Blockbuster art exhibitions are rewriting why and where we travel

At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, they stand in perfect, unnerving silence — visitors who moments earlier were loudly exploring lunch options (read: limited) now gaping at the vast, hyperreal human forms that seem to breathe in front of them.

It’s Australian-born, British-based artist Ron Mueck’s latest act of quiet sorcery — a sculpted meditation on flesh, frailty and scale that seemingly swallows time whole.

You can hear the soft hum of reverence — perhaps it’s confusion — as people encircle his work, caught somewhere between awe, questioning, reflection.

And this, improbably, is becoming a national Australian pastime.

Across the country, so-called arts blockbusters are booming. Once the preserve of culture vultures and retirees with tote bags, the gallery has gone big and arguably gone mainstream — a place where first dates, footy dads, and the algorithm-weary now congregate.

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From Mueck’s striking and bold look at human emotion to the current debut of the National Gallery of Victoria’s impressively curated Westwood / Kawakubo exhibition — art is selling with galleries drawing crowds and dollars from near and far, transforming Australia’s art scene into a fast-growing tourism sector.

Yes, turns out we’ll travel distances — even queue — for a little transcendence, a hit of wonder, or simply to feel something.

“This is Ron coming back to Sydney for the first time in more than 20 years — so it’s definitely a draw, it’s very exciting,” offers Jackie Dunn, senior curator at the Art Gallery of NSW and curator of Ron Mueck: Encounter.

Dunn notes gallery regulars “are travelling up and down the east coast (to embrace art). And they’re travelling more broadly too, you know, across to Adelaide to see a show or to catch those sorts of things.”

Blockbusters like Mueck and the NGV’s current exploration of global fashion icons Vivienne Westwood and Comme De Garcons’ Rei Kawakubo push wide appeal.

Headline NGV showings such as Yayoi Kusama have done robust business, this year’s look at the contemporary Japanese artist selling more than 570,500 tickets.

The NGV’s historic Pharaoh, meanwhile, sold more than 336,000 while the gallery’s Triennial 2023 saw the issue of 1,063,675 tickets (noting the latter was free). Not to be outdone, the Art Gallery of New South Wales welcomes more than 2.3 million annual visitors — claiming that, over the past decade, tourism audiences (regional NSW, interstate and international) account for between a quarter and a third of all visits. “Interstate visitation alone consistently accounts for more than 10 per cent of attendance, and regional NSW visitors contribute roughly one in every 20 attendees, highlighting the strong draw of a significant cultural moment,” Art Gallery of NSW director Maud Page tells ROAM. “Our audience research also shows that Australians consistently travel specifically for major art exhibitions, with blockbusters proving to be a powerful driver of tourism to NSW. In terms of major blockbuster exhibitions, our winter and summer blockbusters often attract between 20-30 per cent of their visitors from outside the city.”

Current national figures on movement for arts tourism are a little dusty. Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council and the government’s principal arts investment and advisory body) last looked at the sector in 2018. Still, its most recent, Domestic Arts Tourism – Connecting The Country, drew an ascendant arc, noting “domestic arts tourism is growing with greater numbers of Australians travelling than ever before”.

Such figures were an increase on previous 2014 markers, growing in total numbers of tourists engaged with arts activities across both daytrips (+14 per cent) and overnight trips (+20 per cent). In her foreword for the report, Wendy Were, former executive director strategic development and advocacy at The Australia Council For The Arts, noted that “the relationship between art and travel is long-standing, deep and complex. We travel to see art, and even when art isn’t our primary destination, we naturally gravitate to the art of a place in order to understand the meaning of that place.” Dunn outs the offer of the new as a key driver — pointing to the unique centrepiece of her Mueck curation and a bold new work informing the exhibition. “That’s something that excites us … and it’s certainly something worth travelling for.”

Somerville has been working on the NGV’s growing fashion collection for the past 30 years. It means a strong platform to launch and explore — fashion proving a drawcard and one that’s become a summer staple, think recent outings with Chanel and Alexander McQueen. “We’ve actually been acquiring textiles since the 1890s and fashion we started collecting in the 1940s, so it’s not a new phenomenon. But as you say, the types of projects and the scale of the more recent exhibitions … we’re collaborating with major international galleries or generating our own projects drawn from the collection and I do think there is now an expectation from the audience about what’s coming next and what will they be able to see and what’s the focus of the next exhibition? And that’s great and we have no intention slowing down.”

Still, Hagger questions the alleged knock-ons such broad tourism brings. “Say there’s an art enthusiast travelling to Melbourne for a week. Would they go to the NGV first? Probably not — they’d be more inclined to head Buxton Contemporary or out to TarraWarra. They might go to a regional gallery in Bendigo or Ballarat or to ACCA (Australian Centre For Contemporary Art), which offers them something a bit more conceptually than a fashion show.

“And the thing to know — in a depressed market, commercial galleries are struggling to get anyone to walk through the door any given day. That’s partly because there’s an inherent fear that these galleries do not accommodate the everyday person, rightly or wrongly, but also because the big institutions capture the volume as a destination product. They have increasingly become a place where one can not only see familiar names in the art world, but eat, shop and entertain children.”

“There’s an assumption that everybody is just here to go to the beach. But they’re getting off the plane and looking for what’s going on at a great museum … And the second they step into this environment, they step into this shared experience with other lovers of culture and they’re going to discover things, they’re going to experience different opportunities and they’re going to broaden their minds.”

Ron Mueck ‘Encounter’, open now until April 12, 2026, artgallery.nsw.gov.au; Westwood | Kawakubo open now until April 19, 2026, ngv.vic.gov.au; davidhagger.com