The Five Rules For A Thriving Museum

The place is packed, but there's a feel-good vibe, common to big, successful events. Like at any popular attraction, there are lines for everything: snack bars, restrooms, ticket counters. The air is even filled with the occasional scream or shriek of delight. A sold-out pop concert? An amusement park? No, it's London's Tate Modern, the world's busiest modern-art museum. The draw right now (and the source of those screams): the seventh annual commission to grace the Turbine Hall, the huge open seven-story interior of the former London Electricity power station. This year, German artist Carsten Höller has constructed Test Site, a set of five tube-shaped slides that twist and turn to the ground from levels two, three, four and five. The slides are open to the public, free and wildly popular. Is it good art? Critics are divided. Is it a gift to the museum's marketers? Clearly.

Welcome to the art world's most conspicuous success story. A decade ago, the building was decaying and empty, a massive eyesore just across the Thames from St. Paul's Cathedral. After a $200 million overhaul, including a redesign by architects Herzog & de Meuron, Tate Modern is now one of the city's must-see destinations, attracting more than twice the 1.8 million annual visitors originally predicted. Last July, the museum announced a $400 million expansion plan that it hopes will increase its size by 60% by 2012.

But Tate Modern isn't alone in exceeding its own expectations. Attendance at Paris' Louvre Museum last year reached a record 7.5 million visitors. Museum visits hit a whopping 100 million in Germany in 2005, while Madrid's three major museums — the Prado, the Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza — recently underwent costly upgrades to handle increasing throngs of visitors. "We are seeing a boom time for museums," says John Kieffer, senior consultant at AEA Consulting, a firm that specializes in advising museums.

Fueling the boom is a new savvy for the marketing and brand-building techniques long employed by big business. For example, Tate Modern and its sister museums (which also include London's Tate Britain — a repository of historic and contemporary British art — as well as outposts in Liverpool in England's northwest and St. Ives in the southwest) recently marketed a line of wall paints through B&Q home-improvement stores. "For a long time, the opinion toward marketing and commercialism from curators was quite negative," says Paal Mork, head of communications at the Norsk Folkemuseum in Oslo. That attitude, he says, is now ancient history.