Attendance Down In Chicago

“Blaming ‘the economy and the Xbox,’ officials said Wednesday that more than half of Chicago’s biggest museums suffered attendance drops last year, with the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry down by double digits.” Some museums which saw increases in attendance could trace the surge to one or more ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions it put on in the last year. Most museum officials seem to agree that the central problem for arts organizations is that people are given so many entertainment choices today that no one organization can count on luring in huge numbers of patrons.