Museum Audiences Research Articles

Editor’s Corner

Editor’s Corner

РЕКРЕАЦИОННО-ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНЫЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ЧАСТНЫХ МУЗЕЕВ Г. БАРНАУЛА

The paper considers current forms of recreational and educational activities of private museums operating in Barnaul (Altai Krai, Russia). A total number of local private museums is given, dynamics of their development is described and a role played by them in urban social and cultural space at the present day is characterized. Urban population’s target age groups covered by museum work are named. The paper points out on factors affecting the choice and testing forms of contact with visitors applied by Barnaul private museums. Technologies used by such institutions in working with children are analyzed. The authors give examples of multifunctional and complex forms of interaction with museum audience that have influence on recreational, information and educational component of museum communication. Also, trends and problems of development of Barnaul private museums in leisure and recreation organization sector these days are defined.

ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ ИНТЕРАКТИВНОСТИ В КУЛЬТУРНО-ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ ИСТОРИКО-ЭТНОГРАФИЧЕСКОГО МУЗЕЯ-ЗАПОВЕДНИКА "ШУШЕНСКОЕ"

The article is devoted to the review of practical software developments of the Shushenskoye Museum-Reserve, including effective methods of pedagogical interaction with visitors. The museum, with an ideological direction in its work in the past, today presents a new model, proving the need for a paradigm shift in its activities, moving from a “culture of consumption” to a “culture of participation”. Employees, taking into account the active position of the new visitor, offer a dialog form of interaction with visitors. In this regard, elements of interactivity are actively used in the cultural and educational activities of the museum, especially with a children’s audience. The developed thematic methods and techniques help to successfully stimulate the interest ofvisitors to the museum and ensure the expansion of the museum audience.

Reducing the gap in nonvisitor studies: Evidence on museum attendance from the German National Educational Panel Study

Looking at museums as informal learning environments, it is clear that detailed information on visitors and especially on nonvisitors is key to preparing adequate offers. However, representative or population-based audience studies are scarce, and even less information is available on nonvisitors. Based on a representatively drawn German adult cohort (analytic sample: n = 6,837), we look at characteristics of museum audiences and use partial proportional odds models to describe factors that characterize both visitors and nonvisitors. Results show strong evidence for relevant factors outside the realm of demographic and socioeconomic variables, and that it is especially cultural capital and cultural participation that explain museum visits. We conclude by arguing in favor of developing broader models to conceptualize museum attendance and especially nonattendance.

Amazonian Activism for European Museum Audiences: Critical Reflections on the Development of an “Amazonia” Exhibition at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands

AbstractThis paper describes and expands on the discussions held at a symposium at the Research Center for Material Culture in the Netherlands in February 2020, which was held as part of the planning of an upcoming “Amazonia” exhibition to be curated at that institution by some of the authors. The symposium invited curators and museum directors who had recently carried out projects with Amazonian communities to share their experiences with co‐production and co‐curation. The discussion and this paper aim to be a reflexive critical first step before reaching out to potential partners in South America. This paper supplements discussions on participative museology by examining the underlying frameworks of an exhibition project at its outset, in addition to contributing, as happens more commonly, post‐rationalizations in a final written evaluation. The discussion furthermore contributes to exhibition co‐curation by focusing on Amazonian‐European collaborations, which are under‐represented in Anglophone museological literature.

Embodying ressentimentful victimhood: virtual reality re-enactment of the Warsaw uprising in the Second World War Museum in Gdańsk

ABSTRACT This article examines how the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland, employs an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience ‘Postcard from the Uprising’ (Kartka z Powstania) in order to build an affective memory regime that prescribes an emotional repertoire for museum audiences. By engaging in a narrative inquiry of the VR experience, I demonstrate how it evokes the emotional dynamic of ressentiment, which has been identified as the affective driver of right-wing populism and which informs the historical policy of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party. The ressentimentful emotional regime is predicated on (1) the repeated re-experiencing of perceived injustice and victimhood, which requires (2) an outlet of negative emotions directed at the enemy and (3) a reclaiming of self-worth and dignity along with an ennobled and morally superior victimhood position. The VR experience functions as an emotion training device through which ‘appropriate’ emotions towards the past are instilled in the audience. The VR narrative transforms collective historical victimhood from a powerless to a morally superior position and may help the PiS in harnessing feelings of injustice and victimhood present among the museum visitors, who yearn to overcome these feelings and reclaim their self-worth and dignity.

Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

Doran Ross: The Scholar of Akan Art

Youth Creative Agency Toward Art Museum Futurity: Re-imagining Inclusive Practices Through Youth Participatory Action Research

ABSTRACT Teen-centric programs have proliferated in art museums across the U.S. and much of Europe, and scores of these programs target young people—and youth of color, specifically—as a way to grow museum audiences and relevance to a diverse public. However, few studies examine how teen-centric programs impact the youth involved and how they make sense of their experiences. In this article, teen and adult co-authors show how they used youth participatory action research as a critical pedagogical and methodological framework to (1) co-create spaces for youth participation and (2) generate youth narratives and research analyses within the context of an art museum teen advisory program in the U.S. The findings and reflections on practice offer critical insights on youth agency and the possibilities and limitations of inclusivity discourses within neoliberal art museums.

Музей как субъект культурных индустрий и городского развития

In this article, the authors substantiate the idea that the museum of local lore in a small town should assume the role of a cultural leader and influence the choice of urban development strategies and geocultural branding, performing not only the traditional functions but also new ones due to the modern museum openness trend. This is, firstly, the function of updating museum collections in the process of interaction with museum audiences, including through the implementation of virtual museum practices; secondly, the function of updating the territory in which the museum is located, through the creation of a unique cultural product based on historical heritage and intended for both internal and external (tourism) consumption; thirdly, the implementation of an expert-protective function that ensures the special role of the museum in regional cultural policy as a key entity capable of preserving, systematizing, and transforming the cultural capital of the territory into a symbolic capital necessary for the formation of the territory’s image. Based on the experience of the Krasnoufimsky Museum of Local Lore, the authors demonstrated how the idea of the brand "Krasnoufimsk – the city of Zemstvo traditions" originated on the basis of local lore research and how modern museum practices can promote this brand. Museum practices, representing the communication of the museum and urban communities, the museum and a particular visitor, are proposed to be considered as an empirical level of museum anthropology. The article provides examples of the participation of the Krasnoufimsky Local Lore Museum in municipal projects aimed at improving and developing the city of Krasnoufimsk – the administrative center of the Krasnoufimsky district of the Sverdlovsk region, as well as examples of fruitful cooperation with external partners from the non-governmental sector.

ЖУРНАЛ “ICOM NEWS” - ИСТОЧНИК ДЛЯ ИЗУЧЕНИЯ КУЛЬТУРНО-ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ МУЗЕЯ

Periodical press as a historical source is actively used by researchers in various fields. Professional periodicals can be a key source of research. This article shows that the professional journal “ICOM News” can be considered a quality historical source for studying the development of cultural and educational activities of museums. The purpose of the article is to determine the main formats of work with visitors in museums in the 1940s - 1980s, identifying the stages and reasons for the modernization of these work formats with the museum audience based on the materials of “ICOM News”. The publications in this journal have a global geographical outreach and cover a specialized variety of museums, elucidating both the inner working of a museum as a historical and cultural unit and its evolving place within the broader societal mozaic. The publications in the journal were subjected to textual analysis based on the study of special texts as carriers of professional knowledge. In our case, these are articles devoted to various ways of interacting with the museum audience. Having studied the available data array, 367 articles were identified on the topic of interest to us, amounting to 4.2% of the total number of all publications in this journal. To sum up, we argue that the professional museum journal “ICOM News” is the full-fledged source for the study of museums globally and for the invaluable regional insights into cultural and educational activities of national museums. It goes without saying that this source works best in combination with other sources, including archival and museographic materials.

Cultural Disconnection During the Pandemic: Access, Art Museums, and the Digital Divide

This article considers who has access to cultural resources during the pandemic, and how isolation from resources due to insufficient technology can impact art museum audiences. The authors consider the benefits and consequences of digital programming during the pandemic through the framework of a museum ecosystem, and how museums can circumnavigate the digital divide. This article also addresses the precarious position of art museum educators during the pandemic and their critical role in serving as bridges between museums and communities.

JHNA Conversations 1: A Curatorial Roundtable on Expanded and Expanding Narratives in the Museum

As the cultural sector continues to grapple with the challenging and transformative events of 2020 spotlighting the exclusionary practices and social norms that structure museums, JHNA commissioned two roundtables to reflect on the challenges of curating Northern European art. This first one, “Expanded and Expanding Narratives in the Museum,” unites four curators in discussion about the evolving trajectory of art history and the possibilities for new narratives in the galleries. In addressing the increasing momentum for new art-historical ecologies in recent years, the participants discuss the inherently marginalizing effects of canonization; signal the tensions between the art market, perceived museum audiences, and historical collections that continue to shape museum presentations and collecting practices; and highlight some objects from the early modern period that suggest pathways forward for more expansive conversations in museum spaces. The discussion closes with a look at the global entanglement of early modern Europe. This point will be taken up by the next JHNA Conversation, to be published in the winter 2022 issue, which will reconvene the curatorial team for the groundbreaking exhibition Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, organized by the Rijksmuseum and the Peabody Essex Museum in 2015–16. Discussants, including a member of their advisory committee from the cultural sector in Indonesia, will reflect on the humility and resourcefulness necessary to present shameful racist histories, the impact of sharing personal—rather than merely collective—stories in the galleries, and the need for museums to participate in the healing of historical wounds. It will also address new research methodologies that inherently expand inclusiveness and surface new types of historical data, leading to a more people-oriented presentation of art history. Both conversations, edited and condensed for clarity for publication in JHNA, have been organized and moderated by Yao-Fen You, Acting Deputy Director of Curatorial and Senior Curator and Head of Product Design and Decorative Arts, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.

The Iguaçu Regional Museum and its Audiences

This article examines discursive languages that the Regional Museum of Iguaçu built for itself and for its public, associated with the preservation of the environment and cultural heritage. In the second approach, the public of the museum exhibitions on social networks and forms of interaction with the Regional Museum of Iguaçu are analyzed. Based on the concepts and practices of public history, the objective is to contribute to the planning of exhibitions and to study the relationship between museum collections and audiences.

The Role of Digital Technologies in Enhancing Effectiveness of Museum Services

The article discusses issues related to the communication system of museum services and perspective aspects of the development of communication in this area based on the widespread use of digital technologies. The development of museum services, as a special sphere of spiritual education and the application of labor, is of great importance in the life of society. The place of the museum in the socio-cultural space of society is determined by the natural desire of a person to study his spiritual and material world, as well as the desire to familiarize himself with universal human spiritual and cultural values. In this regard, the role of the museum is significant, as the custodian of the cultural and historical values ​​of society. Keywords: museum, museum services, economic stability, museum audience, communication, digital technologies

The art of touch: lending a hand to the sighted majority

This article describes three collaborative projects designed to explore tactile and haptic encounters with visual art. As a blind person, the author takes advantage of touch tours offered in many of the world’s museums. As rewarding as these can be, she often leaves feeling that there is something missing. She is aware that people who witness a touch tour for blind people, both companions who might be with them and strangers who might observe it, are curious, even envious. It seems only right that she, and other blind people who enjoy this privilege, have a responsibility to share the experience as a way to expand cultural knowledge about art. The projects described here enable her to begin to establish a taxonomy and vocabulary of tactile and haptic aesthetics, and model tactile descriptions of art that can benefit anyone. She does this both to reciprocate for the privilege cultural institutions bestowed on her, as well as to show that touch is not merely a poor substitute for sight, but rather a different mode of inquiry and appreciation. She hopes this work will support challenges to the ocularcentrism of the museum sector by showing how art can engage the full human sensorium. These projects all took place in the years leading up to the Covid-19 global pandemic and were a small part of initiatives at arts institutions to promote equity and inclusion by drawing on the knowledge and expertise of members of marginalized communities. As these institutions reopen post-pandemic and restructure their staff and programming, it remains to be known if they will continue the progress toward greater inclusion or return to previous models designed to serve only normative audiences. In her conclusion, the author speculates on the kind of systematic changes that will need to happen to continue to diversify museum audiences and increase multisensory access to art.

Thinking Phygital: A Museological Framework of Predictive Futures

The Covid-19 pandemic has underpinned the relevance and significance of the strategic use of digital tools for museums as they were unexpectedly obliged to function from behind physically closed doors. Indeed, it is fair to state that museums have come to recognise the relevance and significance of the digital to a far greater degree than they did prior to the pandemic, and museums have also acknowledged an opportunity to experiment and engage with audiences through the strategic use of digital tools. With the return of physical museum audiences (albeit in fits and starts), museums might consider this to mean that digital tools are now less relevant, rather than identifying opportunities to strike a measure of equilibrium between the digital and physical going forward. Acknowledging what has been achieved so far is certainly one point of departure, although it provides only a limited view of the broad range of possibilities that museums might have to choose from in the future. This paper explores the possible spectrum of museum experiences within the remit of the ‘phygital’, and how the physical and the digital can potentially interact to define a museum experience through the lens of museum theory. The possible ‘phygital’ scenarios, ranging from what we will term ‘sustained physical’ to ‘autonomous digital’ shall be identified through the lens of a futures literacy methodology. Such a methodology allows us to rigorously anticipate possible future scenarios and is accompanied by a series of case studies that are also representative of such scenarios. Finally, the paper anticipates possible scenarios for the phygital in terms of museums’ goals, objectives and available resources.

Curatorial Research as Boundary Work

AbstractCuratorial research is a new field only emerging in the last few years within museological discourse. The notion of curating as research offers useful suggestions on how to escape historically induced binary oppositions between theory and practice, the academic and the artistic. Moreover, curatorial research instigates critical questions on the significance of knowledge production in the context of public museums, particularly the relationship between research, display and museum audience. This article explores different notions of curatorial research as they emerge through current museological discourse. Three models of curatorial research are identified, each conveying a distinct – yet related – understanding of knowledge production through curatorial practice in the museum setting. The article then uses the exhibition In Between as a case to explore these models further. Building on the analysis of the case and the three models, a fourth research model is proposed. The new model is based on the concept of “boundary work”, emphasising the multiple epistemological contributions curatorial research entails as it traverses borders between the domains of science and culture, thereby blurring the distinctions between theory and practice, the discursive and the immersive, the systematic and the creative.

How the potential audience of museums perceives art: results of a segmentation study of aesthetic preferences

The increase, diversification and complexity of the museum audience in recent years has become the reason for the development of deeper and more targeted approaches to its study based on interdisciplinary research. The article analyzes the aesthetic preferences of the potential audience of exhibition projects according to the results of sociological segmentation based on a quantitative survey conducted in January 2020 on the mail.ru platform on the social network in VKontakte (audience coverage 73.4 million in 2020) with a sample of 1905 people. The filling of the questionnaire and data analysis were carried out by the authors using an art history approach, and the research methodology and statistical data analysis were prepared on the basis of sociological and marketing approaches. The assimilation of sociology and marketing tools by cultural institutions is interpreted by the authors optimistically, as an opportunity to oppose the negative aspects of the commercialization of art, to form a community of active supporters of cultural institutions, increase knowledge about their preferences, increase efficiency and reduce costs for promoting exhibition projects. The study also resulted in recommendations for marketing and PR promotion of exhibitions for a more accurate audience coverage and better satisfaction of the aesthetic needs of visitors. Accompanying information in the form of leaflets, audio guides, visuals should be offered in the format preferred by the largest segment of the audience. Curators can refer to research results and shape the exposition, taking them into account, but without losing professional quality. Data analysis was carried out using the methodologist of the Foreitor research company, Yu.R. Wolfson.

THE FUTURE OF SCIENTIFIC PERIODICALS IN BULGARIAN MUSEUMS – THE SCIENTIFIC-AND-APPLIED ASPECT

The current research opens a discussion about the status of the scientific periodicals in Bulgarian museums in view of the opportunities for its future enrichment in terms of content and fields of application. The focus is on presenting the initiatives of Bulgarian Regional Museums, with an accent on the Regional Historical Museum of Kyustendil. On the basis of a thorough review of its publications and their thematic range, the potential of museum periodicals has been explored in relation to the dual character of the museum – as an institution which collects, studies, keeps and preserves heritage, and at the same time presents it to various audiences. The main research goal has been set towards the identification of various practices for transforming the effect of the periodicals from purely scientific into scientific-and-applied, encouraging the promotion of the museum activities and improving the interaction with museum audiences. In terms of methodology, the team has worked with traditional approaches such as analysis and synthesis, comparison, abstraction, induction and deduction, summarization, and building presumptions. Conclusions have been drawn concerning the character of the periodicals published by Bulgarian museums, in view of involving more actively museum audiences in the future.

Can Social Design help diversify museum audiences? A thought-piece

Can Social Design help diversify museum audiences? A thought-piece