Watching Auckland crowding in to see its new art gallery you did have to wonder who they all were. There’s that great advertising saying, “we know that fifty percent of what we do is wasted, the trouble is we don’t know which fifty percent” and that sure rings a bell when you think of public institutions trying to work out who they should appeal to and how they should be appealing. Well, help is at hand. The Dallas Museum of Art got some numbers crunched around the people that found their way inside the doors and discovered:
30 percent of them knew a lot about art and wanted to find out more.
26 percent were ‘observers’ who just liked looking.
25 percent were ‘interactors’ who liked participating in the museum’s programme.
20 percent wanted to be left alone to make their own decisions about what was on display (this includes 32 percent who are artists).
So there you go, labels, no labels, do-it-to-me, and get-the-hell-out-of-the-way-I-just-want-to-look-at-the-art.
Good luck.
