In 2024, Madrid’s Prado received 3.5 million visitors. The Uffizi Gallery in Florence exceeded 4 million for the first time in its history. These figures, presented as victories, mask a growing fragility: both institutions depend significantly on public funding that is contracting, and the model that made these museums accessible, independent of market forces, and guarantors of a certain idea of shared culture has been under structural pressure for nearly two decades—a pressure that has intensified sharply since the financial crisis of 2007/2008.

The 2025 ICOM report on public funding for museums (Decrease in Public Funding? A Worldwide Answer from Museums, published by IRAPFM under the aegis of ICOM-IMREC, January-February 2025) is unambiguous: the contraction of public budgets has become the number one concern of museums in all worldwide surveys since 2018. This is no longer a conjunctural warning signal. It is a fundamental trend, and it forces European cultural institutions to a choice they had hitherto succeeded in avoiding.

The Essentials

  • Since 2018, the decline in public funding has been the foremost concern of global museums in all ICOM surveys.
  • 55% of American museums have not recovered their 2019 attendance levels, according to the American Alliance of Museums (November 2025).
  • The European model of public funding, which represents between 70% and 95% of the total budget of national museums depending on the institution (compared to 24% in the United States), is not disappearing, but it is cracking in several countries simultaneously.
  • Diversification strategies exist and work: dynamic ticketing, commercial subsidiaries, structured patronage, academic partnerships. They do not replace public funding, but they create room for maneuver.

Two Models, Two Different Fragilities

To understand what is at stake, one must start with a structural gap. In Europe, national and regional museums derive on average 70% to 95% of their resources from direct public funding. In the United States, this share drops to roughly 24%: the rest comes from private donations, foundations, corporations, and earned revenue. This is not a question of the relative generosity of governments. It is the result of two opposing conceptions of what culture should be and to whom it should belong.

The European model has concrete and documented virtues. It enables accessible pricing policies: in France, those under 26 have free entry to national museums since 2009; the permanent collections of the British Museum, the National Gallery, and the Rijksmuseum are free year-round. It protects programming from market pressures: a museum dependent 90% on the state can exhibit non-commercial contemporary artists, infrequently visited medieval collections, works that would not attract a private sponsor. It finally guarantees permanence: American cultural institutions in difficulty close or reduce their permanent collections; their European counterparts benefit from a form of implicit state guarantee.

But this model has a symmetrical fragility. When public budgets contract, museums have neither the reflexes nor the structures to compensate elsewhere. They have not developed the commercial teams, networks of patrons, or affiliated foundations that their American counterparts built over several decades. When the cuts come, they come to institutions that have never learned to raise funds.

Cuts That Change in Nature

Budget restrictions are not new in the cultural sector. What is new since 2023 is their structural character in several European countries simultaneously, with cuts presented not as temporary measures but as lasting reorientations.

The Hungarian case is the most documented. Since 2022, subsidies to cultural institutions not aligned with government policy have suffered significant cuts. The House of Terror in Budapest, flagship of the Orbán government, saw its funding increase while independent museums of social history closed for lack of financing. This is not merely a budget issue: it is a case study in how financial dependence can be used as a tool of political pressure on cultural content.

In Italy, the situation is different but equally serious. The reform of differentiated autonomy, underway since 2024, redistributes cultural competencies to the regions. For national museums like the Brera in Milan or the Capodimonte in Naples, this means structural uncertainty about future funding, at a moment when the wealthier regions tend to prioritize their own institutions. The Capodimonte, which nonetheless attracted 800,000 visitors in 2023 after a major renovation, does not yet know what operating budget it will receive in 2027.

In Spain, the effects are more diffuse but documented: regional museums of autonomous communities in budgetary difficulty (Castile-and-León, Aragon) saw their allocations drop significantly between 2022 and 2025. The Reina Sofía National Museum of Art, which depends on the central government, has so far been protected. But the secondary museums, those that irrigate territories and constitute the real cultural fabric of the country, are absorbing the adjustments.

Post-Covid Attendance Does Not Solve the Problem

One might have hoped that the return of visitors after 2022 would ease the pressure. Data from the American Alliance of Museums (November 2025) temper that hope: 55% of American museums still had not recovered their 2019 attendance levels, with only 45% having recovered or exceeded their pre-pandemic levels. In Europe, the picture is mixed: the major museums of capitals have often surpassed their historical records, driven by the recovery of international tourism. The Louvre welcomed 8.7 million visitors in 2023. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam reports its best years since the reopening of the renovated building.

But this recovery is two-tiered. Institutions outside major tourist circuits, regional museums, specialized structures, and contemporary art centers on the periphery of major cities have not experienced this rebound. And even for large institutions, ticket revenue compensates only marginally: at the Louvre, earned revenue (ticketing, bookstore, licensing) represents approximately 60% to 68% of the budget, while the state’s share fell to roughly 28%-32% in 2025-2026. A 10% increase in attendance does not change the fundamental equation.

There is another problem that attendance figures do not capture. Museums absorbed significant digital transformation costs during the Covid period, developed online offerings that generate little direct revenue, and face inflation in operating costs (energy, security, collection restoration) that public allocations have not kept pace with. The structural gap between resources and needs has widened, even where attendance has rebounded.

What Adapting Museums Are Doing

The diagnosis is serious. Solutions exist, and several institutions are pointing the way.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is often cited as a model of successful diversification. Its private foundation raises roughly 30% of its total budget, through a long-established network of individual and corporate patrons. Its licensing program (reproduction of public domain works from its collection is freely downloadable in high resolution) has given it global visibility and commercial partnerships with companies wishing to associate their image with an authenticated cultural capital. This model rests on a strategic decision made as early as 2013: to invest in digital accessibility not as an obligation but as a commercial asset.

In London, Tate Modern has developed an integrated commercial structure whose subsidiaries (restaurants, shops, licensing, private events) generate a significant portion of its annual budget. Tate is also among the first institutions to have developed an explicit corporate patronage strategy with documented cultural counterparts: partner companies don’t simply finance a name on a wall; they benefit from access programs for their teams, art history consultations, exclusive evening events. This is not classical sponsorship. It is an offering of cultural services to corporations.

In France, the Centre Pompidou has pursued an international expansion strategy since 2022 that generates earned revenue: the Pompidou x West Bund Museum in Shanghai and the future Centre Pompidou in Seoul operate on a model of cultural franchise, where the Parisian institution exports its curatorial expertise and brand in exchange for funding that feeds its Parisian programs. Dependence on state subsidies remains predominant, but this model creates a source of structural revenue that did not exist a decade ago.

These strategies have limits. They are accessible to major museum brands with international recognition. They do not solve the problem of medium-sized institutions, nor that of regional museums. And they raise a fundamental question about editorial independence: is a museum whose 30% of budget depends on private patrons as free to program what it wishes as an institution 90% publicly funded? The honest answer is no, not entirely. This argues for mechanisms of structured patronage with contractual rules of independence, rather than direct dependence on a single donor.

The Political Economy Behind Budgets

This debate about museum funding is also a debate about the conception of culture as a public good. Europe has historically defended culture as a sector that the market alone cannot organize correctly: because it produces positive externalities (social cohesion, national identity, citizen formation) that market prices do not capture; because it creates irreplaceable heritage goods that short-term profitability logic would destroy; because access to culture is a condition of democratic citizenship rather than a luxury for those who can afford it.

These arguments have not disappeared. But they are less heeded in a context where European states face severe budgetary constraints and competing priorities (defense, health, energy transition) whose legitimacy is difficult to contest. Culture does not fight on equal terms in these trade-offs. It produces diffuse, long-term benefits, difficult to quantify. It often loses against expenditures with more visible short-term effects.

What the 2025 ICOM report documents, fundamentally, is the exhaustion of an implicit model: the state funds, museums program, citizens visit, and the circle closes without needing to be renegotiated. This model was viable as long as public budgets were increasing or remaining stable. It becomes untenable when constraints accumulate and museums lack the tools to respond to them.

One can read this challenge as a threat to the European cultural exception. One can also read it as a forced opportunity for reinvention. Institutions that began diversifying their revenues a decade ago do not regret having done so. Others find themselves today in a defensive position, negotiating cuts rather than building alternatives. The gap between these two categories will widen in the years to come.

This is not unrelated to a broader debate about how cultural industries find their audiences and funding when traditional circuits of public support falter: the question arises in theater, music, publishing. But museums, by their structural dependence on physical infrastructure and the conservation of irreplaceable collections, confront it with particular acuity.

The real question that European governments still avoid posing openly is this: what level of public funding do we choose to guarantee, for which institutions, according to what criteria of collective utility, and with what right of oversight over programming? Until this conversation takes place transparently, museums will navigate between arbitrary cuts and survival improvisation. It would be unfortunate to let perish through administrative inertia what two centuries of cultural policy have patiently constructed.

Sources

  1. ICOM/IRAPFM — Decrease in Public Funding? A Worldwide Answer from Museums (IRAPFM/ICOM-IMREC, January-February 2025): https://icom.museum/en/news/addressing-the-crisis-final-report-on-public-funding-for-museums/
  2. American Alliance of Museums (AAM) — 2025 Annual National Snapshot of US Museums, November 2025: https://www.aam-us.org/2025/11/11/2025-annual-national-snapshot-of-united-states-museums/
  3. American Alliance of Museums (AAM) — EO Impacts and the Next Era of Museum Funding, Part One (public funding of US museums at 24%): https://www.aam-us.org/2025/05/21/eo-impacts-and-the-next-era-of-museum-funding-part-one/
  4. French Senate — PLF 2026, Louvre Section: https://www.senat.fr/rap/l25-139-37/l25-139-37_mono.html
  5. Rijksmuseum — Official Press Release on Private Funding: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/press/press-releases/rijksmuseum-receives-largest-donation-in-its-history-12-5m-to-support-annual-sculpture-exhibitions
  6. Hungary — Cultural Expenditure (Oeconomus / Eurostat / KSH): https://www.oeconomus.hu/en/analyses/cultural-panorama-the-recovery-of-the-cultural-sector-in-hungary-after-the-pandemic/
  7. The Art Newspaper — Coverage of European museum funding policies 2024-2025