I t’s been a couple of months since I’ve done an art-news story. With spring in the air, the eclipse come and gone until 2044, and New Jersey rocked and rolled and not by Bon Jovi, let’s look inside the glass hive.

Museum-attendance figures from 2023 are out. It’s a challenge to divine how many people actually visit museums. Museum-provided numbers might be inflated. Geek museum directors, shunned in high school, might very well want — finally — to feel like Mr. Prom King by leading a museum with high visitorship. Impressing trustees, donors, and the museum directors in the next city might juice the clicker, too.

Once in a while, though, the numbers ring true. In 2020, for instance, museum numbers hit zero from the Covid mass hysteria, useless lockdowns, and prolonged lockouts as directors, curators, and other museum brass grew to love “working from home,” which, for most, meant hardly working.

Would museums ever rebound to their 2019 numbers? I thought it would take a while. Building audiences takes time, since visitorship, for many, can become a habit. Once the habit is broken, people find other things to do with their culture time.

The Art Newspaper, the closest thing to a paper of record in the vast, diffuse art world, does its best to gather and then vet attendance data. It reported late last month that, in 2023, 176 million people visited the 100 best-attended art museums in the world. That’s up from 141 million in 2022 but still far from 2019’s 230 million, the last full year before the Covid hypnosis and hallucination.

For many months I’ve heard that American art museums were stuck at two-thirds of their 2019 numbers, suggesting to me that many longtime or traditional visitors have left, possibly for good. These might be hypochondriacs or school groups or people who joined a bowling league or all of the above, and more.

The Met, America’s best-attended museum last year, is up 10 percent over its 2019 numbers. I’m skeptical of this number, as I am about many things at the Met. The Met says it used a different methodology in calculating attendance, but its press office didn’t explain what this methodology might be after I asked — twice. In 2022, the National Gallery in Washington edged it, but the Manet/Degas exhibition was a blockbuster of King Tut proportions. Other New York museums still suffer. The Guggenheim and the Whitney are both down about 30 percent from 2019. MoMA’s 2019 visitorship isn’t a benchmark because the museum was closed for part of that year for its renovation project. The MFA in Boston reports that it’s down 25 percent from 2019.

To its great credit, MoMA jettisoned its Covid “Keep Out” sign the instant that public-health bossy-boots allowed, and immediately restored its old seven-day-a-week, 10-to-5 hours. The Met truncated its opening hours, I heard, until Legoland in upstate New York, the trampoline park in Queens, and the Bryant Park carousel in midtown NYC closed for the season, as demanded by the senior staff. Why serve the public when there’s play to be had? Only kidding! The Met did indeed truncate its hours for far longer than it needed, but I have no idea how many staffers were to be found on the beach, in a bump car, or bouncing on Sir Gallopsalot.

The Guggenheim, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and SF MoMA continue to furlough staff, blaming sunken attendance for drops in ticket income. San Francisco is a touristical disaster area. Despite sickly visitorship and layoffs, Dallas and Portland are spending millions on expansions. I continue to wonder whether this is wise.

London’s marquee art museums are still in the doldrums. The Royal Academy, the National Gallery, the Victoria & Albert, the Tate, and the Imperial War Museum are still down by a third or more from their 2019 visitorship. The Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery was closed for all of 2023, certainly affecting its numbers. Britain’s long, erratic Covid lockdown seems to have caused long-term damage. The one bright spot is the British Museum, where 2023’s visitorship is a bit above 2019’s. The BM’s become adept at high-appeal, sometimes dumbed-down blockbuster exhibitions. It has been in the news over a huge theft-of-art scandal, too. Maybe its good numbers are driven by the criminal class casing the joint.

If so, I’ve found another good reason among many for the British Museum to have hired Nicholas Cullinan (b. 1977) as its new director. His first museum job — years ago when he was a graduate student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London — was as a security guard at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Since then, he’s done well as a curator and, for the past nine years, as director of the NPG. I wrote two pieces last year on its first-rate renovation and addition, stewarded under his intelligent, sensitive leadership.

He’s a great choice, and I’m relieved for the beleaguered British Museum. The theft of antiquities, many think by a curator, is an epic, embarrassing scandal. Peter Higgs, the curator errant, is believed to have sold them on eBay at bargain-basement prices, and that’s tacky as well as cheeky. Last week, the BM announced it’s suing Higgs. I don’t know why he hasn’t been charged with a crime.

Then there’s a looming Elgin Marbles scandal. The BM will certainly return the sculptures of the Parthenon to the Greeks when and if the Tories get their overdue thwack in their collective bum.

What will Cullinan do? His only fault is an ever-so-slight bent toward trendy thinking. The NPG’s exhibition on Gainsborough’s portraits of his family, done in 2018, was superb. Shows on Michael Jackson and Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things photographs were on the brink of fatuous. George Osborne, the BM board chairman, itches to send back the Elgin Marbles. There’s no evidence the British don’t own them fair and square.

Osborne, reviled from his days as an austerity chancellor of the Exchequer, wants badly to be loved by Notting Hill’s champagne socialists. They savor the chance to stick it to Essex Man by shipping Britain’s greatest art treasure to Athens. They know they can always visit on their way to Mykonos.

Cullinan could agree, in which case “gave back the Parthenon sculptures” would sully the first paragraph of his long-in-the-future obituary. Or he could stand athwart and say no, in which case Osborne would probably say nothing. He can’t pull the rug out from a new director he just selected. Neil MacGregor, for years the BM’s director and, before that, the National Gallery’s director, was likely the only museum director aside from Kenneth Clark who was universally known in the U.K. He opposed sending the Parthenon sculptures back. Shown at the British Museum, they’re a universal symbol of human achievement, he said. Owned by the Greeks and shown in Athens, they’d become jingo totems.

Cullinan will be an inspiring fundraiser. The BM’s trying to raise $1.3 billion for renovations, among them better locks on the vaults. Cullinan is charming and art smart. Though he’s British, he was born in America in, as chance would have it, the same hospital where I was born some decades before. After all the controversy over the past couple of years, the BM needs a reassuring presence, a successful fund drive, and a couple of years of construction. Cullinan is a proven success in all three.

Earlier this week, Eike Schmidt (b. 1968) announced he’ll run for mayor of Florence. “Who dat?” you’ll ask. For eight years Schmidt was the director of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence’s premier art museum and home of works by Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Raphael, and many others. I knew him when he was a curator at the National Gallery in Washington, the Getty, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. He’s running on a fusion ticket comprising the Brothers of Italy, which is the party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Forza Italia, which used to be Berlusconi’s party, and the League, which used to be the populist, federalist Northern League.

Schmidt was hired to direct the Uffizi in 2015 as part of a new national policy bringing foreign directors, usually with experience in American, British, or German museums, to modernize Italian museums notorious for sclerotic, nepotistic management. “Ma siamo in Italia,” or “but we’re in Italy” was the timeless excuse for tolerating inefficiencies and lowering expectations in museum offices.

A dozen new directors in places such as the Capodimonte in Naples, the Brera in Milan, the museums at Pompeii, and the Uffizi were hired as an experiment. They introduced decent security, fundraising, marketing, building upgrades, proper collection management, and a modern look in the galleries. Old or incompetent curators were pushed out. Schmidt, who was then German, was the first director of the massive, antediluvian Uffizi who wasn’t Italian. He was a stellar director and eventually became an Italian citizen as well as a local celebrity. Florentines take culture very seriously, as do most Italians. Schmidt refurbished the city’s art pinnacle.

Florence is a left-wing town, which means it’s had chronically bad governance. I can’t think of an American museum director who has dived into electoral politics, though the best ones are very political. Schmidt might very well win. As he did at the Uffizi, he’ll cleanse an Augean stable. I’m curious to see what happens. Florence’s mayoral election is in early June.

You mustn’t beat dumb animals but ought to chastise them when they’re both dumb and yappy. I refer to scolds who want opera companies to stop performing Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, set in old imperial China. I saw the stupendous Franco Zeffirelli–designed production last weekend at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I’d read about left-wing loons trying to ditch Turandot because of what they call negative stereotyping and inherent gender bias, which are now crimes against humanity. Then there’s the crime of appropriation, which means that Puccini, an Italian, ought not to have even dared to compose an opera about China since he wasn’t Chinese. I thought I’d better see it before the brownshirt bores got their way.

I don’t write about opera because I don’t know enough, but I’m happy to write about set design, which is visual art, and Zeffirelli’s is still a wonder. It’s burlesque-gaudy, sumptuous, and fantastic. The set’s so packed with stuff — humans, props, textiles, fans, painted backdrops, and feathers — that it’s hard sometimes to find the singers. It’s decadent. Was the Chinese imperial court decadent? Of course! That’s one reason we got Mao.

Zeffirelli (1924–2019) was a famous opera director and designer but is best known to Americans as the director of the movies Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in 1967 and Romeo and Juliet in 1968. He directed and designed the Met’s Turandot in 1987. For those who don’t know opera, the best old productions are stored — costumes, sets, and lighting and stage directions — to be remounted whenever the Met wants a blockbuster fave.

Yes, the very names of Ping, Pang, and Pong — the three mandarins supporting the drama — made me cringe as well as giggle, since characters with names like those might have come from Charlie Chan movies. That’s minor. Yes, the title character, Princess Turandot, is an icy bitch and a haughty, entitled royal, but is she the product of gender bias? Was Puccini, or are we, disposed to think of all women as monsters? Does Turandot confirm this? Of course not. Is she a generalization? She’s surely a strong personality — dozens of suitors end their first date with their head on a spike — but the Western canon is packed with Asian characters in all shapes, sizes, classes, conditions, and temperaments. Is Puccini’s view of the court as cruel and despotic invented from thin air? Well, I can confidently say that China’s palace culture wasn’t like Little House on the Prairie.

Should only Asians make art about Asia? Should we parse creative license through race? Many people, dumb as they are as well as anti-art and anti-human, think so. Alas, they have power and megaphones, so fighting them is up to readers like you, critics like me, and the custodians of high culture in museums and performing-arts spaces especially. By the by, I saw dozens of Asian Americans and Asian tourists at the opera on Saturday. They all looked as though they were having a good time. Turandot is a story, a fantasy, created by Italians, first in the 1720s by an Italian, then in 1801 by Schiller, and, in the 1920s, revisited by Puccini. If anything, it’s international and reflects post–World War I curiosity. Of course, today’s culture Stasi doesn’t want anyone to be curious about anything. And it hates creativity. “Stay in your lane” is its motto, mediocrity and sameness its product.

Turandot’s misanthropes are nitpicky, bottomless-pit people. Many of us are cursed with one or two relatives like these, and we soldier through it, only on holidays if we’re lucky. Let’s not put them in charge of high culture.

Happily, our standard schnauzer is a smart dog, though as a puppy he needed — and welcomed — direction, often from our two cats. Prigs wanting to purge the classics are rote thinkers, educated beyond their intelligence. A good squirt from a spray bottle might at least mortify them into silence.