2019/11/15 by Simon Høffding, Mette Rung, Mette Houlberg Rung +1
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · #Aesthetic Perception and Analysis #Art Education and Development #Museums and Cultural Heritage
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/cura.12344
crossref issued 2019/11/15 · crossref published 2019/11/15 · crossref published-online 2019/11/15 · openalex publication_date 2019/11/15 · crossref created 2019/11/16 · crossref published-print 2020/01/01 · crossref deposited 2023/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Abstract There is a powerful trend in museums today of asking visitors to participate in the exhibitions, co‐create content, and to be active and engage with one another in the museum space. While welcoming the participatory agenda as an initiative of democratizing art museums, we argue in this paper that the rise of the participatory agenda also redefines the purpose of the art museum in a way that risks overlooking the kinds of experiences people undergo in art museums. Based on qualitative and phenomenologically inspired interviews with museum visitors, we present a sketch of a class of aesthetic experiences that ought to be taken into consideration in curatorial practices. Developing a picture of the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, we argue that such experiences should be taken into account when considering the question of the purpose of the art museum.