Tretyakov Gallery: Determinants of Attendance

Abstract

In the past few decades, visitors of various museums, both abroad and in our country, have been studied a lot, in order to better understand who comes to museums. Those studies allowed us to recreate the collective social and cultural portrait of the public, but, in fact, did not bring us closer to an understanding of who goes to museums and why. The main problem is also the existence of communication barriers between the museum and the public. Ensuring the competitiveness of art museum as a subject of leisure industry and enhancing its social role as a cultural institution requires today considerable efforts in audience investigation, with the ultimate goal of increased attendance. The article, on the materials of a concrete sociological study of the audience of visitors of the State Tretyakov gallery, shows how the application of new research approaches, based on econometric methods of analyzing sociological data, can bring the researcher closer to an understanding of some current trends in consumer behavior and attendance factors of an art museum. The study demonstrates that the most important determinants of cultural consumption are the essential characteristics of the audience, associated with the measurement of cultural capital, and the motivations and individual preferences.