Academic literature on the topic 'Art exhibition audience'

Museums are judged not solely on the basis of their exhibition quality and collection care but, within a corporate model, they are also judged on quantitative measures such as audience numbers and, in turn, their financial viability. Programming has, therefore, become a major focus of forward planning and the basis for funding development. Blockbuster exhibitions, strategically placed throughout annual programs, have been a common way to increase audience numbers and sustain support. In more recent times, the blockbuster model has developed to address more complex measures of success beyond their quantifiable benefits. In addition to the aim of increasing visitor numbers, the blockbuster exhibition and its associated public and education programs, have been effectively utilized as a means of broadening and diversifying audiences. Such efforts help museums to meet expectations, often set by governments, to address and reflect the diverse demographic communities within which they are situated and to whom they serve.The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Australia provides one such example of a museum that is working creatively within the blockbuster model in order to present exhibitions that build on their collection strengths and existing programs, attract large audiences and engage diverse audiences by focusing on community building. This paper uses the AGNSW blockbuster exhibition The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors, to examine the role of this format in contemporary museums more broadly. We use this exhibition as a frame by which to analyse how the Gallery has modified the blockbuster model, and indeed built on it, in order to target geographically and culturally diverse audiences. We argue that this has been effectively achieved as a result of the Gallery building blockbusters around their curatorial and collection strengths, by working with external organizations and community groups and by offering a range of activities and opportunities for engagement both within the museum and outside of its boundaries. This exhibition proves that when blockbusters are used creatively to support museum wide efforts to engage culturally and linguistically diverse audiences they can achieve success that is both quantitative and qualitative.

This article is based on examples of contemporary audiovisual art with a primary focus on the Tony Oursler solo exhibition Face to Face in Aarhus Art Museum ARoS, 2012. My investigation involves a combination of qualitative interviews with visitors, observations of the audience’s interactions with the exhibition and the artwork in the museum space, and short analyses of individual works of art based on reception aesthetics, phenomenology, and newer writings on sound, voice and listening. The focus of the investigation is the quality and possible perspectives of the interaction with audiovisual works of art, articulating and sounding out their own ‘voices’. This methodological combination has been chosen to transgress the dichotomy between the aesthetic or hermeneutic artwork ‘text’ analysis and cultural theory, which focuses on the context understood as the framing, the cultural acts and agendas around the aesthetic ‘text’. The article will include experiences with another exhibition, David Lynch: The Air is on Fire (Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2007 and Kunstforeningen Gl. Strand, Copenhagen, 2010- 2011). The two exhibitions are fundamentally different in their integration of sound. My field of interest concerns the exploration of sound as artistic material in audiovisual combinations and those audiovisual works of art that might cause a change in the participatory strategy of the art museum towards the audience.

This essay deals with issues of citizenship, artistic labor, and belonging in the context of the Dominican Republic. It examines the collaborative work of the Colectivo Quintapata to understand how artistic collaboration is used as a way for generating social transformation and reaching audiences beyond the artistic medium. Analyzing art installations, public interventions, and socially engaged art pieces produced by Quintapata between 2009 and 2014, this essay argues that artistic collaboration works in the case of Quintapata, not so much as a formula but rather as a flexible tool employed to face situations of economic and institutional precariousness, extending the outcomes of each project beyond its original temporality and audience.

Changes in the format, design and content of museum and art gallery exhibition catalogues can be traced to the visibility and popularity of these souvenirs for the block-buster exhibitions of the 1970s. The increased museum revenue from these book sales and the need, perceived by the publishers recruited to museum staff from a trade background, to address the interests of a more diverse audience are identified as the two main instigators of these changes. The resulting exhibition catalogues play down the scholarly apparatus, offer more images particularly to enhance the reader’s contextual understanding and, in some cases, ameliorate the academic register of the writing. The uses made of exhibition books by institutions, their associated sponsors and museum visitors is commented on.

The increase, diversification and complexity of the museum audience in recent years has become the reason for the development of deeper and more targeted approaches to its study based on interdisciplinary research. The article analyzes the aesthetic preferences of the potential audience of exhibition projects according to the results of sociological segmentation based on a quantitative survey conducted in January 2020 on the mail.ru platform on the social network in VKontakte (audience coverage 73.4 million in 2020) with a sample of 1905 people. The filling of the questionnaire and data analysis were carried out by the authors using an art history approach, and the research methodology and statistical data analysis were prepared on the basis of sociological and marketing approaches. The assimilation of sociology and marketing tools by cultural institutions is interpreted by the authors optimistically, as an opportunity to oppose the negative aspects of the commercialization of art, to form a community of active supporters of cultural institutions, increase knowledge about their preferences, increase efficiency and reduce costs for promoting exhibition projects. The study also resulted in recommendations for marketing and PR promotion of exhibitions for a more accurate audience coverage and better satisfaction of the aesthetic needs of visitors. Accompanying information in the form of leaflets, audio guides, visuals should be offered in the format preferred by the largest segment of the audience. Curators can refer to research results and shape the exposition, taking them into account, but without losing professional quality. Data analysis was carried out using the methodologist of the Foreitor research company, Yu.R. Wolfson.

Through the case study of a visual arts exhibition on the Kyrgyz Revolution, (...) Ketsin! (May 2013), this article traces the complex set of factors that influence how a transnational exhibition is interpreted. Combining literatures on visual representation, the role of intentionality in authorship, and, museum and gallery studies, I propose here the notion of ‘entangled interpretations’ to convey the overlapping and muddled layers rather than discrete parts that together constitute interpretation. These layers comprise: the artworks; other works in the same genre and other works by the same artists; the exhibition design and display; the architecture of the venue; the artists’ intentions; the roles of commissioner, sponsor and curator; and, the split audience: original and intended.

This paper examines a curatorial approach to digital art that acknowledges the symbiotic relationship between the digital and other more traditional art practices. It considers some of the issues that arise when digital content is delivered within a public gallery and how specialist knowledge, audience expectations and funding impact on current practices. From the perspective of the Digital Curator at MOSTYN, a contemporary gallery and visual arts centre in Llandudno, North Wales, it outlines the practical challenges and approaches taken to define what audiences want from a public art gallery. Human-centred design processes and activity systems analysis were adopted by MOSTYN with a community of practice—the gallery visitors—to explore the challenges of integrating digital technologies effectively within their curatorial programme and keep up with the pace of change needed today. MOSTYN’s aim is to consider digital holistically within their exhibition programme and within the cannon of 21st century contemporary art practice. Digital curation is at the heart of their model of engagement that offers new and existing audience insights into the significance of digital art within contemporary art practice.

A recent Manifesto for a Visual Medical Humanities suggested that more in-depth analysis of the contribution of visual art to medical humanities is urgently required. This need perhaps arises because artists and curators experience conflict between the experimental approaches and tacit knowledge that drive their practice and existing audience research methods used in visitor studies or arts marketing. In this paper, I adopt an innovative psychosocial method—uniquely suited to evidencing aesthetic experiences—to examine how an exhibition of my own curation facilitated audiences to undertake psychological processing of complex ideas about mental distress. I consider the curator working in a health context as a creator of care-driven environments where complex affects prompted by aesthetic approaches to illness can be digested and processed. My definition of care is informed by psychosocial studies and object relations psychoanalysis, which allows me to approach my exhibitions as supportive structures that enable a spectrum of affects and emotions to be encountered. The key argument of the paper is that concepts from object relations psychoanalysis can help to rethink the point of entanglement between curating and health as a process of preparing the ground for audiences to do generative psychological work with images and affects. The case study is Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age, an exhibition that was iterated at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), UK and University of New South Wales Galleries Sydney, with an emphasis on audience response to key artworks such as Madlove—A Designer Asylum (2015) by the vacuum cleaner and Hannah Hull. It is hoped that this paper will help to reaffirm the significance of curating as a cultural platform that supports communities to live with the anxieties prompted by society’s most complex medical and social issues.

Inspired by their new university president’s call for global outreach and a desire for community partnerships, several libraries at the Ohio State University worked with the Columbus Museum of Art on a proposal for exhibitions and public programming. Called ‘Artist as Activist’ this exhibition and educational program proposed a dynamic collaboration between the institutions, with the goal of broadening the audience for the museum’s and the libraries’ collections and developing an inclusive educational and dissemination model.

On the roof of the German pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Olaf Nikolai produced boomerangs whose shape was adapted to local wind currents. He thus reified the conditions of their production, while each thrower individualised each boomerang through their throwing. The art work was thus created only with the help of the participants; similarly to the installation with singers entitled Non Consumiamo... at the exhibition curated by Okwui Enwezor at the Arena.