The Responsive Museum

Working with Audiences in the Twenty-First Century

Caroline Lang, John Reeve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317017882
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

What is the relationship today between museums, galleries and learning? The Responsive Museum interrogates the thinking, policies and practices that underpin the educational role of the museum. It unravels the complex relationship of museums with their publics, and discusses today's challenges and the debates that have resulted. The highly experienced team of writers, including museum educators and directors, share their different experiences and views, and review recent research and examples of best practice. They analyse the implications of audience development and broadening public access, particularly in relation to special groups, minority communities and disabled people, and for individual self-development and different learning styles; they explore issues of public accountability and funding; discuss the merits of different evaluation tools and methodologies for measuring audience impact and needs; and assess the role of architects, designers and artists in shaping the visitor experience. The latter part of this book reviews practical management and staffing issues, and training and skills needs for the future. This book is for students, museum staff, especially those involved in education and interpretation, and senior management and policy-makers. This is a much-needed review of the relationship between museums and galleries and their users. It also offers a wealth of information and expertise to guide future strategy and practice.

PART I
Understanding Audiences: Theory, Policy and Practice

Introduction to Part 1

UK society and culture changed almost out of recognition from the 1960s onwards. Museums and galleries were slow to respond and remained, on the whole, part of a deferential, expert-led culture that was increasingly under attack. Certainly there was change: new kinds of art exhibition for example at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and Royal Academy, and new kinds of interactive display and customer care at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum. These attracted more middle-class and school and college visitors, but not usually new kinds of audiences. Local and regional museums, often the real innovators with audiences, were vulnerable (during the 1980s in particular) to funding cuts, with major inherited problems of infrastructure and conservation. Urban riots in the 1980s helped put inner city regeneration (for example in Liverpool) on even the Conservative government’s agenda. It took a Labour government, however, from 1997, to bring culture and museums right up the agenda and into the world of major social policy, and with this came compliance with detailed targets for the first time.

This section explores how far the profession was ready for the challenge of developing audiences: how had its thinking and practice evolved? What had learning in museums to offer a new agenda? How have the power relationships within museums and also those between museums and government developed? Are museums and the other cultural industries now being expected to deliver too much? What new expectations have there been from audience groups such as families, teachers, ethnic minority communities and people with disabilities, and can these be fulfilled and sustained?

Finally, an example to show how far the map has been redrawn. In the summer of 2005, The Ulster Museum, Belfast, announced its plans for renewal, costing £11.5 million. Nearly half of the funding came from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) which will now fund projects only if there is a strong audience case as well as a compelling heritage one. The announcement leads with audience:

It will greatly enrich the museum experience for visitors. Innovative learning and outreach programmes, associated with dynamic new exhibitions and interactive displays, will make its diverse collections visually and emotionally stimulating and intellectually meaningful for visitors of all ages and backgrounds. The programme is based on the philosophy that the Museum should have a central role in the life of the Northern Ireland community, that it should be accessible to everyone and that it should encourage participation in a wide range of activities and events that meet the needs and interests of all sections of our rapidly changing society (‘Opening Up the Ulster Museum’ press release, July 2005). Part 1 explores how this new philosophy has become so deeply embedded in museums that it appears irreversible, but also asks whether this is really so.

Chapter 1

Influences on Museum Practice

John Reeve and Vicky Woollard

Introduction

Over the past 50 years there has been a major shift in the relationship between museums and their audiences. In the 1960s the relationship could have been considered simple and one-dimensional; the museum was all-powerful and the uncontested authority. The museum staff saw their public as a reflection of themselves; knowledgeable about the actual and symbolic meaning of the collections and the obvious ‘value’ they held for society. Thus museums believed the public to be those who visited regularly and understood the rules and definitions by which the collections were collected and interpreted.

The shift over the past three decades has been towards museums recognizing that the public is made up of many diverse groups who are keen to articulate their needs and make their views known, even through choosing not to visit. Equally, museums have come to appreciate, though not fully, the complex relationships that can be formed with the thousands of individuals who have taken an active role in contributing to the overall activities of the museum; through volunteering, acting as trustees, attending events or providing information on the collections as experts and enthusiasts. This chapter introduces a number of influences that have contributed to these changes. These influences are beyond government intervention yet have helped to raise the debate about audience interests and the role museums have to play in engaging with those interests.

Audiences or Consumers?

A closer look at the terminology used to describe all those who use and contribute to museums will uncover a number of key ideas, individuals and texts that have either directly or indirectly influenced the change in the museum/audience relationship.

Museum audiences will be described in a number of ways throughout this book: audiences, customers, consumers, participants, the public, stakeholders, users, spectators and visitors. ‘Audience’ and ‘spectator’ indicate the method by which the individual is actively engaged.1 ‘Visitor’ is the more familiar term for those who enter museums and galleries, and ‘virtual visitor’ is used increasingly for museum websites.2 Other combinations such as ‘actual’ and ‘potential’ visitor are used to identify sub-groups. Visitor figures are required by the UK government as opposed to audience figures. However, some data is collected, as for example the number of visits as opposed to the number of visitors, as they are likely to be higher. It is interesting to note that the term ‘non-users’ or ‘non-attenders’ is used rather than ‘non-visitors’. This inconsistency may indicate a previous lack of interest and research into this important group.

Participants are visitors who take part in activities such as workshops and gallery events, while those attending lectures are identified as an audience. The marketing terms ‘customer’ and ‘consumer’ indicate participation in the financial sense, either by paying for an entrance ticket or by purchasing items at the café or shop. The former has been a more accepted term since the 1990s, when an emphasis on customer rights and services meant that the museum was obliged in some way to provide customer assistance. The term ‘consumer’ is often used in a derogatory way when discussing capitalism, mass consumption and the consumer society. The implications of selecting one word over another are revealing: museums must recognize that they continually offer products for consumption such as exhibitions, events, gifts, membership schemes, yet for most museum professionals, using the term ‘consumer’ places museums alongside shopping malls and the high street.

The final words to be explored are ‘public’ and ‘stakeholder’. These terms encapsulate people who do not necessarily visit or engage with museums but are recognized as significant. The term ‘stakeholder’ makes it clear that these individuals have a vested interest in the aims of the organization and how they are delivered. The interest of the public as stakeholder is primarily that of financial investment, through local or national taxes. The majority of the world’s museums and galleries receive funding (all or part) from income raised through public taxes. Therefore the public quite rightly needs to see how these funds are spent.

Therefore the use of these terms (such as audience, visitor, consumer and stakeholder) signifies different relationships between the museum and its public. ‘Audiences’ may be thought to be more passive than ‘participants’, the term ‘visitor’ seems to have less authority and be less demanding than ‘customer’. Perhaps from this one could extrapolate that the preferred term for museums is ‘visitor’ as in ‘visitor services’ rather than ‘customer services’, for institutions may wish to keep the power balance in their control rather than that of the customers. The possible change in balance may lead to the dominance of the consumer, which would totally change the rationale of the museum as a cultural institution.

Postmodernism and Museums

Museums and galleries were identified early on as one of the battlegrounds for postmodernism; the traditional museum being seen as another repressive, disciplinary institution controlling visitor behaviour and both physical and intellectual access to art, history and other cultures, while providing grand narratives from a position of uncontested authority (Araeen et al., 2002; Crimp in Foster, 1985; Duncan, 1995; Foucault in Rabinow, 1984; Hall, 1997). Others, such as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, have examined the motives for visiting art galleries, for example the middle class hoping to acquire cultural capital. Like economic or social capital, cultural capital is something that can be accrued, can give advantage and status, and can possibly be exchanged or converted. It also implies a need for art to remain exclusive (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1990). Their research showed ‘museum visiting increases very strongly with increasing levels of education and is almost exclusively the domain of the cultivated classes’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1990, p 15). They think that schools can only be effective if the family had already inculcated the attitudes and behaviour patterns. Conservative voices are also invoked, such as Adorno, who disapprovingly coined the term ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944). In the museum world the voice of American museologist Stephen Weil has repeatedly cautioned against claims that museums can change the world (Weil, 1995).

In this new context, museums and the world of cultural theory have enjoyed a healthy relationship (a useful introduction to the latter is Mirzoeff, 1998). New and close attention has been paid to the related histories of museums, collecting and systems of thought (Bennett, 1988, 1995; Duncan, 1995; Hooper-Greenhill, 1992; Preziosi and Farago, 2004) and to the traditional practices of curators and museum managers. Art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and scientists have all been through major conceptual and philosophical changes in their respective fields and this has impacted not only on curatorial practice but also on the relationship (or lack of it) between higher education and museums and galleries. Meanwhile in many art galleries the ‘high priests of modernism’ carry on as before, though with greater acknowledgement of audiences and public agendas (Serota, 1995). Contemporary art remains the most problematic area for learning and access, because of its innate newness and the often exclusive behaviour of its advocates, both curatorial and educational (engage, 2004b). This is another area, along with archaeology, that has benefited from increased media attention in order to attract enthusiastic new audiences.

Cultural Democracy/Democratizing Culture

These two terms denote a major shift in the perceptions of culture; whose culture and what culture is it? Democratizing culture refers to public accessibility of culture, through price, location and education; there should be no barriers to prevent individuals participating in culture, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights states. Cultural democracy describes the desire for every culture to be respected equally, without hierarchy. Many factors have contributed to challenging traditional white, male, Western ruling class histories and unquestioned curatorial practices, including Marxism and Social History, and the wider debates about heritage and the heritage industry (Boswell and Evans, 1999; Dicks, 2003; Kavanagh, 1996). Feminism has encouraged critiques of collecting, interpreting, colonialism and management (Carnegie, 1996; Morton, 2003; Porter, 1998). The Multiculturalism of the 1960s and 1970s now campaigns under the banner of Diversity (Cummins, Crew, Merriman and Poovaya-Smith in Kavanagh (ed.), 1996; Simpson, 2001). Edward Said and other postcolonialist scholars have made sure that non-European collections do not sit uncontested in Western museums. The semiotics of display and museum language has also been fruitfully explored in museums and galleries (Araeen et al., 2002; Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 1999; Coxall in Durbin (ed.), 1996 and Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), 1997; Hall, 1997; Loomba, 1998; Morton, 2003). New approaches to museology include initiatives in Asian, Pacific and North American museums and many reassessments of ‘heritage’ (Dicks, 2003; Kreps, 2003; Stanley, 1998). These have lessons for museums and galleries in the ‘West’ also, particularly those emerging from Communism with new narratives and relationships to forge. For the situation under Communism, and for a whirlwind tour of museums worldwide in the 1980s, see the writing of Australian sociologist Donald Horne (1984, 1986).

Marketing

As we have seen above with the words ‘customer’ and ‘consumer’, since the 1980s the role of marketing theories and the growth of marketing departments has had a significant influence on how museums regard their audiences (Mclean, 1997; Runyard and French, 2000). Due to diminishing or stand-still budgets, and under pressure to deliver bigger and better services, museums have had to raise income from a number of sources. This income generation can be carried out through the shop, café, tours, educational services, loans, copyright fees, corporate entertainment or even from providing venues for weddings. Marketing’s principal role in this is to generate ideas, seek out potential need, inform potential buyers/customers of these opportunities through advertising and promote the o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Understanding Audiences: Theory, Policy and Practice
• Introduction to Part 1
• Influences on Museum Practice
• The Impact of Government Policy
• The Public Access Debate
• Developing Audiences
• Introduction to Part 2
• References
• Prioritizing Audience Groups
• Networks and Partnerships: Building Capacity for Sustainable Audience Development
• Audience Development: A View from The Netherlands
• Dancing Around the Collections: Developing Individuals and Audiences
• Developing the Inclusive Model
• Museums and the Web
• Response to Digital Technologies and Museum Learning
• Understanding Museum Evaluation
• Children and Young People in Museum Evaluation
• Managing the Responsive Museum
• Introduction to Part 3
• Where Does the Museum End?
• ‘… And there is no new thing under the sun'
• The Funding Challenge
• ‘What is your Exit Strategy?'
• Learning, Leadership and Applied Research
• Developing Integrated Museum Management
• Audience Advocates in Museums1
• A Collective Responsibility: Making Museums Accessible for Deaf and Disabled People
• Whose Space? Creating the Environments for Learning
• The Importance of the Museum's Built Environment
• An Unsettled Profession
• Specialism versus Generalism
• Conclusion
• So Where Do We Go From Here?
• Appendix 1 UK Museum and Gallery Visitor Figures
• Appendix 2 The Inspiring Learning for All Framework
• Appendix 3 A Common Wealth: Twelve Targets for Development of Museums Learning
• Reference
• Index