WE ALL KNOW THE FEELING: you step into a gallery and suddenly you feel like you have to be on your best behaviour, stand a little straighter, use obscure vocabulary and try your hardest not to say anything stupid. It’s uncomfortable and it’s oppressive, and a lot of people feel this way → see W. But, believe it or not, this is something that many museums are working hard to change.
When it comes down to it, one of the first responsibilities of cultural institutions is to promote an understanding of art. Many museums have an ‘education’ or ‘learning and participation’ department specially dedicated to making sure the art exhibited is relevant and accessible to as many potential visitors as possible – children, adults, art professionals, international tourists and local communities. One way to engage these different audiences is by engineering an events programme with strands tailored towards each one. This may include gallery tours for visitors with disabilities, school workshops, activities for families, academic symposia, lectures and talks. Museums also engage with online communities who may never visit in person through online magazines and blogs with comments boards, live-streamed lectures and performances, and Twitter sessions with artists and curators.
Alongside this flurry of activities, considerable resources are also put towards identifying new audiences. This stems from a fundamental understanding that the audience is not an abstract figure, but a variety of different kinds of people with diverse interests. Research and outreach are therefore crucial to understanding why certain sectors of the public, be it young people or local residents, find an art museum alienating. Some institutions seek to address this by inviting select visitors to become advisors – conduits between communities and the museum – and help create relevant programmes that will engage their peers. The result is diverse, personalized and more dynamic content, co-produced with visitors.
This endeavour has become all the more urgent as visitors seek a more active engagement with art – they don’t want to be treated like passive consumers. In an era when people are accustomed to exchanging views and participating through social media and digital platforms, creative activities and social interaction are fast becoming integral to cultural engagement. More interactivity – in essence, more conversations and fewer lectures – can allow for multiple readings, with many different voices contributing to a deeper and more personal engagement with the art. At museums, educators more and more often adopt an ‘interpretive’ approach (asking questions!) where learning, understanding and appreciating art starts with what people already know and builds further meaning from there. By encouraging visitors to really look closely at an artwork and inviting their personal responses, museum staff hope to facilitate an exchange that re-invigorates the work with new meanings.
In an era when people are accustomed to exchanging views and participating through social media and digital platforms, creative activities and social interaction are fast becoming integral to cultural engagement.
After all, what role can contemporary art play if its audience is only a small minority of the population? And who really is entitled to speak for art → see H? If the art experience is a personal one, then perhaps the best starting point is to encourage one-on-one engagement and share that with others. And if a museum seeks to inspire, then perhaps it can best achieve this goal as an agent of creativity rather than as a storehouse of objects → see Q.
GIANT SLIDES, an inflatable Stonehenge bouncy castle, a room filled to the ceiling with balloons: contemporary art can be fun and we know you love it! Being invited to leap around on an art object can be exhilarating and empowering, especially in a space that can feel constricting and austere. In courting audiences, both artists and museums are trying to tap into what it is that makes people feel alive, and this has placed fun higher up the agenda. After all, fun can be tremendously powerful as a break from ordinary social conduct (screaming at the top of your lungs and actually talking to strangers), encouraging playfulness (rediscovering a side to yourself that your husband of ten years doesn’t even know), and creating a sense of wonder and being in the moment (forgetting life’s worries) → see A.
But the more people flock to these works, queue for hours to see them and take fantastic pictures for their Facebook profiles, the more such works are condemned as crowd-pleasing, child-friendly or pandering to a spectacle-hungry press. The concern is that such emphasis on exciting audiences and generating visitor figures is damaging to culture by creating a vogue for art that is immediately accessible but lacking in depth – the art equivalent of fast food. Critics contend the immediacy of this kind of art (the ‘wow’ factor) does not require visitors or artists to give it much thought.
Whether you view such works as art for all the senses or little more than an overblown playground, there is something to be said for firing up people’s imaginations and getting them through the door. Visitors might have an entertaining Sunday afternoon or they might have a truly inspiring experience. Either way, a fun work of art might be just the push they need to open them up to all that contemporary art has to offer. And can there be a better way to convince your six-year-old that museums aren’t all boring?!