This book deals with the evolution of the language of museum communication from 1950 to the present. The term ‘museum communication’ is used here to address the whole variety of actions of written communication able to strengthen an organisation’s relationships with its audiences (Kotler et al. 2008). These include engaging not only in one-way media and pursuing positive press coverage of the museum and its activities, but also using Web communication and social media to build a community of interest and nurture relationships with audiences and sponsors (Wallace 2006).
Museum communication is undergoing momentous development and its linguistic evolution is a current and highly relevant issue for professionals. Over the last few decades, long-established public relations practices, based on traditional tools, such as press releases, press conferences and interviews, have given way to a new paradigm that places great value on Web communication and social media, such as Twitter, Facebook and many other platforms (Grunig 2009). Such new media, which are now being extensively exploited by museums, also require adaptive writing skills and, in particular, a great ability to synthesise information which poses a challenge to the traditional ways of communicating with audiences. Although planning to go beyond its 140-character limit in the future,1 Twitter has so far been characterised by short-form content (see Marwick and Boyd 2010); for other social platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, there is no strict rule, but still conciseness seems to be preferable, because users are generally confused and annoyed by seemingly endless messages (see Kaplan and Haelein 2010). Moreover, when mobile devices are used and text display is limited to a smaller screen, synthesis appears to be a necessity (see Baron 2013). In contrast, traditional museum press releases generally cover two pages or even more and are generally associated with an in-depth presentation. They are interpreted by practitioners as a textual space where description and evaluation can take place at ease, a story can be told (for instance, the artist’s biography) and long quotations can be reported, if needed.
This dramatic contrast between old and new communication genres leads us to question how the language of museum communication has changed up until now and how it is still to evolve in the medium and long term: what will be the language of museums in the future? What directions are being taken by museum communication and what professional challenges lie ahead?
In order to trace the historical development of the language adopted by museums in its external communications, a diachronic, corpus-based analysis will be carried out in this book, focusing on the most salient written tool of museum public relations: the press release, which has traditionally been considered, in museum settings as well as other contexts, as ‘the basic tool for communicating with the media’ (Kotler et al. 2008: 290) and as the direct ancestor of subsequent and more recent museum media. In particular, we are going to explore a very typical kind of museum press release, that which is issued to announce upcoming exhibitions, commonly known among practitioners as exhibition press announcement (EPAs).
To this purpose, an ad hoc corpus has been compiled, the EPA Diacorpus, made up of 378,315 words (tokens) and including 430 EPAs, half issued by American museums and half by British museums, dating from 1950 to the present. Corpus linguistics and genre-analysis methodologies will be used in order to explore its content in quantitative and qualitative terms. More specifically, variation in terms of lexical choice and change in the structure of the genre across the decades will be examined.
After identifying the typical features of the museum press release, to be detected in the diachronic analysis, other communication tools more recently adopted by museums, such as Web presentations, blogs, e-news and social media, will be taken into consideration. This second part of the analysis aims at evaluating whether press release features are still detectable in newly emerged genres or if they have been replaced by new linguistic strategies; hence, whether the press release model is obsolete or still vital for museum communication.
1.1 Museum Press Releases
EPAs are proposed as the groundwork for the diachronic analysis of museum communication carried out in this book.
As a written professional genre in use among practitioners since the very earliest origins of museum public relations, dating from immediately after World War II, museum press releases are representative of change not only at the linguistic level: their evolution can tell us much about the great social and cultural changes taking place over the last decades of the past century in museum settings, especially with the advent of new technologies, new public relations practices and with the transition towards a more market-oriented concept of the museum.
EPAs are press releases issued by a museum in order to announce an upcoming exhibition and are aimed at a narrow category of journalists, those in charge of arts reporting and criticism.
As such, they belong to the press materials periodically released by a museum, which range from announcements of seasonal programmes—i.e., texts which summarise the main events scheduled over the year—to single exhibition announcements, devoted to one display in particular; from ordinary news about the museum (such as announcements of artist talks, presentations of films or books, accomplishments, awards, new appointments, philanthropic events) to crises responses released in order to protect the image of the institution.
Contemporary EPAs are generally characterised by short paragraphs and a simple layout. They often provide an attention-grabbing image below the headline and include contact details and background information on the museum.
Despite their undoubted affiliation to the textual genre of press releases, it would be limiting to present EPAs as a mere subgenre of this category. The high level of creativity characterising EPAs, both in terms of lexical choices and structure, their strong promotional intent, often realised through a significant use of evaluative language and emotional linguistic features and their capacity to address media people as well as the lay public through their e-dimension (Lazzeretti and Bondi 2012), encourage readers to consider them as belonging to a genre worth of interest per se, which shares its own peculiar features, as well as its own rules.
EPAs can be comprised under Ravelli’s wide definition of ‘texts in museums’ (2006: 2), i.e., written explanatory texts produced by museum professionals, which function as communication tools between the institutions and their audiences, and have become crucial especially in consequence of the development of thematic exhibitions characterised by strong educational goals and aiming to appeal to a wide range of visitors (McManus 2000; Schiele 1995; Jacobi and Poli 1995): this is a phenomenon that can be dated back to the 1940s and is still ongoing. Moreover, they can be considered prime examples of what scholars have been alternatively calling ‘artwriting’ (Carrier 1987), ‘artspeak’ (Atkins 1990; Harris 2003), ‘art talk’ and ‘artworld discourse’ (Irvine 2004–2009).
EPAs are a little-researched topic, although there are some aspects related to this genre that still need to be fully explicated. The first has to do with their evolution—or maybe we should say their survival, in view of the advent of new public relations practices—which is strictly related to the evolution of museum public relations in their entirety: how do they face the challenge of the need for adaptive change posed by the Internet and new technologies? Are these practices evolving or dissolving?
A second point of interest concerns the origin and reasons of the evaluative and promotional features characterising EPAs, which have only been investigated from a synchronic perspective so far (Lazzeretti 2010; Lazzeretti and Bondi 2012).
Scholars have tried to identify the factors involved in genre change, looking at how variables associated with the various participants and contextual factors interact causing a given genre to change. As pointed out by Yates and Orlikowski (1992) in their study on genres typical of organisational communication, such as the memorandum and the proposal, a reciprocal relationship exists between the changing textual features of a genre and concomitant rules for use that are determined by people responding to a changing and demographic climate: “empirical research is needed to investigate the various social, economic, and technological factors that occasion the production, reproduction, or modification of different genres in different socio-historical contexts” (1992: 320). For instance, with the appearance of the typewriter, conventions emerged such as underlining, subheads and the use of all capital letters to facilitate readability (Yates and Orlikowski 1992). According to Garzone (2012: 34), the spread of new technologies had a deep impact on genres, to the point that “for many genres now there exists a multimodal ‘double’ resulting from their migration to the web, while many new genres have been born that are native to the web, and have unprecedented peculiarities in terms of mode of discourse” (e.g. Askehave and Ellerup Nielsen 2004; Garzone 2007).
In such a scenario, the future of the press release genre is hotly debated: Solis and Breakenridge (2009: 114 ff) report on journalists who have explicitly called for its death2 and endorsed an up-to-date version of the traditional press release, like the SEO Press Release or the Social Media Release. Similarly, Luttrell (2014: 191–197) argues for the replacement of traditional press releases with social media releases. It might be expected that EPAs, as press releases in use across museum settings, may be under the same threat, or, at least, may be evolving into a new form.
As for the second point—evaluative and promotional features...