COMING ATTRACTIONS

More and more museum patrons are sidestepping the gigantic world-famous museums and instead attending their friendly neighborhood museum, a recent survey on museum attendance revealed. British curator Kenneth Hudson’s book “Museums of Influence” indicates that increasingly, museums like Washington’s Anacostia Neighborhood Museum--which once displayed a rat--are having more influence on people’s standards of literacy than the Louvre in Paris or the Getty in Malibu. In “Museums of Influence” Hudson discusses 37 collections in 13 countries that he believes have played a pioneering role in museum development over the last five years. All but five are in Western Europe or the United States.