Untitled Film Still #14, courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York, copyright 2012 Cindy Sherman

The DMA’s current career retrospective of photographer Cindy Sherman is the end point on a tour that began at New York’s MoMA last year. According to Art Newspaper‘s annual attendance survey,  Sherman’s remarkable, sometimes creepy photos in New York outdrew da Vinci’s paintings in London: 5,700 visitors per day vs. 3,856 per day at the National Gallery. Sherman wasn’t the biggest art attraction of the year — that, by far, was an Old Dutch Masters exhibition in Tokyo:

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum reopened after a refurbishment with paintings lent by the Mauritshuis, which is closed for modernisation until 2014. The main attraction of the Mauritshuis show, which also visited Kobe, was Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, around 1665. The portrait, as well as works by Rembrandt, Hals and Van Dyck from the Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague, attracted 10,573 visitors a day in Tokyo. (The Kobe leg ended in January; the next stop is San Francisco.)

I know, I know, the DMA’s Max Anderson hates this kind of simple-minded, bottom-line metric, but it does crudely indicate one thing: The Sherman show has been a bona fide blockbuster. What’ll it do here?