Extra Credit For The Morgan Library

Yes, perhaps I did read too much into it. I agree wholeheartedly that it would be wonderful to find a way to measure engagement (and the IMA doesn't, you are right). My point was that some museums are trying to measure engagement, with some, perhaps limited success. I think it is important to be clear that many museums are struggling to understand and document their visitors in order to create more meaningful relationships, although these are not typically art museums.

To Guy Hermann: I'm afraid you have read far too much into my post: I never said the gate was the only thing being measured, but it is something most museums, etc. watch carefully. As for your other points, I myself have written about IMA's Dashboard (which doesn't measure engagement, so far as I've seen) and I've heard Marc Wilson's comments. (His experience is not widespread, btw.) As for the study written about in Miller-McCune, did you read how few people it involved?

My point in writing the post was simply, as I said, to ruminate about other measures of success.

So imagine, if, instead of "the gate", researchers and museums took account of these kinds of events in an exhibit: minutes before a work,returns to a work, comparisons between works, conversations about the works (beyond auction price). Then imagine an afterwards, where viewers could log in to works on line and record whether and if their thoughts returned to what they had beheld. Costly? Yes. Revealing - absolutely.

Many museums are using measures other than attendance to measure their effectiveness. Just in the past few days there have been two interesting articles.

Here is Marc Wilson, the director of the Nelson Atkins Museum on visitor engagement in his new building:

"[Visitors] are spending more time in front of individual works of art. . . . The guards have a stopwatch and we can track how much time people are spending with certain works. In the Bloch Building they are spending about three times as much [as in the 1933 building] and we're loving that."

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2009/09/qa_with_outgoing_nelson-atkins.html (from another artsjournal blogger)

Wilson attributes this to the new building, but it might also be the kind of art on display, as this interesting study suggests:

http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/modern-art-more-likely-to-stir-the-heart-1462

Or have a look at the Indianapolis Museum of Art's "dashboard" for all kinds of interesting metrics:

http://dashboard.imamuseum.org/

The Visitor Studies Association has long been a leader in helping museum understand visitors:

http://www.visitorstudies.org

And the Getty's Leadership Institute has also addressed the issue:

http://www.getty.edu/leadership/compleat_leader/evalperf.html

The field of museum metrics has a long ways to go, but it is also much more sophisticated than you suggest. The biggest issue is that every museum needs to establish metrics for its own success (ROI just doesn't work), but substantial progress is being made.

I believe the dilemma of measuring depth versus breadth is a challenge to all museums. With the exception of blockbuster exhibits, isn't engagement what we are all striving for? It's not just finding a way to measure engagement well, but also finding a way to change the mindset that attendance is the primary indicator for success.

At the Chicago season opener here on Friday, I thought quite a bit about how many pieces of work I saw that night. And how little I learned about the artist and the artwork by my marathon viewing experience. We will certainly never be able to return to the days when viewers traveled to see ONE painting, but I think the art world talks infrequently about the viewer's relationship (however brief that relationship is) to one piece of work.

People were standing for munites on end in front of each work of art at MoMA's "James Ensor" exhibition yesterday. The same has been my professional observation at numerous special exhibitions at The Met.