Dramaturgy of the ‘Experience-Driven’ Museum

Methods

Within the framework of a mixed method design, we conducted numerous observation protocols of different museum genres e.g., on the exhibition designs as well as on the practices of visitors and museum safety guards and attendants. In selected museums, we realized guided interviews with responsible museum officials (directors, curators, exhibition designers). In addition, we used standardized visitor surveys and carried out standardized observations in three contrasting museums.

Findings

• Eventisation and experience-orientation: Eventisation in museums is based on the visitor’s active, sensory and emotional involvement which should lead to them being fascinated and having extraordinary experiences.
• This type of promise is expressed, for example, in a pronounced contextualization of exhibits or of the exhibition itself, as well as in different types of activity options (e.g., hands-on exhibits). In this way, different eventization profiles of museums and attitudes towards experience orientation become recognizable.
• Tensions: This trend towards eventisation is accompanied by various conflicting priorities. When addressing their audiences and designing exhibitions, responsible museum officials are on the one hand guided by rhetorics of sovereignty (making ‘own’ decisions, individual paths…). On the other hand, exhibition designs are guiding their audiences in terms of space and time - which can also be shown by observations of the audience. Furthermore, museum officials often have to face a dilemma concerning the characteristic value of their institution and economic, pedagogical and funding requirements. Though the development of a 'hybrid offer' is one answer to such conflicts of interest.
• Practices of Social Distinction: One thesis is that responsible museum officials set rather ambivalent signals of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’. Event-oriented situational contexts relevant to social distinction and differentiation emerge. Both, contextual and situational conditions – the staging of the exhibition and the social composition of the co-visitors – have an influence on visitors’ self-presentations as practices of differentiation and as practices of social distinction. According to our in-depth methodological reflections, the ‘distinctive nature’ of visitor practices and interactions in the sense of Bourdieu can hardly be unambiguous identified empirically within a concrete situation. This is a major challenge when investigating empirically on the reproduction of social inequality in museums and other cultural institutions. Different opportunities for evaluating visitors and social distinction emerge, but self-presentations in general and status-indicating distinctions in particular are rather entangled in a complex way.

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