Suchergebnisse

'Is this art?' is a question often raised by museum visitors when encountering contemporary artworks. But what factors influence museum visitors' judgement on contemporary art? To what extent do visitors' prior knowledge, socio-demographic background, emotional experiences, and specific aspects of the artwork itself, influence their judgements? In the context of the Swiss National research project eMotion – Mapping Museum Experience, we investigated these questions experimentally. The site specific intervention created by the renown artist Nedko Solakov in the St. Gallen Fine Arts Museum allowed us to conduct such a concrete experiment. We interpreted the findings by statistical analyses of the data gathered from entry and exit questionnaires (n=291) in view of sociological art theories dominant in the last few decades. Against theoretical expectations, we found that the judgement art/non-art was driven by several factors not anticipated by those theories.

In the interdisciplinary context of the Swiss National Research Project eMotion—mapping museum experience, an integrative methodology for visitor research was developed. The goal was to investigate aesthetic experien-ces in the environment of a fine-arts museum. The methodology and technical setup merged different data levels (movement tracking data, heart rate and skin conductance, sociological variables, emotional and aesthetic evaluations of specific artworks) into one integrated data set. The merging was achieved online with high spatial and temporal resolution, using data gloves and a wireless network. This data set was used to generate information cartographies of visitors, visualizing their spatial behavior and physiological responses in the environment. In a field study with 576 museum visitors, the methodology was successfully implemented. Significant associations between physiology and aesthetic evaluations supported the validity of the cartographic representations; participants reported little reactivity toward the technical equipment. This methodology appears feasible for environmental behavior research in general.