Tips for travelers: how to beat the crowds at art museums
One of the most compelling reasons for travel, cited in many surveys of vacation travelers, is to visit museums and see art and artifacts. And there are great museums in almost every city in the world, each with its own special collection of rare aesthetic treasures. In London there is for example the often-overlooked Queen’s collection, in Paris there is the L’Orangerie with Monet’s works, and in Houston there is the Rothke museum. But one problem with visiting museums, whether you are going to the Louvre or the MOMA, is crowds. Here are some suggestions for beating the crowds, so that you don’t go to look at your favorite painting and find that there is a whole tour bus full of people ahead of you in line.
Go on “off days” and at “off hours”, not on peak days for museum visitation. If you go on a weekday, early in the morning, for example, you may have the entire museum all to yourself. Avoid going on weekends, when everyone else will have time off from work and school to visit the museums, but if you must go on busy visitation days, try to go during the hours when the museum is least busy. One way to find out the best time to go is to ask a museum guard which times of day are slowest.
If you enter a museum and find that you are behind a large crowd, don’t panic. When buses of tourists unload to visit a museum (and you may be one of the tourists who just got off of one of those buses) they always follow the same procedure. Once they are inside the museum, they move from room to room, from start to finish. So if you want to avoid the crowds, the best thing to do is to immediately go to the last gallery on the top floor of museum, which will probably be empty, and work your way backwards through the rooms of the museum.