At 2 a.m. on Saturday, January 20, the wait to see Christian Marclay’s wildly popular 24-hour film “The Clock” was 30 to 45 minutes long, according to @TheClockatMoMA, a Twitter feed created especially for the exhibition. Visitors running late still had 15-and-a-half hours to see the work before the Museum of Modern Art closed for the evening.

Welcome to the latest trend in museum programming: Pulling all-nighters.

It’s not just MoMA that has kept its doors open around the clock recently in the name of art. The Denver Art Museum’s exhibition “Becoming Van Gogh,” which traced the development of the Dutch painter alongside work by artists who inspired him, remained open for 40 hours straight before closing for good on January 21. Across the pond, the Grand Palais in Paris plans to welcome visitors for 62 consecutive hours — from February 1 through 3 — to accommodate crowds for the final days of its surprise blockbuster exhibition of Edward Hopper, which features 164 works by the American artist and is France's first-ever Hopper retrospective.

“It’s not the usual crowd,” Christoph Heinrich, director of the Denver Art Museum, told ARTINFO of the patrons who fill the galleries in the early morning hours. “It’s often couples, people on a date, groups of young people. Maybe they go to a bar before and a discotheque afterwards.” The DAM sold out its timed tickets for the exhibition — 180 passes per half-hour — in a matter of days. (The last tickets to go were for the 3:30 a.m. slot.) 

Not long ago, the prospect of a museum remaining open for more than 24 hours at a time was so off-the-wall it constituted an artwork in and of itself. Michael Asher’s contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial was “Open All Day and Night” — the simple act of keeping the museum open for three consecutive days. At the time, Asher characterized the work as “a suggestion, a little different way of thinking about time, or the institution, about who uses the museum, and how it’s used, and maybe even what goes into it.” His original proposal had been to keep the museum open continuously for the biennial’s entire three-month run, but management quickly nixed the idea for budgetary reasons. (Paying union guards and video technicians around-the-clock is expensive, it turns out.)

To be sure, museums have stayed open overnight before Michael Asher made it art. The Grand Palais opened its doors overnight in 2009 to accommodate crowds for its exhibition “Picasso et les maîtres” and in 2011 for “Monet.” (Meanwhile, museums remaining open all week is also becoming more common, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art publicly pondering the idea and MoMA opening seven days per week beginning in May.)

Heinrich credits Hollywood for increasing demand for after-hours museum visits. “Thanks to ‘Night at the Museum’” — the 2006 film starring Ben Stiller about a museum guard who watches the Museum of Natural History come alive at night — “suddenly people are thinking about it. I can tell you, there’s not a lot that happens [in a museum after hours]. But I imagine movies like this put the idea in people’s heads.”  

To create a real life version of “Night at the Museum,” however, institutions must confront substantial logistical challenges. “You can’t make any compromises with security — it all has to be even better at night,” said Heinrich. The Denver Art Museum added additional guards for the night shift and paid existing staff members overtime. MoMA, which remained open round-the-clock for three weekends in January, did not bring on additional security but did hire temporary staff members to monitor the lines. (All staff working overnight were provided boxed “lunches” by MoMA’s Café 2; DAM's staff got a hefty supply of donuts and coffee.) Of the estimated 40,000 people who viewed “The Clock” during its month-long run, over 5,000 visited outside regular museum hours.

Why go to all the trouble? While a marathon screening of “The Clock” makes sense — Paula Cooper Gallery also stayed open overnight when the 24-hour-long work debuted there in New York in 2011 — the more traditional exhibitions of Van Gogh and Hopper merited special treatment in part because they will not travel, organizers said. “It really is a once in a lifetime thing,” Heinrich noted. “The show will never be together again as it is here.”

Still, “we’re certainly not going to do it once a month,” said Heinrich of the all-nighters. “Maybe every five years.”