A museum for the twenty-first century: the influence of ‘sociality’ on art reception in museum space

Abstract

In recent decades fine art museums have experienced a boom in popularity. This surge is not only reflected by the proliferation of spectacular new museum buildings, but also through a considerable increase in visitors, and, as a result, the significant modification of ‘visitor culture’. These developments require investigation as to how new social situations within the museum environment may influence the perception of artworks. Through the Swiss National Research Project entitled ‘eMotion – mapping museum experience’, we studied the aforementioned social aspects of museum visits in real field conditions, deploying novel methods such as: wireless physiological monitoring, position tracking, electronic surveys, and information cartography. The combination of diverse investigative methods provides insight into the effects of artworks, necessitating alternative strategies for future exhibitions and museum installations. We demonstrate that the social behavior of museum visitors, such as companionship and conversation, have a decisive influence on art reception, which entails consequences for the strategic orientation of museums as sites of experience.

Keywords:

• art experience
• art museums
• visitor research
• exhibition planning
• physiology
• tracking

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (13DPD3-120799/1). We thank the Institute for Research in Design and Art at the University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), for their administrative support and Ubisense for providing the position-tracking technology.

We would especially like to thank the eMotion-team: the media artist and technical director of eMotion, Steven Greenwood, art theorist Prof. Dr Karen van den Berg and art sociologist Prof. Dr Volker Kirchberg; Sukandar Kartadinata and Christophe Vaillant for developing the electronic glove, Mauritius Seeger, Enrico Viola, Valentin Schmidt for the information design and programming, Chandrasekhar Ramakrishnan for the data sonification, Roman Rammelt and Behrang Alavi for the database management, and Nicolai Karl for managing the tracking technology. We thank Johanna Schindler and Patricia Reed for proofreading. We also want to thank the three reviewers for their comments and critique, which helped us to improve the quality of the article. All graphics, figures, and photos (except Figures 4 and 11): eMotion. Figure 4 by Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Figure 11 by Abdullah Al Saadi.

Figure 11.  Exhibition design of the United Arab Emirates Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia4, 2011. A curatorial experiment, which tries to establish attention energy, viewing distance and organize sociality in a crowded place, like the Venice Biennale. Curated by Vasif Kortun. Commissioner: Lamees Hamdan. Photo by Abdullah Al Saeedi. Courtesy of the organizers.7

Notes

1. Also according to the Institute for Museum Research Berlin, over the last 10 years in Germany museum visits increased by 10 percent from 96 up to 109 million visitors (www.smb.museum/ifm).

2. Certainly, artworks are not exclusively viewed in fine art museums, but also in churches, offices, streets etc., and various social practices can be found there (Kammerer 2012; Lewitzky 2005; Tamen 2001), our research focuses on the social practices and their impact on art reception in fine art museums.

3. The 12 items were: ‘This exhibition was very thought-provoking’./‘The exhibition design was convincing for me’./‘I enjoyed the museum space in silence’./‘The exhibition improved my understanding of the fine arts’./‘I had a nice time with my family and/or friends’./‘All of my senses were open and alert as I entered the exhibition’./‘I experienced a deep connection to the art I saw in the exhibition’./‘I saw something familiar, something I already knew’./‘I experienced the beauty of the artworks’./‘The exhibition was entertaining’./‘I was surprised by new impressions’./‘I saw famous artworks’. Possible answers were: 1=absolutely agree, 2=agree, 3=partly agree, 4=do not really agree, 5=strongly disagree, 6=do not know. These variables were taken from the literature of empirical museum studies (Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson 1990; Pekarik, Doering, and Karns 1999; Schuster and Ameln-Haffke 2006). In a discussion process they were partially adopted for our specific research interest in our team including a sociologist, psychologist, and art theorist.

4. According to Guintcheva and Passebois two motivations for visiting a museum can be found. The authors state that one group of visitors hold in high value, the social recognition in visiting a museum. They show a ‘superficial experiential strategy’ and ‘ignore the quality of the exhibition’ (2009, 14). The second group of visitors is characterized by those who ‘prefer to be alone and to have time to spend contemplating art works’ (2009, 15). It appears that their findings correspond highly to the results presented here.

5. For detailed information concerning technology and reliability of the integrative methodology, please see Tschacher et al. (2012) and Tröndle et al. (2012).

6. It must be considered here that ‘Conversation’ and ‘Accompanied’ were correlated variables, since visiting the exhibition in company increased the probability of conversation. We therefore conducted the analyses separately for the two fixed effects (to avoid multicollinearity). The effects on ‘aesthetic quality’ were similar. This clearly supports the conclusion that people estimated the aesthetics of artworks more when visiting alone, and when not engaged in conversation.

7. See http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/bien/venice_biennale/2011/tour/uae/