MusLi (Museums Literacy) - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

22 MusLi - No qualifications needed: museums and new audiences
straints, etc), the setting up of a positive relationship with the target audiences and with intermediaries
or referents who can boost a museum’s credibility from their point of view, the capacity to listen to such
audiences, and in response to modify the project in progress, etc.
This different way of approaching the expectations of individuals and the quality of museum-audience
relations, when applied to each element of a museum experience, can also usefully be conceived as
an invitation to rethink the whole relationship of the museum with all different kinds of audience, which
could take advantage of the considerations that follow.
Pay attention to different systems of representations and of values. If necessary, develop
an “exchange of values”
In particular, the analysis of the case studies reveals that an effective project must necessarily and realistically
find fertile ground on which the museum’s values (potentially very different) and those of less
culturally motivated audiences can meet.
Totally uninterested in the hierarchies of values on which the museum builds and sets up its objectives
and activities, individuals and communities can recognize divergent and autonomous systems of values.
The museum experience can however connect with these values putting into practice at a
first step, if not “specific objectives” (i.e. cognitive, referring to collection disciplines), at least sideobjectives
which are useful to people’s overall growth and their cultural and social competences.
For example, the timing and the location of social relations linked to the visit experience, the experience
of a space for listening and of attention, the acquisition of new skills that are measurable in a social or
professional context, and not only related strictly to specific museum disciplines. The “incidental benefits”
of a visit experience are often more important than the visit itself in terms of the priorities of people
or groups.
In fact this mirrors the variety of motivations that audience research has already shown, in general, for
museum visitors, whatever their origins or education level, in contexts where models and cultural identities
are plural and negotiable and the museum no longer not embodies “the” unique system of knowledge
and values. That is to say, it cannot be excluded that the social dimension of a cultural event, the
pleasantness of the spaces, the type of company or programme could motivate in a decisive way both
the “ordinary” public and the culturally educated.
The recognition of a (possible) great divergence of values, as well as culture, from those of its audiences
does not necessarily mean that a museum, especially in its approaches to less motivated or well-educated
audiences, should abdicate its cultural objectives in favour of more generic educational, social or “welfare”
objectives, but rather it should postpone objectives of a strict cultural nature until after a process
of listening, mutual acquaintance and trust building between the museum and its audiences
and an introduction to the museum experiences that often turns out to be completely necessary.
The Louvre case study shown here – the implementation of a programme of conferences and
workshops in a Parisian prison – supplies us with a number of hints that are useful in this sense.