TripAdvisor has issued a new list. Now, I take both TripAdvisor and lists with a grain of salt, but I’m prepared to have a look and have my say.
This one offers up the world’s Top 25 museums. It’s a big call, but it’s interesting to me both because it mentions a few I know nothing about, and excludes (or gives low rankings to) some of my favourites.
First of all, the big disclaimer. No list can be perfect because nobody has visited every museum in the world and, even if they had, it’s impossible to rank them objectively. How does one compare, say, a collection of embroidery with a exhibition of motor vehicles?
As this list is crowd-sourced — that is, it’s compiled from the input of many people — it may have some more veracity than those that travel scribes regularly rattle off from the top of their heads.
I suggest you check out the full list for yourself, but the top 10 are:
1 Musée d’Orsay, Paris
2 The National 9/11 Memorial & Museum, New York
3 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
4 The British Museum, London
5 Prado National Museum, Madrid
6 Acropolis Museum, Athens
7 Louvre Museum, Paris
8 The National WWII Museum, New Orleans
9 National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico
10 War Remnants Museum, Ho Chi Minh City
One of my favourites, the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, is at No. 15, but others — such as the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Science Museum in London — are missing.
I’d add the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra (it’s way up there with war museums around the world).