Composing a Public Image Online: Art Museums and Narratives of Architecture in Web Mediation

Abstract

As museums’ public images become increasingly intertwined with architecture and tourism on a global scale, spectacular museum buildings have come to have a presence both in local, urban landscapes and online. We analyze the website presentations of two new national contemporary art museum buildings, the Tate Modern Museum in London and the National Museum of 21st Century Arts (MAXXI) in Rome, to explore the ways in which multimodal compositions and architectural narratives are designed to communicate a museum's public image. Applying methods from social semiotics and text analysis, we identify the compositional means by which narrative themes of transformation, social space, and recovered origins become linked with global market forces and destination branding through communication design.