The World’s Greatest Single Art Museum
The Met is the Best Bet
(7 min read) New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art — more affectionately known as the Met — is, hands-down, the best single art museum in the world.
Now, before you get up in arms and start leaving nasty comments, note my exact phrasing and hear me out. I didn’t say “The Met is the best art museum” in the world, period, and without any qualification (though it might be). I am making a more limited claim, and one that I am pretty sure is easily defensible:
I am saying the Met is “the best SINGLE art museum” in the world. This is because the Met is an amazing “one-stop shop,” with a massive and very well-rounded collection that covers virtually every region of the globe and every period of time. I am saying that if you could pick only one museum in the world to go to and get a sense of all the art the world has ever produced, there is no better choice.
There are in actuality only a few potential contenders for this title, and you can get a sense of which they are by going to the Wikipedia List of Largest Art Museums. While the physical size of a museum does not relate directly to the quality of its collection, it’s not a bad rough proxy; and certainly nothing not in the top dozen or so places in that list are going to be contenders for best single museum in the world. (Many would be strong contenders for best museum of “type X”, though.)
I have been to 54 of the 115 museums in the list (and 13 of the top 20), and the better ones I have visited multiple times (sometimes many multiples of times). Based purely on the building and collection size, the only possible contenders to top the Met for the title of “best single museum” that I have not visited are the Hermitage in St Petersburg, and Beijing’s National Museum (I generally avoid visiting lawless kleptocracies and police states). But from what I’ve read and seen of their collections, I am confident that — while both are larger than the Met in physical area — they are not well-rounded enough to be contenders.
Really, there is only one museum that could be considered for the top spot instead of the Met — and that is the Louvre. I have spent over 50 hours in the Met and almost 30 in the Louvre, so I know them both fairly well.
Is the Louvre bigger, and does it contain more mind-blowing pieces, than the Met? Yes: the Louve is a great museum and the 30 hours I have spent there are less than half of what I would eventually like to spend.
But it holds virtually nothing after the mid-19th century, and it is too heavily focused on European and Near Eastern art to be considered “well-rounded” in any global sense. Its “Pavillion de Sessions” galleries of “exotic world art” are a joke, for example, and the museum has virtually nothing from the Americas.
Now, add together all the great museums of Paris — the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, Musee Cluny, three major modern art museums — and add in a half dozen other good-sized museums with specialized collections, like the Guimet (Asian art) and Quai Branly (a much better version of what the Louvre’s “Pavillion de Sessions” wants to be) — and you blow the Met out of the water. In fact, Paris as a whole easily tops NYC as an overall city of museums.
Ditto for London. The British Museum, National Gallery, two Tates, and V&A — just to name the biggest and most obvious suspects — all together certainly beat the Met, and London as a whole beats NYC for museums. In fact, if we are looking to name the single best “museum city” in the world, it is either London or Paris. I’m inclined to give it to Paris, but I’d have to think more carefully before I made that judgement with confidence.
Berlin and Rome are not far behind London and Paris for the title of “best museum city in the city in the world,” and both easily top NYC, too, when you take all their museums into consideration. And there are plenty of other “cultural capitals” around the world that can at least hold their own against NYC for art and related museums. Madrid and Tokyo come immediately to mind, for example; closer to the Met’s home, so does Washington DC.
But nowhere other than Met can you enter a single museum and see such a huge and wide range of amazing art from all over the globe, from prehistoric ages to the 21st century.
Think of it like a single volume history of art: are there better books on various aspects of art history than “Gardner’s Art Through the Ages”? Of course. And if you are really into art history, that should most certainly not be the only book you ever read on the subject. On the other hand, if you could only ever own or reference one art history book it would be hard to beat a massive, wide-ranging tome like that, as it provides a reasonably comprehensive overview of the world’s art from prehistoric times to now.
The Met is the museum equivalent of Gardner’s; and so I am awarding it the title of “Best Single Museum in the World.” If you disagree, let me know in the comments. But first, scroll through the twelve photos below showing the Met’s range of collections, which I am introducing into evidence as Exhibits A-L. (I will also be posting detailed looks at individual pieces from the Met over the next week in my instagram account Thousands of Museums.)
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