Museum audiences: A visitor-centered perspective

Research on why the public visits museums is presented in order to provide a visitor-centered perspective on the long-running debate about whether museums should position themselves first and foremost as content authorities or as public educators, often dichotomized as ‘quality/education’ versus ‘quantity/entertainment.’ Data from a diversity of museums across the globe reveals that the public currently visits museums in order to satisfy not a single goal but rather a diversity of leisure-related goals, including learning outcomes falling at both ends of the quality–quantity continuum, as well as every point in between. The results suggest that the current debate, which tends to frame the problem as an either–or issue, is misguided. The author concludes that museums should strive to meet a diversity of visitor needs, creating both exhibitions that attain the highest standards of intellectual excellence and integrity, and exhibitions that seek to pique the interest and generalized understandings of diverse audiences.