Art galleries and museums recorded a sharp rise in visitor numbers last year thanks to blockbuster shows featuring artists such as Manet, Matisse and Miró.
But some experts believe the proliferation of these crowd-pleasing megashows is reducing the diversity of exhibitions and may squeeze smaller, more academic shows out of the market.
A survey of about 800 galleries and museums reveals that 241 exhibitions managed to attract more than 1,000 visitors a day last year, a 21% rise compared with the 2003 survey.
Heading the list of the world's most visited shows was Treasures of a Sacred Mountain at the Tokyo National Museum, which was seen by 7,638 visitors a day. The El Greco exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art was the second most visited show with 6,897 visitors a day and an exhibition of work from New York's Museum of Modern Art attracted 6,568 people a day when it opened at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie.
The Tate Modern's Edward Hopper retrospective, which attracted 4,215 visitors a day last year, was the only British show in the top 20.
The survey, which is published in the March edition of the Art Newspaper, also highlights how the same show can attract far fewer visitors in London than in New York or Paris.
El Greco at the Metropolitan was seen by 574,381 people, compared with 219,000 at the National Gallery. An Edouard Vuillard exhibition was seen by 323,500 people at the Grand Palais in Paris, compared with 159,900 at the Royal Academy in London.
Cristina Ruiz, the editor of the Art Newspaper, said the figures were a reflection of the relatively small capacity of London's exhibition spaces rather than a lack of public interest in the shows.
The Hopper exhibition, which had been seen by almost 430,000 visitors when it closed in September, heads the list of the 10 most visited London shows. El Greco at the National Gallery was second with 2,126 visitors a day and Tate Britain's Turner Prize 2003 show was third with 2,066 visitors a day.
Ms Ruiz said the rise in global attendances was not necessarily linked to the quality of the art and exhibits on offer. Galleries in Japan and Europe were under increasing pressure to increase revenues as government funding was either withdrawn or frozen and institutions moved towards the privately funded model favoured in the US.
As a result, more directors were turning to proven crowd-pullers such as Egyptian antiquities and the work of popular artists such as Picasso, Manet, Matisse and Miró. "The rise in attendances is a good thing, but you also have to consider the quality of the experience," Ms Ruiz said.
"I don't consider seeing a show with 7,000 people a good thing. I'd much rather see a show with 2,000 people in a day - people who aren't necessarily going because of the hype."
The director of the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith, takes a more positive view of the survey. He believes it reflects a genuine increase in the number of people interested in the fine arts, a trend underlined by the number of peoplewilling to travel to and from Britain to see a major exhibition.
"I noticed that particularly with the Raphael show, where people seemed to realise this was the only chance they would have of seeing the work," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Serpentine Gallery, which staged two of London's most visited shows last year, said it had sought to "up its profile" to attract sponsorship, but its curatorial decisions were not dictated by the number of visitors a show might attract.
The rise of blockbuster shows was particularly noticeable in Japan, which has three exhibitions in the global top 10 and seven in the top 100. Happiness, a show which attracted 7,860 visitors a day to the privately-run Mori Art Museum would have been No 1 on the list, but was excluded from the survey because its admission price includes access to a popular observation platform.
Ms Ruiz said the semi-privatisation of Japan's museums in 2001 and the country's continuing recession had led to the closure of some institutions. Others had sought financial salvation in large, heavily advertised shows attracting huge crowds.
For example, the inaugural show at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa was seen by 500,000 people between October and February. It does not feature in the list because it runs until March 21 and the survey only includes shows that closed in 2004.
Global top 20 daily attendances
Treasures of a Sacred Mountain Tokyo National Museum (7,638)
El Greco Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (6,897)
MoMA Museum of Modern Art, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (6,568)
Manet at the Prado Museo del Prado, Madrid (5,832)
Gauguin-Tahiti, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (5,812)
Pre-Raphaelites in Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (5,507)
Henri Matisse: process/variation, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo (5,389)
Treasures of Chinese Art, Tokyo National Museum (4,997)
Joan Miró 1917-34, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (4,742)
Art in the age of Dante, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Florence (4,343)
Edward Hopper, Tate Modern, London (4,215)
Richter, Weiner, Whiteread, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (4,212)
Edouard Manet, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (3,960)
Rimpa, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (3,873)
Museum of Modern Art Masterpieces, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (3,846)
Mark Rothko: walls of light, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (3,783)
Fashion and furniture in the 18th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (3,738)
Masterpieces from the Musée d'Orsay, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (3,728)
Edouard Vuillard, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris (3,700)
James Rosenquist, Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (3,596)
London top 10 daily attendance
Edward Hopper Tate Modern (4,215)
El Greco National Gallery (2,126)
Turner Prize 2003 Tate Britain (2,066)
BP Portrait Award 2004 National Portrait Gallery (1,916)
Vuillard Royal Academy of Arts (1,796)
Dürer and the Virgin in the Garden National Gallery (1,719)
Vivienne Westwood Victoria and Albert Museum (1,567)
Cy Twombly: 50 years of works on paper Serpentine Gallery (1,539)
Copyright 2005  guardian.co.uk
