Is the Uffizi cueing up a problem?

News has reached Rakewell that a new company has been awarded the contract to sell entry tickets to the Uffizi in Florence. This has been followed by howls of complaint from opposition politicians, who are claiming that this is an act of exploitation by the government. Your roving correspondent recognises that changes in back-end functions at museums might not be the glitzy art-world gossip we all love to hear, but this could have serious consequences. As a survey for the Museums Association once pointed out, queues are cited as the main reason that people don’t visit cultural institutions and nothing contributes to a queue quite like the ticketing system.

And yet, one can’t help but wonder, are queues really so dreadful? Is there a world in which the queue itself becomes the attraction? Rakewell has been thinking about some of the most famous queues – yes, there are such things – and wondering what might be the best one. While the line of people waiting to ascend the Eiffel Tower has fallen foul of some tourists’ tolerance, other queues have attained a mythic reputation.

The last time Rakewell remembers queuing properly was when paying homage to the Queen Mother lying in state in 2002. This, of course, was nothing compared to the queue to see the Queen 20 years later. If it is not unseemly to say so, the latter was at one point as long as 10 miles and is one of the contenders for the longest queue ever, according to Guinness World Records. The queue to see JFK’s lying in state was a mere three miles long.

A queue in Moscow in 1990 outside the first branch of McDonald’s to open in the Soviet Union. Photo: Bernard Bisson/Sygma via Getty Images

Yet one of Rakewell’s favourite queues came about in 1990, at the opening in Moscow of the first ever McDonald’s restaurant in the Soviet Union. The country was no stranger to queues but this one, where 30,000 in one day queued for the privilege of being able to buy a Big Mac for 3.75 roubles, was something else. Then again, perhaps the treat was so great that waiting eight hours for it became almost irrelevant. Rakewell is sure that people feel the same at the Uffizi when they see Botticelli’s Primavera.

Of course, London became the site of another important museum queue in 2005 when Tate bought Roman Ondak’s Good Feelings in Good Times (2003), a work of art which is nothing more than paid professionals standing in a line, queuing for nothing in particular. Naturally, the promise of something at the end of the line drew people in and the queue would grow and grow. Maybe the Italian government is on to something but they haven’t gone quite far enough. If they really want to exploit cultural venues then they need to sell tickets to nothing at all.