What museums can teach us about audience engagement
If your content strategy is the Louvre, it’s important to sharpen up your Mona Lisa magic, writes Edge’s junior planner, Kath Mills.
The field of visual arts has an engagement problem, embodied in the phrase ‘I don’t get art’. In the past year alone, nine different works have sold more for than 100 million dollars and one work by an anonymous Brit was publicly shredded, only to be revalued at a higher price point.
Understandably, these privileged antics can have an alienating effect on 99% of the population. It could also be attributed to some of the more esoteric or ineffable conceptual artworks that prompt the catch cries of “my kid could do that”.
These factors have created the ‘art-fluent’ outsider complex, rendering any audience member not in the economic 1% or the rigorously scholarly feeling somewhat excluded.
This is a good piece with valuable insights. I would add that museum curators tend to all come from a very similar mind set, predetermined in universities especially ideologically, which fosters a groupthink and it shows in museums around Australian cities. There’s a bleak, self-loathing perspective on Australian/Western culture that rarely varies within that bubble, and woe betide the free-thinking curator who dares to rock the boat (if you’ll parson the mixed metaphor). So it’s wise when museums reach outside for fresh creative viewpoints and perspectives – not to change the content or story, but to influence how it may engage audiences.