Short but meaningful: visitors’ experiences underlying time spent looking at artworks and labels

Abstract

ABSTRACT For more than a century, the timing and tracking (T&T) approach has been widely used in museums. Museum professionals tend to find the average time visitors spend in front of artworks ‘too short’. This implies to consider mediation devices as a hindrance that could distract even more visitors’ attention from artworks. However, when visiting an exhibition, what happens when a visitor looks at an artwork which is systematically accompanied by a label of almost equal or even greater size? In 2019, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille (France) opened the temporary exhibition Le rêve d'être artiste (The Dream of Being an Artist) where each artwork was accompanied by a large label seeking to encourage and guide visitors during their visit by asking questions, telling anecdotes, or providing information to be found in the artwork. The museum wanted to know whether the labels were read, and in what proportions; what effects reading the labels would have on the visitor’s relationship to the artworks; and whether the time spent reading and focusing on an artwork changes over the course of the exhibition. To answer these questions, a study initiated a dialogue between T&T observations, and visitors’ physical, cognitive, and emotional activity reported by visitors themselves through a stimulated recall interview. This article highlights visitors’ relationship to the artwork via labels such as guiding, reducing ambiguity, answering questions, explaining the exhibition’s approach, and triggering interest in artworks a visitor might otherwise have missed. Eventually, the authors argue the pitfalls of trying to infer the visitor experience from solely observing viewing patterns and measuring time spent looking at an artwork. Therefore, the study breaks with the tradition of T&T alone in museums and calls for qualitative indicators of experience.