You may not have noticed, and there’s little sign of it in Toronto, but Saturday, May 18 happens to be designated worldwide as International Museum Day. That might be a good time to take a look at how our museums stack up against those elsewhere on the planet.

Let us turn now to The Art Newspaper, a sort of “inside culture” publication that every year offers a massive report crammed with stats on attendance at hundreds of museums around the world.

As usual, the ones with mega numbers were mostly in Paris, London and New York. Topping the list is the Louvre, where 9,720,260 visitors turned up.

But if you scroll down far enough, there is some good news for Canada. For the 2012 calendar year, the Royal Ontario Museum inched back over the million mark, the only museum in Canada to reach that magic number (reversing a steep decline in 2011). And the Art Gallery of Ontario drew just under 800,000 visitors: a huge gain over its anemic 2011 figure (627,453).

To put it another way, our competitors did not come home with Olympic medals or the Stanley Cup of the museum world, but we made the playoffs and improved on our lacklustre showing in 2011.

In the all-important category of temporary exhibitions (with closing dates before the end of 2012), the international winner was a show of Dutch Old Masters paintings from the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. It began a tour of Japan and the United States at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art, which attracted more than 10,000 visitors a day and a total of 758,266 over just 11 weeks last summer. Among its treasures is Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring.

More recently, this show has migrated to this continent, where its 2013 schedule includes San Francisco, Atlanta and New York. Unfortunately, no Canadian museum has managed to snag it.

Elitists might say it’s gross to grade museums according to how they fare with imported blockbusters, but as public institutions they need to demonstrate popular appeal to justify government subsidies and balance their books, without which they could not afford to create the smaller gems.

The big factor for the AGO in 2012: high-profile exhibitions. Its Picasso show from Paris attracted almost 3,000 visitors a day last summer, for a total attendance of 308,582.

According to the Art Newspaper, the only other exhibition in Canada that came close to that was Van Gogh: Up Close, which brought 230,146 visitors to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa last summer.

Two interesting footnotes to the AGO’s success with Picasso: the same show was even more successful in Seattle, where in 2011 it drew more than 400,000 with a shorter run than Toronto’s.

And across the Great Lakes, the Art Institute of Chicago had 346,020 visitors for its Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, which ran over the summer while Picasso was in Toronto.

As for the ROM, which had slipped to an alarming 912,000 attendance total in 2011, its return to the million-plus club with 1,025,920 visitors in 2012 suggests that the decision of CEO Janet Carding to reduce admission prices achieved the desired result.

But let’s not forget that when the ROM and the AGO were raising money for their expansions a decade ago, both promised post-project numbers that turned out to be utterly unrealistic.

The AGO should be able to draw over one million visitors every year. The ROM could solve all its problems if it could get within the range of 1.5 million visitors.

But the best-case scenario for 2013 would be to avoid slipping below their 2012 figures. That may not be possible. The AGO’s current exhibition about the beginning of the Renaissance in Florence is superb but not likely to finish with huge numbers. And the prime summer weeks between mid-June and mid-August seem to be surprisingly devoid of blockbuster exhibits.

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Still, the AGO’s record of major exhibitions has improved vastly over the past two or three years, and so has its performance in visitor services. Lately there has been a buzz about the place that makes you want to drop in more often. Let’s hope that trend continues.