| dc.description.abstract | This thesis offers insight into how museums in the twenty-first century museums facilitate a relationship between art objects and their audiences. Initially, museums have displayed exhibitions for visitors to passively consume. With the rise of the internet, the need for museums to create interactive experiences both online as well as on-site has increased. Nowadays, visitors are considered as active producers who contribute to programs and activities of the museum in the form of co-production and co-creation. This interactive development is defined as the participatory museum.
For this research, two Dutch private art museums are selected to discover to which extent Lisser Art Museum and Museum No Hero respond to the need for visitor-oriented experiences by involving their visitors before, during and after the museum visit. Using Visual Discourse Analysis, both case studies were analyzed. The main conclusion is that Lisser Art Museum and Museum No Hero apply various digital (social media and interactive tours) and physical (customer-journey and well-prepared hosts) tools that facilitate participatory museum visits. In addition, both museums are examples of how learning and fun could be combined, resulting in accessible, inclusive visits.
However, this does not imply that visitors enjoy full agency. Lisser Art Museum and Museum No Hero actively mediate between visitors and art works in order to make interactive visits possible. Instead of describing the museum visit as either free-choice learning or a compulsory classroom setting, these museums could be defined as open-minded meeting places where visitors and hosts actively contribute to the continuity of both museums, while at the same time the back-office staff actively shapes the visitor journey. For a long time, the oppressive and misleading power of museums as knowledge institutions has been emphasized. This research provides a new starting point, namely that museums could use their power in a positive way to create appealing visitor-centered experiences. | |
