SA. I have also relied on information supplied to me by the shows themselves, but I have done my best to corroborate that information.
Before announcing the unofficial winners of this “size survey,” I should throw out an even more interesting question: “Does all this matter, anyway?” If exact numbers can’t be pinned down, should we really be worried about which of the Ann Arbor July shows attract the most people or whether the Hermitage in St. Petersburg has a few more galleries than the Louvre? Perhaps the greatest irony about this article is I’m trying to apply an objective standard to something that concerns art — which is inherently subjective. On the other hand, our culture is obsessed with numbers and often assumes that bigger is better. So, with that said, here are the results:
There are three major ways to classify the size of art and craft shows: sales, attendance and number of exhibitors. (Square footage or acreage of the show site seems unimportant.) Regarding sales, SA’s annual 200 Best (in the September issue) is the industry’s best gauge of the top-selling events. We compile votes from our subscribers, who fill out a ballot each year listing their 10 best-selling shows. While there are other ways of figuring out the shows with the highest total sales (such as getting sales numbers directly from promoters), SA feels that our 200 Best, while certainly not perfect, is the most accurate and objective way of compiling this information.
Last year, the winner for fine art was the St. James Court Art Show in Louisville, Kentucky, while the Yellow Daisy Festival in Stone Mountain, Georgia, won for classic and contemporary crafts. Don’t forget to read our September issue this year to see if those shows hold on to the top spots.
The next two categories (attendance and number of exhibitors) proved more ambiguous and had to be broken down into further categories: shows that feature predominantly art and crafts, and events where art and crafts are a smaller (but still important) portion of larger festivities. Fairs and festivals where art and crafts take a significant backseat to music, food, carnival rides and other activities were not included in this research.
Of all the nation’s shows at which art/crafts is the focus, the Gold Coast Art Show in downtown Chicago has the highest attendance. While this free three-day event does feature music, almost all of the annual 750,000 patrons come to the show for the art, according to promoter Amy Amdur. That number is based upon police statistics and seems accurate for a 50-year-old, well-regarded show in the heart of the nation’s third-largest city. The Coconut Grove Arts Festival, held each February near Miami, Florida, might have claimed that title before the introduction of a gate fee in 2004. Estimates for that show’s attendance also used to reach 750,000. However, former show CEO Carol Romine Hawks said she thought the show site could not hold more than about 500,000 for the entire weekend. The 2005 show drew 225,000 paying patrons.
There is no clear second-place winner. Several art and crafts shows around the country claim an attendance of 500,000-600,000, including the Columbus Arts Festival (Columbus, Ohio), the Three Rivers Arts Festival (Pittsburgh) and the Ann Arbor, Michigan, shows in July.
Of the shows that feature art and crafts alongside other activities that are given equal importance, the Parke County Covered Bridge Festival (based in Rockville, Indiana), with a 10-day attendance of about 2 million, is the largest. The show is spread across an entire county and is only loosely organized by a single promoter.
Second place overall and first place for a show held at a single site goes to Chrysler Arts, Beats and Eats in Pontiac, Michigan, which pulls in 1.2 million, according to Lisa Konikow, the director of the art portion of the event. That number is based upon food-and-beverage sales, surveys, police estimates and SA’s own observations.
St. James Court has more juried fine art and fine crafts exhibitors (750) than any show in the country, while the Little Falls Arts & Crafts Fair in Little Falls, Minnesota, has the largest number of juried art and crafts exhibitors of all kinds (850 scheduled for 2005). The Parke County Covered Bridge Festival has more exhibitors of every type (including buy/sell) — about 2,000, although only about 150 of those are supervised directly by the County.
If you want to see the largest concentration of juried art and crafts exhibitors in the country, visit Ann Arbor in July. Although the city’s five major shows are run as separate events, most attendees view them as one big event — with about 1,200 exhibitors.
As with shows, there is no definitive answer here, either. Guinness World Records lists the Hermitage and Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, as the world’s largest “art gallery,” but the publication is unclear about its measurement criteria. The Hermitage does have 3 million works of art (not all on display at once) and 15 miles of galleries, according to several sources. However, the Louvre in Paris is often referred to as the world’s largest, especially after its major expansion in the 1990s. An Art in America article by Anne Rochette and Wade Saunders from 1994 said the Louvre was most likely the world’s largest museum, following its expansion. Regarding attendance at the two museums, the Louvre beats the Hermitage, 8 million to 3 million. Although the total areas cannot be confirmed, both museums (galleries plus all other space) likely have between 2 million and 3 million square feet. Though it is frustrating to do so, we must declare a tie for first when using total square footage as our criterion.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is close behind, with about 2 million square feet. Although this number cannot be independently verified, personal research, observation and map studies bear this figure out. In addition, the Met has about 2 million works of art and is the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere.
Tied for fourth place are three museums with about 1.6 million square feet each. Although if you took a tape measure to the buildings, you would certainly find a winner, our evidence is not conclusive enough to pronounce one bigger than another. The British Museum in London is said to have 30 miles of corridors. On the other hand, the museum was only able to confirm that the building had two miles of galleries; they said they did not know their total square footage. (Why this gallery figure is so much lower than the Hermitage’s is anybody’s guess. While the Hermitage is substantially bigger, the difference is not that great. This simply reflects the inaccuracies of measuring procedures, or perhaps exaggeration.) Old editions of the British Guinness Book of World Records claimed that the museum floor space comprised 17.5 acres (about 762,000 square feet). However, that was before a recent expansion, and it is unclear what criteria Guinness used to reach that figure. The British Museum has 4.8 million annual visitors and 7 million total works of art and artifacts, 2-3 million of which are books or manuscripts.
The Vatican Museums in Vatican City are difficult to measure. If you were to include all the buildings at the Vatican, the complex would certainly rival if not surpass the Hermitage and Louvre in square footage. For the purposes of this article, though, we are defining the Vatican Museums the way the Vatican itself does — the area devoted to the display of art, not including St. Peter’s, the Papal Apartments and other non-public areas.
The other museum tied for fourth is the only non-art museum on the list: the American Museum of Natural History, which includes 45 permanent exhibition halls spread over 25 buildings. The world’s largest natural history museum (bigger than the British Museum of Natural History in London) also contains 30 million items, scientific specimens and cultural artifacts. According to Guinness’s Laura McTurk, Guinness World Records ranks the American Museum of Natural History as the world’s largest “museum,” with 1.2 million square feet of “floor space.” As mentioned before, the book contains a separate listing for the world’s largest “art gallery” (the Hermitage). So, presumably, that means that Guinness defines “museum” as buildings containing artifacts, not art.
Most museums list their size as the total square footage of the entire building or complex of buildings, so that is the criterion we use here, too. The actual space devoted to display is always much smaller. In the case of the American Museum of Natural History, museum personnel claim that the display space is 40 percent of the building’s total area — casting doubt on the accuracy of Guinness’s claim of 1.2 million square feet of “floor space.” And with the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, only 125,000 of the building’s total 630,000 square feet is devoted to the display of art. Although the newly redesigned MOMA did not make our list of the world’s largest, it could possibly be the world’s biggest museum devoted exclusively to modern art, rivaled perhaps by the Centre George Pompidou in Paris.
The world’s largest complex of museums is without a doubt the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., with 16 separate museums (plus the National Zoo) and 140 million items.
Although Guinness World Records proved a useful starting point for this article, it is often vague about its measurement criteria and, by its own admission, does not independently verify some facts. And as shown by its statistics for the British Museum and the American Museum of Natural History, it often raises more questions than it answers.
This confusion is not confined to museums. For example, the publication used to list the Columbia carousel in Gurnee, Illinois, as the world’s largest merry-go-round. Although it had the largest capacity for many years because it was a double-decker, Guinness never took into account that the traditional measurement for merry-go-rounds is diameter, not capacity. Using that criterion, Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel at Walt Disney World in Florida, which I had the pleasure of researching and refurbishing, is the nation’s largest — and considerably more noteworthy because it is a historic, hand-carved wooden machine.
Another, more grievous example of a Guinness inaccuracy is that the publication claims that Macy’s in New York is the world’s biggest store, with 2.15 million square feet, according to McTurk. For decades, Macy’s has called itself the “world’s largest store.” However, my own personal research, which includes exhaustive studies of floor plans, city maps and actual on-site measurements, puts the figure at only about 1 million. By my estimates, Harrod’s in London and Tobu in Tokyo might be bigger, while Tokyo’s Seibu and Chicago’s Marshall-Field’s are probably very close behind. (These comparisons take into account all customer areas and employee areas devoted to sales but not office space in adjoining buildings or on floors where the public is not allowed.)
While these figures are difficult to prove — and slightly off topic for the usual Sunshine Artist article — it just shows that people often take for granted facts that are passed down, without taking time to double-check them or realize that there are as many different measuring criteria as there are people doing the measuring. So the next time you see attendance figures for an art show, or a museum, store or anything else for that matter claiming to be the “world’s biggest,” take those claims with a grain of salt.
All of these ambiguities lead us back to the central question of whether this all matters as long as the show or museum is good. The simple answer would be probably not, but as long as our culture is obsessed with categorizing and rating everything from the most successful consumer products to the top movies, we’re going to feel a need to subject art to the same rigors.
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