These essays discuss the findings of two researchers that visited various museums throughout North America, Europe, and Canada. By doing this they were able to gather a vast amount of data on the visitors, experience, exhibits, display, and admission costs.
The first essay reveals how within market-regions the cost of admission stays within a four-dollar price difference and how the top revenue producing museums set the tone for the overall market. Therefore if one museum decides to charge for an entrance fee the smaller venues generally need to follow in order to survive within the market. It was noted that many of the American museums did not charge for general admission in most instances but still tended to charge for special exhibitions. The author of the essay talks of special exhibitions like items in an a la carte, the visitor can select how little or how much information they would like to view that day. One-day admissions ended up being the most economically viable in comparison to the “packages” or membership fees. The package option turned out to be more limited when it came to deciding which museums to visit since the package pre-determined the museums included, personal preference is nullified. Memberships to the museums functioned best on a local level, visitors could return as many times as they wanted, gain free entry to special exhibits, and/or just give back to the museum with a membership. Oddly enough the discounts were limited by age for students over 30, otherwise blatantly discriminatory against non-traditional students. Something that I also found interesting within the reading was the authors correlation of visiting a museum in person to visiting a museums website. In this day and age it is bound to happen that there will be online exhibitions, well, there already are….flickr, Dribble, Behance, etc. all sort of act like personal galleries of artistic work. The work tends to either be photography or digitally rendered specifically to be viewed on a computer anyways. This difference I’m reaching for is that three-dimensional galleries will never work. Two-dimensional work will always be able to be viewed and considered onscreen, whereas items that are intended to be viewed in a specific environment or touched even cannot be taken in online. With that I feel the authors mention of charging to view work online for membership fees or a one-stop fee makes sense if the work is intended to be viewed onscreen and not in an exhibit or gallery. In an exhibit the notions of user experience are completely different from onscreen, as well.
The second essay discusses how the visitor interacts with the exhibits and chooses to distill the information. The author generally decides to read all of the labels and deems that as thoroughly viewing the items. His partner choose to listen to the audio tapes because of personal preference and in Spain the tapes were in Spanish the partners primary language. The labels of the items where almost always in English and neither more information was given from one or the other depending on the museum. I would think that the labels would tend to have the more generic information and the audio tapes would have more in depth information since it is an additional option. I never thought of choosing one or the other when visiting a museum. I image this could also be because of personal preference but the obvious fact that audio tapes take longer to divulge information than simply reading through a paragraph. The visitors experience could also be applied to digital galleries as well. I tend to shut off any audio options when visiting any site since I tend to use my computer in public areas. If there is an option to simply read the information then that is the primary choice for convenience and promptness of gathering the information. I think that these two realms will eventually meet in the sense that labels could become digital and thus possibly contain audio clips, additional imagery, information, and even video that would pertain to the piece. On the other hand I could see how one could see this as a distraction and possibly an overload of information, that casts over the original work itself. As with most things the overall interpretation of an object comes down to individual circumstances somewhat controlled by an exhibit designer.
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