Museums Refine the Art of Listening
Curators at the Detroit Institute of Arts used research to find out how long visitors spend at each exhibit. Gathering data about visitors has never been as important, or as sophisticated, to museums as it is now. “A zillion other things are competing for our leisure time,” said Ford Bell, president and chief executive of the American Association of Museums in Washington. “People might visit a museum to see a Monet or a toaster or a textile display — what’s important is it’s getting them in the door.”
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, recently put in a touch screen at a Mayan exhibition to see how the public would interact with it. The screen was positively received.
For potentially challenging exhibitions, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art offers learning lounges, which are rooms next to the galleries with catalogs and excerpts of artists talking.
The Detroit Institute of Arts showed a period dinner for its 18th-century galleries, replete with Meissen porcelain and 18th-century silver. A stylist created a period feast, right down to a roast pig centerpiece.
At the Museum of Modert Art in New York, concerts by acts like Chicks on Speed attract younger visitors.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, offers audio tours.
Naum Gabo’s “Linear Construction in Space, No. 4,” a plastic and stainless steel sculpture, draws visitors in a conventional gallery at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Via N.Y. Times
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