Hesitation before the impact - The museums and their visitors

Abstract

This study has had a twofold ambition; to probe into the life in the museums by studying the visitors and trying out some concepts in a cultural policy research setting. I will do this by analysing encounters between art and visiting audiences using “acontextual” analytic concepts: event instead of experience, affect rather than emotion and a broad understanding of the concept of atmosphere. Furthermore, the empirical material for the analysis consists primarily of parts and elements that are often discarded or excluded in examinations. The preliminary conclusions invite further probing into the interface between visitors and art, between the cultural imaginations that motivate cultural policy initiatives, and the actual concrete events in spaces and settings we tend to think of as cultural.