Is it wrong for museums to study audiences?

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Is it wrong for museums to study audiences?

Friday, September 3rd, 2010 | blogging

I missed this story in the Wall Street Journal when it first came out a few weeks ago:

Matt Sikora doesn’t look at the Rembrandts and Rodins at the Detroit Institute of Arts. His eyes are trained on the people looking at them.

Mr. Sikora watches where visitors stop, whether they talk or read, how much time they spend. He records his observations in a handheld computer, often viewing his subjects through the display cases or tiptoeing behind them to stay out of their line of sight. “Teenage daughter was with, but did not interact, sat on bench, then left,” read his notes of one visit.

Mr. Sikora is the Detroit Institute of Arts’s director of evaluation. He and five other observers are studying how visitors use the exhibits so the museum can tell if its information is accessible and which galleries are popular.

More museums are paying to send stealth observers through their galleries. Based on what they see, the museums may rearrange art or rewrite the exhibit notes. Their efforts reflect the broader change in the mission of museums: It’s no longer enough to hang artfully curated works. Museum exhibits are expected to be interactive and engaging. As well, many foundations and donors are requiring proof that their funding is well-spent, and the studies provide data to show a rise in traffic or exhibit engagement.

Jed Perl at The New Republic is uneasy:

Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who knows more than anybody else alive about shaping the museumgoing experience, recently commented that “danger always lurks when a museum is regarded first and foremost as an instrument of social engineering.” The phenomenon that The Wall Street Journal is reporting certainly suggests social engineering, and nobody contemplating the bottom line can entirely dismiss efforts to study visitor behavior and rethink signage and even presentation. But a masterpiece is always in some sense unknown and unknowable, and if you smooth over that fantastic conundrum by developing a new circulation system for visitors, you may find in the end that you are engineering the museum right out of existence.

I can’t say I really follow Mr Perl’s point. Yes, masterpieces are in a way unknowable, we contemplate great works precisely because of that (where a work is entirely obvious, why would we linger?). But I don’t see how thinking about flows of people and how they respond to information and presentation of works rises to the level of “social engineering”, and I feel certain that′s not what Mr Montebello was talking about.