Attracting and Keeping New Audiences (Or Not)

Museums keep searching for ways to broaden the demographics of their audiences. And every so often, they mount a show that draws a whole new crowd. Curators then hope that those people will come back for the more traditional fare.

Most of them don't.

Past examples of such new-audience magnets include "Black Male" at the Whitney, "Star Wars" at the Brooklyn Museum and "The Glory of Byzantium" at the Metropolitan Museum. Whether it's people of color, young children, people of faith, or other affinity groups, they usually come once for the exhibition that speaks directly to them and then they leave. (If museums have audience surveys indicating otherwise, I'd be glad to be contradicted.)

This experience suggests that the concept of the encyclopedic mega-museum as the best repository for all masterpieces of all cultures is, at best, debatable. The lesson of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris (which I discussed in yesterday's post) is that we also need smaller "niche" museums that appeal to particular cultural constituencies---those who often feel marginalized in, or intimidated by, the grand art palaces where the great masterpieces of Western European and/or American art usually have pride of place.

Also needed, to help reach new audiences, is a systematic plan for encyclopedic museums to regularly share parts of the world's patrimony with the countries or societies of origin where these objects have the deepest significance. This can be done through large-scale loan shows, organized jointly with experts from the countries or societies to which the objects closely relate.

This is precisely the motivation behind the British Museum's exhibition, "Hazina: Traditions, Trade and Transitions in East Africa," which opened in late March in Nairobi, Kenya. The museum's director, Neil MacGregor, explained the genesis of that exhibition in the March 2006 issue of Museums Journal, the magazine of Great Britain's Museums Association:

Curated and conceived by colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, it consists of objects selected by them from the British Museum to tell a story for Kenyan audiences about the East African context of Kenya's cultures. This, we expect, will provide a new model for partnerships elsewhere in the world as the collection fulfills its purpose to be a library of the world's material cultures, available for the world's citizens to consult and make of them what they will.

This "new model for partnerships" should be adopted not only by the British Museum, but also by the world's other major museums. It's not just good cultural policy. It's also a good way to de-escalate the antiquities wars, by favoring collegiality over confrontation.