37% OF ART MUSEUM VISITORS DON’T VIEW THEM AS CULTURE—AND OTHER TAKEAWAYS FROM THE 2017 CULTURE TRACK REPORT

BY ISAAC KAPLAN

Photo by Alicia Steels.

What do you picture when you think of a “cultural experience”? The white walls of a museum? The high ceilings of an opera house? The flashing lights of Broadway musical marquees?

In reality, the image Americans have of a cultural experience is dramatically more diverse, according to the 2017 Culture Track report—the seventh iteration of the national tracking survey of cultural audiences, due to be released tomorrow. For many respondents, going to the park or eating at a food truck counts as a cultural experience, while attending a museum does not.

“It’s clear that people don’t know or really even care about what is a cultural attraction or activity,” said Maggie Hartnick, managing director of LaPlaca Cohen, the cultural agency that developed the report. The report looks at the attitudes of cultural audiences rather than the larger population, tallying the responses of thousands of Americans who self-identified as having participated in one of 33 broadly defined cultural activities. The study also tracked the changes in those attitudes over time among a smaller set of respondents who had participated in a more limited number of activities.

Below, we spotlight seven findings from the study could have major consequences for how traditional cultural hubs like museums think about audience outreach, development strategies, and cultural participation in the 21st century.

37% didn’t think art museums were a cultural experience

The figure points to the increasingly democratized definition of culture. The designation “culture” used to be a way of placing certain leisure activities on a pedestal, notes Hartnick, a pedestal that today’s audiences are happy to take a sledgehammer to. While 63% of respondents saw art and design museums as culture, large numbers found culture outside the white cube: 54% defined public and street art as culture, while a “food and drink experience” and a night at the opera fit that bill for 51% and 48%, respectively.

This doesn’t mean culture doesn’t exist or is somehow vanishing, stressed Hartnick. Rather, culture needs to be defined in new ways and from the ground up rather than the top down. To respondents, culture involved fostering empathy, expanding your perspective, building community, and educating the public.

81% engage in cultural experiences to have fun

Cultural activities continue to be a source of leisure and relaxation for many. The survey found that 81% of audiences are motivated to attend a cultural activity because they want to have fun. A desire to feel less stressed was tied in third place, along with “experiencing new things,” with 76% citing both as reasons for participation. 71% cited learning something new as a reason to participate in culture.

This doesn’t mean that levity must replace education at museums, noted Harnick, but rather that the two cannot be divorced from one another. Culture offers the opportunity to connect with other people and take a pause from daily life—today’s audiences are full of anxiety and looking for a chance to relax, a conclusion that gels with other findings that show high levels of anxiety among the general population.

Only 27% of cultural audiences are loyal to cultural organizations

That figure is lower than the percentage who are loyal to restaurants or bars (58%), retail stores (48%), or streaming sites (36%). But loyalty takes many different forms. While some in the museum sector may define it as joining a membership program or making repeat visits, audiences have a more expansive definition of loyalty. It could mean attending a cultural organization’s picnic—while never setting foot in the institution itself. Technology has also stretched the parameters of what constitutes support, with audiences defining ‘liking’ something on social media as an act of loyalty. Meanwhile, the percentage of people with memberships to visual art institutions continues to decline, from 26% in 2011 to 22% in 2017…..

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-37-art-museum-visitors-view-culture-takeaways-2017-culture-track-report