The Personalization of the Museum Visit

Art Museums, Discourse, and Visitors

Seph Rodney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138045828
• eBook ISBN: 9781351695862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Personalization of the Museum Visit examines a fundamental shift in institutional behavior in museums located in the United States and the United Kingdom. Contending that art museums have moved toward a new paradigm of public engagement, it posits that modern museum visitors are treated as self-directed "clients", with the agency to make meaning for themselves. The book then considers how this change has come about, examining factors such as the onset of a new museology, an experience economy, and a marketing revolution.

Drawing on extensive research undertaken at Britain's Tate Modern, the book examines a range of issues, including visitor engagement, curatorial practice, and museum management. A visit experience that is customizable to the individual visitor, in which curators and marketers work together with visitor-clients to create an experience of personalized meaning, is, Rodney argues, rising in prevalence in the art museum field, but it is also being stymied by certain structural impediments. This book examines such obstacles, including institutional division of labor, long-standing conceptions, or misconceptions, of the museum's mission, and the orientation of museums toward a certain conceptual model of their visitors.

The Personalization of the Museum Visit is essential reading for scholars and students engaging with issues of visitor engagement, curatorial practice, and museum management. With a particular focus on the role of business interests and public policy, the book should also be of interest to those undertaking research in fields outside of museum and visitor studies.

1Introduction

Conversations about museums

After I undertook writing this book, I would sometimes mention it in conversation with colleagues, students, artists, curators, and other researchers, explaining that it is based on my doctoral thesis research regarding the nature of the visit to an art museum. Quite often I was asked to explain what I mean by the “visit”. Over the years and months of working on the thesis and this project, I’ve learned to shorthand my main argument to what might be called an elevator pitch: My research examines the how the museum visitor’s experience has changed in the past generation, how it has lately become reconceived by curators and marketers and other museum professionals as an experience of cocreating meaning with a self-directed, self-actualized visitor. I aim to explain the underlying historical forces and movements that are being expressed in these new conceptions of the visitor and her experience. Ultimately, I am trying to explain why the experience you have in a contemporary museum of art is likely very different from the kinds of experiences your parents had.¹ This succinct description is a good starting point, but it begs all sorts of questions.

If the person is still interested, the questions I get asked tend to break down into two categories, depending on whether the person I am speaking to had or has a professional relation to the museum, that is, has had formal education or training in museum work, in museology, or related topics.² From other researchers and professionals, I receive questions regarding methods, methodology, and focus: What type of museum I am looking at, where these museums are located, what size museum, what I mean by the term “museum visit”, what forms of evidence I rely on, how I sift and parse this evidence. Laypeople tended to respond with declarations about their own relationships with art museums (or museums in general) followed by personal anecdote. Many in both camps have told me they think the museum has become overrun by spectacle, filled by noisy interactions with electronic media and games, and inundated by people who busy themselves with taking selfies while hardly paying attention to the art. Others have cited similar experiences (but with quite different emphasis) to argue that the museum seems to be becoming more democratic, demonstrating growing ethnic and socioeconomic diversity in its audiences, even shifting its focus to become more oriented to serving nearby communities, thereby reaping the rewards of increasing audience numbers and visitor enthusiasm.

The relevance of art museums

This is to say that the subject of visitors’ experiences in art museums is relevant not only to professionals and academics operating within the fields of museum studies and its (younger) sister discipline, visitor studies, but also to many other researchers, theorists, and to museumgoers in general.³ Ultimately this book should also be of interest to readers curious about how public institutions shape and direct their interactions with their visitors in an age of organizations retooling themselves to become more user-oriented, customer-friendly, sensitive to public critique, and reflexively aware of their own precarity within an environment where business interests and politics overlap and public opinion is often crucial to an organization’s survival.

Art museums are relevant to me because I feel in a deep way that these institutions socialized me. There was little in my immediate or extended family’s history or experience as immigrants from Jamaica to New York City that suggested I could or would have a life centered on art and the academic study of museums. My immediate family has working-class roots: My father was a plumber, and my mother was a secondary school teacher. The primary cultural influences on me in that household were religious. I had to attend church several times a week, and attended a Christian private school from the time I arrived in New York through high school graduation. Aside from a very haphazard collection of classical music records, I had little or no exposure to the art and music my parents termed “secular”.

However, the first year I entered college was also the first time I stepped into an art museum: The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, at 17 years old. I felt that I had opened a living book and walked into the shockingly new, imagined spaces that lay within its pages. I remember seeing a phallic sculpture of painted wood by Louise Bourgeois that looked simultaneously like a catamaran, African tribal work, and a human figure. I also recall a piece by Umberto Boccioni, a vaguely anthropomorphic statue of polished bronze that seemed like it was relentlessly striding forward though it stayed anchored on its white plinth. It later felt, as I reflected on that experience, that the work I saw took up residence inside me. Returning to that museum, and others throughout the city for the next several years, I felt that I was gathering visual stories and poems and reeducating myself visit after visit, discovering worlds I had not previously known existed. Thirty years later, I still explore the worlds of art I am given access to through museums with a sense of wonder and gratitude.

Since undertaking this study, I have found that it has relevance beyond me and beyond the precincts of museology. The notion of the museum as the preeminent institutional example for a consciously and rigorously enacted set of collecting practices has diffused itself into the culture. This diffusion has occurred in such a profound way that the idea of “curating” now is synonymous with the discriminatory and enlightened arrangement of consumables such as food, wine, and personal items—whatever might constitute objects worthy of collection. It has been noted that a collection might now metaphorically stand in for a mode of knowledge, even where this knowledge is idiosyncratic and particularistic (Stewart, 1992, p. 161).⁴ For example, the You Museum, an online service that claims to be “the world’s first and only personalized museum that’s with you wherever you go”, has recently launched.⁵ It is essentially a web-based application that gathers information from the user, tracks the websites the user visits most frequently, and then displays what the developers term “personalized exhibitions” in a kind of electronic gallery presentation. A similar form of visual curation can be seen in the algorithmically generated galleries created by Apple Photos and Facebook.

Unsurprisingly, use of the term “museum” has, in intersecting with popular culture, departed from the aforementioned set of collecting practices that has distinguished the public institution. There is now a “Museum of Ice Cream”, with outposts in Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, though there is little indication that this enterprise is committed to the preservation of objects in its care, or the cultivation of knowledge through conscientious public programming or curation. Though they claim that their mission is to “bring people together and provoke imagination”, it is fairly obvious that the self-styled museum is actually a theme park or amusement house that while seeking to make a profit first, nevertheless appropriates the authority and intellectual integrity of organizations committed to the public good. There is a Museum of Failure and a Museum of Broken Dreams, both organizations that exploit the signified notion of the museum as an organizational apparatus employing certain principled means of research, categorization, and care of collected objects, but perhaps most importantly, status as a public-facing entity equipped to educate and enlighten the general populace.

This interpenetration of the practices of popular culture and the procedures of the museum has to do with the onset of a twenty-first-century information-centric culture that is oversaturated with news, advice, and information. And the engine of this culture is profit-making. Thus, individuals and collective enterprises seek to leverage the cultural capital associated with the idea of the public museum. More, the technological tools that generate and are generated by this culture—the Internet, electronic media platforms, and digital data storage—make the production and distribution of information more readily available to more people than has occurred previously in history. The museum model serves as a way to conceptually organize this information and the material objects that are also made readily available to those with the economic resources to procure them.

More generally, one of the key reasons museum activity is of interest to diverse audiences is that it is shown in study after study through a range of disciplinary lenses including economics, public health, and cultural studies that visiting museums is beneficial to individuals and communities.

A study undertaken in Norway shows that participatory cultural activities such as museum visiting increase health (particularly in men) by lowering the risk for anxiety and depression (Cuypers et al., 2011). Jan Packer (2008) found that museums can provide a restorative environment in which visitors can recover from the demands and pressures of their lives. In a commissioned study, an economist from the London School of Economics purported to quantify the value of visiting museums for the public, finding that the value is higher than playing a sport and worth more than £3000 per annum (Fujiwara, 2013). Chaterjee and Noble (2013) examined the effects of patients handling museum objects while in hospitals and care homes, and found significant improvement in what they terms “positive emotion”, well-being, and happiness. They also noted advancement in patients’ perceptions of their own health. Simon Tait (2008) puts forward the argument, gaining in popularity, that museums can bring about urban renewal by generating new business investment in areas previously blighted by crime and neglect.

Given this demonstrated utility, it is an article of general faith that the museum will perform these collectively and individually salutary functions. Economic, psychic, and public health benefits associated with museum attendance reinforce the museum’s identity as an institution that is important to and supportive of our general well-being. For visitors, researchers, and patrons the museum is a stable linchpin in a collectively organized civic endeavor through which we become connected to others and through which we come to deeper knowledge of ourselves. But this begs the question of what the art museum represents to those who do not hold these convictions, for those who rarely or never make the visit.

The academic discipline of museum studies, in which this study is primarily seated, at its core continues to wrestle with the persistent concern of how the European public museum birthed in an Enlightenment ideal of universal education has become comprised of a visitor population that does not reflect the greater society. One can perceive this concern come to the surface in methodical analyses and frequent laments about the course of development museums have been taking, particularly in the last few decades as this concern has become associated with museums’ chances for survival.

A history of exclusivity

The consensus for many museum researchers is that the art museum is an exclusive space, and this is an observation that has attracted and continues to attract deep and prolonged study. Data collected recently in the United States show that the museum persists in a particularly middle-class persona. The Center for the Future of Museums, an arm of the American Alliance of Museums, commissioned a report in 2010 from the Policy Center at the University of Chicago, to survey the entire museum field. The investigators found that only 9 percent of “core museum visitors” were of the minority population. They do not clearly define what a “core” visitor is, but I take it to refer to the most frequent visitor profile (Farrell & Medvedev, 2010). The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 2012 partnered with the General Social survey to determine how and why Americans participate in certain arts activities. The NEA reports that those who self-identified as working class, though sharing similar levels of household income and education with classes of higher status, were less likely to attend arts events.

Recent studies in the United Kingdom also attest to this state of affairs. A report published in 2015 by the Warwick Commission, Enriching Britain: Culture, Creativity and Growth, indicates that “higher social groups accounted for 87% of all museums visits, [while] the lower social groups for only 13%”, based on the data gleaned from a study of government-supported museums commissioned by the Museums Association.⁶ (The criteria that determine inclusion in the “higher social group” category seem to be defined in the report as high socioeconomic background, university-level educational attainment, and a professional occupation.) Previously, statistics provided by Longborough University Research School of Informatics (2006) also bear this out. According to their data, while working-class and lowest-subsistence groups make up 28 percent of the general population, they only make up 11 percent of museum visitors. However, while middle-class and upper-middle-class groups only make up 24 percent of the population, they represent 42 percent of museum visitors (Greenwood & Maynard, 2006, p. 9).

Within this last generation, much of the discourse in the museum field has been convened around anxiety regarding how to expand the museum’s audience. The question has lately become urgent because of two main trends: The decolonization movement and the recognition that the survival of museums has become dependent on visitor numbers.

Toward diversity and inclusion

The decolonization movement consists of a loose US-based coalition of activists, writers, museum professionals, teachers, and museum visitors who are convinced that museums may no longer pretend to be neutral spaces, above the fray of cultural contests.⁷ These struggles are poignantly articulated by former Walker Art Center director Olga Viso, who left the institution after a very public debacle prompted by artist Sam Durant’s piece Scaffold (2017), which was found by local communities of indigenous Americans to play on their historical traumas in ways wholly unacceptable to them. Viso describes what I believe lies at the heart of the decolonize-the-museum movement when she says its focus is on “expos[ing] the underlying power structures of white establishment culture, corporate America and the federal government” in order to address what she terms a “great societal reckoning around race and gender”.⁸ In essence the burgeoning movement recognizes that there is a clear and crucial correlation between the gender and ethnic makeup of the corps of museum leadership (not just visitor profiles) and the institutional valuation of perspectives that are alternatives to White, that is, European-American mainstream understandings of art and culture. As the Andrew Mellon Foundation showed in its 2015 report, Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey, approximately 28 percent of museum staff are from ethnic minority backgrounds, but the greater number of these personnel work in security, facilities, finances, or human resources. In the fields that are directly related to art, which include curation, conservation, education, and leadership, that number drops to 16 percent (Lefrak, 2018).⁹ Similar findings have been made about the paucity of women in leadership roles in art museums, though they make up the majority of other staff posts.¹⁰

Museums are now widely and urgently being called to provide a platform for addressing underrepresented histories and narratives. The homogeneous makeup of museum staffs, the wealth disparity between art producers and the collecting class, and the economic power of the commercial art market are all viewed by subscribers to this movement as new (and continuing) forms of colonization. Thus, even private institutions, such as the Phillips Collection, which is based in the District of Columbia, has recently hired a chief diversity officer at the executive level to work on diversifying both the audience and staff. The recognition for the need of such a position is undergirded by the awareness of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The new museology
• 3 An interpretive museum
• 4 Marketing and the museum
• 5 Tate’s audience research
• 6 Appearances of the customizable visit
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index