engleski

Visitors’ interpretative frameworks at art exhibition

This focus of the talk (paper presentation) is a visitor study conducted at the art exhibition Images of the Great War which was on show at the Croatian History Museum in Zagreb in 2015. The goal of the study was to explore socio-cultural frameworks visitors drew on while experiencing art in a physical space of the museum. The study was based on interviews with local visitors aged 19 to 30 which were transcribed and analysed using the qualitative methodology of discourse analysis. The findings were consistent with the museological literature that deals with knowledge construction, mostly found in the works of authors whose approach to researching museums has been informed by hermeneutics and semiotics. The visitors are understood as social actors shaped by both the museum environment constructed according to the basic museum functions of collecting, research and communication, and the “outside” socio-cultural context in which museums operate and which they share with their local visitors. The two contexts intertwined in the experiences and comprehension process of the interviewed visitors. The socio-cultural discourses defined in the analysis are the following: education (information format, aesthetic judgement, authoritativeness) media landscape (mediated imagery, formats, new media use), and previous and present museum experience (comparison with other museums, authority of the institution).

art; museum; interpretation; discourse analysis

nije evidentirano