3. WHY DO MUSEUMS
MATTER?
Why is your community better off because it has a
museum? The answer must necessarily be something
more than, because otherwise it wouldn’t. Museums
matter only to the extent that they are perceived to
provide the communities they serve something of value
beyond their own mere existence.
Stephen Weil, Making Museums Matter
Flickr Credit ~adforce1
5. DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART
Founded in 1903, the DMA’s collection
spans 5,000 years of human history
Located in the largest arts district in
North America
Dallas is the 4th largest metro area in
the United States with over 6.5M
residents
6. DALLAS MUSEUM OF ART
While 2,500 new people move to
Dallas each and every day…
Attendance has hovered around
500,000 for most of the last decade.
With just over 500,000 visitors last
year, we are reaching no more than
7% of our community
8. According to a study by Indiana
University, museums are
considered a more reliable
source of historical information
than books, teachers, or even
personal accounts by
grandparents.
TRUSTED
9. BUT NOT VITAL
The 2010 U.S. census reports that only 14.5% of US Adults visited
museums in the prior 12 months (Census, 2012).
10. Studies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found that most visitors spend
much less than 30 seconds viewing works of art The study reports that
rarly do visitors spend more than a minute with any individual artwork.
GRAZING
Spending Time on Art” by Jeffrey K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith in Empirical Studies of the Arts, Vol 19, Number 2, 2001.
On the Brink of Irrelevance? Art Museums in Contemporary Society” by Douglas Worts, 2003.
Flickr Credit ~Petereck
11. TIME FOR A CHANGE
FREE ADMISSION
FREE
MEMBERSHIP
13. ARE YOU A MEMBER?
PARTICIPATION IS
THE NEW CURRENCY
OF MEMBERSHIP
14. A CULTURE OF
PARTICIPATION
A participatory culture is one
in which members believe
their contributions matter,
and feel some degree of
social connection with one
another
Jenkins, Henry. 2006. “Confronting the Challenges of
Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century.”
18. Badges are bundles of
activities that are created by
DMA staff.
Badges are used to magnify
existing visitor behavior and
encourage new forms of
engagement
19.
20.
21. Points are awarded for
completing badge activities
DMA Friends can use their
points for a variety of rewards
22. For the first time, we can
have a stream of data about
what visitors do inside the
museum, not just when they
show up…
23. Social Media Listening
Listen to the social web
comprehensively
Credit Friends for online
engagement
Use high engagement as a
“mirror” to the community
25. WHY DO MUSEUMS
MATTER?
“When you can slip into a gallery for just 15 minutes to see a
favorite painting, or when parents can take their children without
having to budget for it, the museum takes on a societal function.
It's no longer just a fortress or an amusement: it's a civic platform,
where education and citizenship go hand in hand”.
Jason Farago, The Gaurdian, London, 30 Nov, 2012
26. WHY DO MUSEUMS
MATTER?
“For Dallas, a museum membership should be like a library card:
everyone should have one, and it should foster an engagement
with the museum that goes beyond the occasional visit to a kind
of civic pride”.
“I hope it works. Because in a perpetually privatizing world, the
kind of civic culture that the Dallas Museum of Art is trying to
foster has become rarer than any antiquity”.
Jason Farago, The Gaurdian, London, 30 Nov, 2012
Empirical data supports the view that visitors spend little time at individual exhibit components (often a matter of a few seconds and seldom as much as one minute); seldom read labels; usually stop at less than half the components at an exhibit; are more likely to use trial-and-error methods at interactive exhibits than to read instructions; that children are more likely to engage with interactive exhibits than adults, and that attention to exhibits declines sharply after about half an hour.
Studies of 150 visitors at the Metropolitan Museum of Art found a mean time of less than 30 seconds viewing an object to be typical, with most spending significantly less time. Douglas Worts, former interpretive planner and audience researcher at the Art Gallery of Ontario and museologist, summarizes this behavior as “grazing” and theorizes that the pattern may arise from a mismatch in the goals of curators and visitors. It is relatively rare to watch a visitor spend more than a minute with any individual artwork.
A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another…Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways.
