Museums I visited and what I spent, 2018
Over the 2017–18 Christmas break I read ‘Peak: How All of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary Things’. The main argument of the book is ‘The right sort of practice carried out over a sufficient period of time leads to improvement. Nothing else.’ It made me think that concentrating on the different areas of my life that I care about (work, exercise, relationships, home improvement and culture) could make me better in all areas of my life. To concentrate I documented different things (scoring different climbing workouts depending on the number and grade of problems I’d completed for instance). For culture I wrote a page for each cultural thing I did. I defined culture as visiting Museums or Galleries (either permanent collections or specific exhibitions), books and a couple of musicals. This is the first time I’ve reviewed all the write ups across the Museum and attempted to extrapolate patterns and insights from it.
There’s a lot of ‘audience development’ talk within Museums Public Engagement teams, but how much time do we spend analysing our own cultural habits? If we can understand our own cultural consumption then we at least have a better sense of the multiplicity in which culture plays even within someone for whom culture plays a large part (i.e. it competes with the interests of whoever you’re visiting with, and that the same person can visit a Museum in a variety of ‘modes’ depending on what has motivated the visit).
This year I wrote up and scored each Museum, Gallery or exhibition visit I did. I then listed all those visits and scored them. The list is made up of 40 visits: 31 museums/galleries (main collections) and 9 exhibitions.
Top 10 visits for 2018
I was surprised at how many more permanent collections I’d visited compared to exhibitions. I realise this was because when I travel abroad, or within a part of England I haven’t visited before, I tend to think, I’m only here once; I want to know what the Museum is ‘about’ (and in smaller regional museums, I want to learn more about the area I’m travelling in).
My scores for how good the permanent collections have a large range, I saw some very good ones (Vatican Museums, Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk) and some relatively poor ones (Colbost Croft Museum, Skye — which is in fact quite damp).
Most of the time (28 out of 40) I visit Museums with friends, the rest of the time I went by myself.
I started to break this down into my main ‘modes’ of visiting Museums which I made into the following categories:
i) Solo culture trip (12 of 40) — I do sometimes really want to see a certain thing and am almost more keen to do it at my own pace, by myself and make my own mind up about it. This year I booked a holiday by myself to Amsterdam because I was really keen to see the audio guides at Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh and Stedelijk. With some of the big London exhibitions I would book a trip by myself to see them because I was really motivated to have a highly personal experience there.
ii) Group culture trip (8 of 40) — this year I went on trips with groups of friends to visit the Cambridge Museums, Charles I at Royal Academy and Picasso 1932 at Tate Modern.
iii) Travelling with my partner (16 of 40) — a lot of the time I’ll be on a holiday with my partner anyway and we’ll use that as an excuse to do some really good museums (this year notably in Rome and Glasgow, Paris coming up!)
iv) Meeting friends (4 of 40) — a smaller minority of trips were primarily booked for meeting up with friends and then, as we happened to be in Bristol or London (for instance), we’d do an exhibition or museum at the same time.
It’s interesting to reflect that if I was trying to fix down myself in a typical audience segmentation I would have said that I mostly visit museums by myself, but that’s not in fact the case, the majority of my museum visits I will have factored in someone else’s preferences to that visit.
Commercial
I realise that I contribute less to the revenue of Museums than the vast majority of visitors, since I hardly ever pay for entry (abroad because I can borrow the International Council of Museums card and in the UK as Ashmolean Museum has reciprocal free exhibition entry with most of the big London Museums).
When I have spent money, it rarely correlates with how much I liked the place. I actually found V&A’s Frida exhibition pretty disappointing (where was her art? Surely that would have been the best way of telling her biographical story!?) but that didn’t stop me buying a necklace in the always very nice V&A gift shop (from the Fashioned From Nature exhibition gift shop, which I didn’t see). Similarly I thought Charles I at Royal Academy had no underlying narrative, but that didn’t stop me buying a pair of earrings there. I would however be more likely to ask for a discount (National Art Pass, reciprocal Museums or NUS) when I’d been disappointed by the visit.
The most expensive thing I bought was post-visit. I spotted these lovely earrings in the John Soane Museum. I think the fact that I was really visually inspired by the Museum helped me want to buy these, but I bought them about 6 months after the visit, it was mainly on the strength of the earrings themselves that I eventually parted with my £70.
I have learnt from this whole process that I buy a lot of jewelry from Museum gift shops!
I was more likely to spend money in a Museum cafe if I was visiting with friends. But I was more likely to spend money in the shop or on a hired audio guide if I’m visiting by myself.
Shamefully the only donation I made was of small change to a not very impressive Museum in Penrith, because I thought it should continue to exist and what small collections they had were presented well.
What about you? I’d be really interested to hear about other people’s cultural consumption over 2018 — what museums and exhibitions were top of your list this year? Do other people find they have strong behavioural patterns about where they visit permanent collections versus exhibitions and is there little relationship between how much money you spend at the Museum and how good a time you had during the visit? It would also be really interesting to compare this ‘year in the cultural life of’ with a visitor who did have to pay entry, and see how sentiment and behaviour compared.
