Beyond Science: Implications of the LSIE Report for Art Museum Education

Abstract The Learning Science in Informal Environments report holds great potential for creating change among those who work in the field of science education. But to what extent can it inform other sectors of the informal education world? This article explores how the LSIE report might influence research and practice in art museums. By comparing the report to a recent study in art education, the authors point out areas of overlap and divergence relative to content and skills, identity, and communities of practice. We suggest several implications for how art museums and science museums might learn from one another. A call to action is made for further research and discussion about common learning goals and outcomes for the art museum experience.     

Methods for studying family visitors in art museums: A cross-disciplinary review of current research

This paper examines current trends in family studies research, details the methodological and topical perspectives that are emerging, and reflects on how these findings could be integrated to provide a more coherent approach to researching the leisure, learning and recreational aspects of family visitors to art museums. Research findings from disciplines such as sociology, ethnography, education, design and marketing are of interest to the field of visitor studies, and this paper contributes to the wider research agenda by providing an overview of family research methods from a range of other disciplines, as well as those used within visitor studies.Over the last decade, there has been a growth of research in family learning in science museums, leading to an emerging disciplinary matrix, whilst many aspects of family visits to art museums remain relatively unexplored. The paper discusses the problems of gathering meaningful data from adults and children in family groups, and concludes by suggesting that a challenge for art museums is to learn from what is happening in other areas of cultural research into families, and to develop a framework for research which builds on the methodological strengths and practical experience of robust studies.     

浅析科普场馆沉浸式科普戏剧的创制与实施——以《鲸的寻游》为例

科普场馆是普及科学知识的重要场所,用科学的方法、新颖的形式进行科学知识普及是科普场馆承担的社会责任。随着现代信息技术发展和大众对文化的需求,沉浸式戏剧成为一种体验感极强的创新艺术形式。本文从沉浸式戏剧和科普戏剧相关研究着手,分析沉浸式戏剧与科普戏剧的关系,提出以沉浸式方式开展科普剧创制与实施的可行性,并以《鲸的寻游》为例探索在科普场馆实践沉浸式科普戏剧的途径。     

Gallery One at the Cleveland Museum of Art

How can art museums use interpretive technology to engage visitors actively in new kinds of experiences with works of art? What are the best strategies for integrating technology into the visitor experience? In 2012, the Cleveland Museum of Art responded with Gallery One, an interactive art gallery that opened to stakeholders on December 12, and went through a six‐week testing period before its public opening on January 21, 2013. Gallery One drew from extensive audience research and was part of a major building and renovation project in which CMA reinstalled and reinterpreted the entire permanent collection in new and renovated gallery spaces. The end result was an innovative and robust blend of art, technology, design, and a unique user experience that emerged through the collaboration of staff across the museum and with outside consultants.     

A Conversation on Object‐Centered Learning in Art Museums

Danielle Rice and Philip Yenawine are veteran art museum educators who have wrestled for decades with the thorny issues involved in teaching about and learning from art objects in the museum setting. While there is general agreement within art museums today that the object should be the focus of educational practice, debate continues as to the most effective processes for facilitating learning. Gallery teaching is one of the most contested arenas, with much of the disagreement centering on the place of information in teaching beginning viewers. In art museums, the issue of what and how to teach is complicated by the fact that many people, including artists, museum professionals, psychologists and educators consider art primarily as something to be enjoyed, and they posit this enjoyment in direct opposition to learning about art. Partly because of this, the function of art museum education and gallery‐based instruction is still evolving.     

Art and National Identity: Some Museums in Prague

In histories of the art museum, Prague has only a minor place. Yet at one crucial early moment, Prague played an important role in what we might call the prehistory of European public museums. There is a close link between art museums and nationalism. One necessary condition for being a country, it might be said, is that its people have a distinctive artistic tradition and therefore reason to build a museum in which to house it. What, then, is the relationship between Prague’s art museums and the identity of the Czech people?     

‘The feeling of exclusion’: Young peoples' perceptions of art galleries

This article first looks at the relationship between museums and art galleries and their potential audiences and, in particular, the under-represented sector of young visitors. It examines the main findings from the limited research available on young visitors, and goes on to discuss theories delineating the differences between the cultures, identities and values of culture consumers and culture providers. The second part of the article looks at what specific museums have done towards being more inclusive in their appeal, and then reports the findings of a survey of young people in relation to New Zealand's Auckland Art Gallery. The survey found that young people's ideas of what constitutes modern, relevant art do not match standard art criteria, and that most exhibitions and marketing methods do not mesh with their worldview. The article concludes by using data from the survey to suggest ways of engaging more young people with public art galleries.     

Stay Behind the Yellow Line: Young Children Constructing Knowledge from an Art Exhibition

Studies exploring very young children visiting museums and art galleries are few. The majority of research about museum and gallery visitors explores family group interactions. This paper examines the findings of a study involving three‐ and four‐year‐old children visiting an art exhibition in a national museum on more than one occasion. The children's construction of knowledge about being a museum visitor and exhibitor indicates their ability to develop an appreciation of art and an understanding of the purposes of museums and art galleries.     

运用真实生命体创建真实自然环境的多感官参与原文选自Rowman & Littlefield 出版社2014年出版的《多感知博物馆:基于触摸、声音、嗅味、空间与记忆的跨学科视野》(The Multisensory Museum:Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory and Space)一书的第4章。因杂志版面限制，中译稿有少量删节。

本文从植物等真实生命体在植物园中的运用实例出发,探讨围绕多感官体验的博物馆新型展览的构建。博物馆如何借鉴植物园中的相关经验来满足观众的学习与体验需求,同时促进观众间的互动和交流沟通,通过触摸真实植物等来开展自然基础教育,这值得我国博物馆尤其是自然科学博物馆借鉴。     

The Museum Experience: Mapping the Experience of Fine Art

How do visitors to fine art museums experience exhibitions? Can we classify their experiences? What are the factors that drive different types of visitor experience? We set out to answer these questions by analyzing from sociological, psychological, physiological, and behavioral perspectives the responses of 576 visitors to a special exhibition 11: 1 (+ 3) = Eleven Collections for One Museum mounted at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, from June to August 2009. Our five‐year research project, eMotion: Mapping the Museum Experience, interpreted computer‐modeled movement‐tracking and physiological maps of the visitors in complement with entrance and exit surveys. We tested individual aspects of the visitor, such as her or his expectations of the exhibition prior to seeing it; his or her socio‐demographic characteristics; her or his affinity for art, mood just before and receptivity just after the visit; and spatial, individual, and group‐related behavior patterns. Our study breaks down three types of exhibition experience that we call “the contemplative,” “the enthusing,” and “the social experience.” The results yield new information about aesthetic arousal, cognitive reaction, patterns of social behavior, and the diverse elements of the exhibition experience.     

Prescriptions for Art Museums in the Decade Ahead

Abstract The landscape of art museums has been altered since the AAM's 1992 publication Excellence and Equity. Rather than following a path towards community service or an educational mandate, the field has been led astray by a corporate mindset. The author identifies the primary challenges facing art museums in rebalancing their mission, and suggests a series of remedies to the unrealistic economic model that threatens to exclude education as museums' primary mandate.     

艺术创作在科技馆展览展品设计中的重要作用

科技馆展览展品设计通过科学和艺术的完美融合,不断突破常规、激发想象的跨界表达,成为了现阶段中国科学文化语境中亟需研究的课题,更是科技馆展览展品研究工作的一项任务。本文从艺术创作在科技馆展览展品设计中的必要性与现实意义入手,对展览展品策划、环境艺术设计、展品造型设计三个方面来解读具体的实践方法。科技馆为了避免枯燥的教化式科学传播,其作为传播美学和艺术的载体作用将会受到广泛重视,艺术创作的融入能够切实提高展览的艺术性、原创性和生动性,赋予科普展览更多可能,也为科技馆自身发展带来更大的上升空间。     

Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post‐cinematic Conditions,Limitations, and Possibilities

This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within ‘post‐cinematic’ conditions. Since the mid‐1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and ‘relocated’ within new technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post‐cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the ‘exhibition of cinema’ as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black box and the art museum's exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence demonstrates that while the museum's exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.     

From Period Rooms to Public Trust: The Authority Debate and Art Museum Leadership in America

A recent lecture series at the Harvard University Art Museums titled “Art Museums and the Public Trust” marked the eightieth anniversary of the founding of Harvard's famed Museum Course. A graduate seminar begun in 1921 by the Fogg Art Museum's associate director, Paul J. Sachs, the Museum Course became the primary training ground for art museum leadership in the first half of the twentieth century. The 2001 commemorative lecture series was intended to foster a healthy debate on the place of the art museum in Anglo‐American culture. Instead, the speakers, veteran directors of America's and England's most prestigious art museums, invariably returned to one concern: authority—theirs and that of the art museum itself in contemporary society. Authority was at the heart of the Museum Course decades earlier, tellingly explored in annual debates around two significant topics. The first debate involved the pros and cons of including period rooms in American museums. In the second, students argued about whether America's established art institutions should collect the work of living artists. Questions of how museums should respond to the interests of audiences and communities, their responsibility to contemporary artists, and the meaning of a public trust trouble America's museum leadership now as then. This article explores the common ground between the Museum Course debates of the 1930s and Harvard's recent commemorative “debates” by America's contemporary museum leaders and comments on its significance for today's museums.     

The ASTC Legacy and the Institute of Museum Services

The Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) represents 283 science-technology centers in the United States and 89 centers around the world. Among its most significant accomplishments is the leadership role that it played in the passage of the legislation that created the Institute of Museum Services (IMS), the federal agency that provides general operating support for the nation's museums. Prior to the funding of the IMS, government support for individual projects in art and history museums had come from the NEA and NEH, but the science museums fell through the cracks. Science museums, were already represented in Washington by ASTC, and ASTC became the natural lobbying group to establish a separate agency for museums. Although ASTC was one of the major driving forces behind the creation of IMS, its members represent only a fraction of the beneficiaries of IMS grants. Since 1984, ASTC institutions have received only 10 to 16 percent of the total dollars awarded by IMS.     

Interpretation and the Role of the Viewer in Museums of Modern and Contemporary Art

Abstract What does the term “interpretation” mean when it's encountered in museums of modern and contemporary art — and is something missing? Studies conducted by the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the University of Leicester in England reveal that visitors want more information about art. In this article, interviews with the directors of the Phillips and the Walker (as well as other museum professionals and academics) examine interpretative practices today and suggest plans for tomorrow. When preparing future interpretive materials, the author advocates that museums expose visitors to the idea that they make their own meaning when viewing art.     

Motivational Factors and the Visitor Experience: A Comparison of Three Sites

Museums, art galleries, botanical gardens, national parks, science centers, zoos, aquaria and historic sites are important public learning institutions. The free‐choice learning offered in these settings is closely linked to visitors' intrinsic motivation, making it important to understand the motivational factors that impact on visitors' experiences. This paper presents data from a questionnaire administered to visitors at three sites: a museum, an art gallery, and an aquarium. Similarities and differences among the sites are reported in relation to visitors' expectations, perceptions of learning opportunities, engagement in motivated learning behaviors, and perceptions of the learning experience. The importance of learning to museum visitors and the unique opportunities and challenges of the museum in relation to other educational leisure settings are discussed. The authors argue that the study of motivational factors might contribute to the development of a common theoretical foundation for interpretation in museums and other informal learning settings.     

“图文博美”四馆协同服务之研究

公共图书馆、文化馆、博物馆和美术馆之间处于一种条块分割、分散管理的状态,很少开展具有一定深度和广度的交流与合作。文章分析了“图文博美”四馆开展协同服务的必要性和可行性,阐述了如何实现公共文化服务机构之间的协同服务,并介绍了江门地区文化场馆开展资源共享和联合服务的工作实践。     

西方自然历史博物馆展陈变迁——从以文化和艺术为主的综合性视角出发

西方自然历史博物馆的展陈设计向来不是仅以科学作为独立的支撑。在其变迁中,艺术与文化的影响不可小觑。本文从西方历史、宗教和文化的背景出发,分析长期以来在自然历史博物馆的展陈设计中所隐含的科学观念与艺术文化现象,及其设计方式和影响范围。最后对新型自然历史博物馆所在学科理念和理论依据方面可尝试的突破方向做出了预期。     

The Laboratory on 53rd Street: Victor D’Amico and the Museum of Modern Art, 1937–1969

Abstract This essay addresses the pioneering work of Victor D’Amico, the first director of education at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and an influential art educator. During his tenure at MoMA, D’Amico explored the role of museums in developing creativity through direct aesthetic experience and the larger social implications of art museum education. Victor D’Amico led the Education Project at MoMA, which began as a part‐time school partnership program in 1937. By the time he retired in 1969, he had become an internationally recognized leader in the field of art museum education. Yet today his influence is little known and seldom discussed. This essay focuses on two important programs he developed at MoMA: his most widely acclaimed and influential program, the Children’s Art Carnival (1942‐1969), and the groundbreaking art education television series Through the Enchanted Gate (1952‐1953).