Blog week 4.

Michelle Henning noted in her article ‘New Media’ that from the 1970s onwards, the relation between the museum and its visitors changed due to a large result of political and economic changes that began around that time and that it was not merely changing because of introducing new technologies into the museum. Until then, museums executed everything regarding their exhibitions in-house, but from that moment museums began to employ external parties to mediate their message to the public.

What appealed to me is that it seemed like the EYE Film Museum carries out every aspect of marketing, communication and design by themselves (in-house), so, without the help of external parties. I posted the question – regarding the campaign image – why they’d choose for the image of the little kid in Afghanistan because it felt to me that the core of the exhibition was ‘universality’, ‘playing together’, ‘joyfulness’ etc., whereas the image felt more like the kid was alone, lonely and playing in solitude. The people of the communication department did understand why this question was posted and as a reply, they said it was difficult to choose a picture for the Francis Alÿs exhibition because the works were created over a scope of 20 years. It is generally known that people empathize more with a photo of one person instead of a group picture. Also, certain pictures work well with colour grading, so this photo looks aesthetically good in combination with the colour pink.

Furthermore, the idea of the exhibition is ‘universality’. When a visitor observes the exhibition it feels rather global and specific. The people from EYE called this the first layer. Underneath this layer, the artist tried to communicate that children are often not recognized in anthropological discussions because they are seen as dependent on adults. These were the two aspects the EYE communication team wanted to communicate in their campaign image.

In conclusion, it is interesting to see how a renowned museum like the EYE manages to do everything inhouse, whereas a whole industry has developed, specializing in museum exhibit design and production. Now I quote Henning again, “In this context, questions of access, participation and interaction, democratization, and so on are also marketing terminology, overlaid on another discourse of profitability, cost, customer satisfaction.” In the same fashion, another comment stroked me a lot, which is that if they want national newspapers to write articles about their ongoing exhibitions, they are almost required to pay for an advertisement in their newspapers. It feels like these are the aspects that touch upon the capitalist system in which museums are inevitably part of too.

Written by Britt.