What Do Museum Visitors Leave Behind? The New Experience and the New Visitor in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Visits to museums in the twenty-first century do not merely involve coming in contact with art but also living an interactive and relational experience that has changed the organization of museums, not only the exhibition rooms but also other museum spaces: boutiques, cafés, restaurants, and public areas. This new type of visit implies the role of an original agent: the frontalier visitor who, by inhabiting spaces adjacent to exhibition rooms, expands and reinforces the museum’s boundaries and the museum experience itself. This work is focused on visitors’ footprints as material and virtual marks and aims at showing the results of a field analysis carried out from 2017 to 2019 addressing the architecture of modern art museums. Fourteen museums have been analyzed, and four of them have been selected as the main objects of analysis: Malba, Moma, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou. We have studied their façades, esplanades, and entrance halls as spaces advancing what the public will experience inside the buildings. This analysis considers these adjacent spaces essential for the pass-through from the material experience to the virtual experience and from material footprints to virtual ones.

Visiting a Museum in the Twenty-First Century

Visiting modern art museums in the twenty-first century is not only about coming into contact with artworks but also about living an interactive and relational¹ experience typical of contemporary art which, after being incorporated into modern collections, has spread to the institutions themselves. All kinds of visual and technical resources are implemented to propose new ways of contact with the artworks, but above all with the museums: mobile applications, podcasts, hashtags, YouTube channels, live broadcasts with experts, numerous contents on social media, VIP artwork lists, photo booths, virtual reality, and the list goes on.

At the same time, museums regularly reorganize and expand not only the exhibition rooms but also the spaces surrounding them: merchandising stands at the exit of exhibitions, cafés, restaurants, children’s rooms, boutiques, gardens, and all sorts of devices contributing to promoting this new museum experience on both the façades of buildings and wherever possible² in the public space.

This highlights the expansion of the physical and virtual boundaries of the museum: extension and renovation of buildings, multiplication of cultural and consumer activities, and increasing production of pedagogical and entertainment content on an increasing number of digital platforms. The expansion of the museum and its audiences has allowed new modes of consumption of the museum experience.

This panorama leads to reflect on the nature of the museum visit in the twenty-first century. Even if inhabiting the space is different from interacting with the virtual platforms of the institutions, it is worth asking how these experiences coexist? In the case of the in-person visit, has the expansion of the surrounding spaces modified how the museum is visited? Can spaces dedicated to consumption, socialization, or entertainment be more important than the contact with the artworks, and could the visit end there, even before entering the exhibition room? Or can the visit exist without even entering or approaching the building? Do interactive contents (e.g., virtual tours or live videos) imply some kind of visit to the museum? Is it possible to have a bond with the museum without ever entering it?

To understand some aspects of the modern art museum visit in the twenty-first century, the spaces around the exhibition room have been studied, as these are the focus of many debates³ on the type of experiences offered by museums today. To this end, 14 modern art museums in the Americas and Europe were analyzed. This chapter focuses on four of them, Malba (Buenos Aires), Moma (New York), Tate Modern (London), and the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and draws its conclusions from a semiotic-ethnographic analysis of museums carried out between 2017 and 2019, which is part of an ongoing research project. During that period, façades, esplanades, and entrance halls have been studied as intermediary discourse (Traversa, 2017).

The research was based on the hypothetical function of these intermediary spaces: concretizing the passage from the virtual experience of potential visitors to the material experience and, in turn, ensuring the transposition of the visitors’ corporal traces to the virtual ones.

These intermediary spaces configure an experiential promise to visitors as they anticipate, comment on, organize, suggest, or inform something about what the public will experience inside the buildings. They also establish a certain kind of visiting contract. Both these functions feed back into each other and work together in the creation of the twenty-first-century museum experience materialized in a new visitor, the frontalier, who, in his or her spatial trajectories, highlights the importance of the museum’s boundaries which are increasingly more difficult to identify.

The Twenty-First Century: The Reign of the Visitor?

The research carried out in 1983 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris has been a precedent and methodological guide for this work. The French institution commissioned the semiologists Levasseur and Veron (1983) to study the bonds it maintained with its visitors. The authors define exhibitions as mass media, but with a specificity: their dominant order is metonymic. This means that the discourse is supported by the visitor’s body, which functions as a space of resonance for all the indexes of the discourse that define the subject’s contact with the spatio-temporal materiality of that discourse. Thus, the museum territory is constituted as a network of redirections in space, temporalized by the signifying body of the subject at the moment of appropriation (Levasseur and Veron, 1983).

In this way, the visitor’s behavior expresses the gap between the production and the recognition (Verón, 1998) of the museum discourse that must be considered as the result of a negotiation that can only be understood as the complex articulation between the properties of the proposed discourse and the subject’s appropriation strategies (Levasseur and Veron, 1983).

Based on these observations, a typology of museum visitors was made, metaphorically including ants, butterflies, lobsters, and fish. These categories show the strategies chosen by visitors to go through an exhibition—more or less ordered, more or less free, and more or less directed—and reveal the bond that these people establish with the Centre Pompidou. Ants and butterflies are interested in the thematic and pedagogical aspects of the visit, sustaining the classic museum imaginary: calm, contemplation, and silence. These visitors have been called, respectively, the spectator-body and the book-body as their visit strategies are structured by the exhibition design, the former to a greater extent than the latter (Verón, 2013).

The fishes regularly visit the institution and possess a global discourse on the cultural space, and frequent it as if it were part of their lifestyle, they pass through to have a look. The fishes are passing-bodies, accustomed to contact with the museum. The lobsters share certain characteristics with the fishes, but they are bodies with pseudopods. They also pass by from time to time and have a general idea of the institution, but for them, Beaubourg’s (as Parisians call the Centre Pompidou) proposals are characterized by their sophisticated, but not very solemn, themes, which allow the absorption of the cultural product by a purely personal experience, which in this case defines the pleasure of the visit (Verón, 2013).

In considering the museum as a mass media (Verón, 1985), this research transposes the notion of the reading contract coined by Verón (1985) to refer to the bond that a medium establishes with its readers, which is revealed after an enunciative analysis. The bond between museum institutions and those who frequent them will therefore be a visiting contract.

Analyzing this contract, according to Verón (1985), is not a matter of analyzing the contents of the media (or of the museum’s programming) but the regularities of its enunciative strategies and the positions it occupies in the relationship with its reader (its visitor), whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, distant, or complicit.

It is a matter of distinguishing, in the functioning of any discourse, two levels: the level of the enunciated and the level of the enunciation (énoncé/énonciation). The level of the enunciated is that of what is said (in a rough approximation, the level of the enunciated corresponds to the order of content); the level of enunciation concerns the modalities of saying. Through the functioning of enunciation, a discourse constructs a certain image of the speaker (the enunciator), a certain image of the receiver (the addressee), and, consequently, a link between these two places (Verón, 1985).

In the case of the museum, as a media of a metonymic order, the reading contract (or bond with its visitors) needs, to be established, connecting instances before entering the exhibition room: advertising, social media content, art reviews, and the experiential promise configured by the intermediary discourses-spaces. It is in these intermediary spaces where some kind of bond is established or reinforced but also where the museum visit could very well end.

The notion of intermediary discourses developed by Oscar Traversa (2017) designates a discursive subcategory that acts as an instance of connection between those who produce a good and those who yearn for it. Although he has been studying the functioning of this category in relation to the radio effects (Verón, 2014) produced by the cinematographic device, these intermediary discursivities can be considered as operating similarly when linking the instances of production and reception of a museum experience.

Traversa (2017) argues that the industrial nature of cinema requires it to be consumed to exist and therefore needs connecting instances that link two disjunct instances: film producers and potential spectators. Among them, we find commercial publicity, criticism, advertisements, and posters. The same can be said of the museum⁴ experience: the museum needs its visitors to exist, and, like the cinema, it needs connecting instances, in particular, an architectural program⁵ capable of luring potential visitors.

Oscar Traversa (2017) characterizes intermediary discursivity as a relationship between three machines: the textual machine, that is, the set of films—or the programming of a museum—offered to the public; the spectatorial machine, the complex that articulates our desire with the presumed satisfiers; and, finally, the machine that links the two.

From this perspective, any museum program can be understood as the first machine. The second machine consists of the connections between the visitors’ experiences with other museum programs in general and with those previously carried out by that museum in particular. The third machine will link the two others: the architecture, specifically, the façade, the esplanade, and the entrance hall. They will, together, configure a promise about what will be experienced in the building.

Traversa also explained that these intermediary discursivities are deployed based on plural enunciative strategies organized around three major units: what is being talked about; the attribution of values; and an assumption about effects. The three units play with the past experiences of the potential visitor and are articulated at the level of erudition (Traversa, 2017). In our case:

• (a) What is being talked about? A museum of modern art.

• (b) To what value is attributed? The experience inside a modern museum.

• (c) What supposed effect it will produce? Entertainment, family bonding, team building, apprehension of knowledge, enjoyment, discussion of art, etc.

To arrive at this description, two fundamental concepts developed by Oscar Steimberg (2013) have been applied to the museum: the genre and the style. Genre and style are understood as two opposing and complementary sets of discursive organization, whose first member can be understood as a mold and the second as a way of filling it. Steimberg has proposed three dimensions to analyze genres and styles: the rhetorical, the thematic, and the enunciative dimension (2013).

According to these terms, the esplanade, the façade, and the entrance hall should be analyzed as molds, and how museums present their programming would be their spaces of differentiation that consolidate or reinforce a certain bond with visitors.

The observations collected during the field study have evidenced that in the twenty-first century, the modern museum presents a new institutional style—or epochal style, in Steimberg’s terms (2013)—that involves not only the organization of exhibitions and cultural activities but also a new multidisciplinary experience happening inside its building and, fundamentally, in its margins.

According to this new institutional style⁶, the exhibition of modern and contemporary art must achieve a balance between chronology and thematization, between the critical and pedagogical perspective, and between the re-reading of the history of twentieth-century art and the playful proposal and, above all, provide the visitor with various things to do.

From Experiential Promises to the Visiting Contract

The central role of intermediary discourses-spaces is grounded in their capacity to offer an experiential promise to visitors and, at the same time, to participate in the configuration of the visiting contracts, i.e., the bonds of the visitors with the institutions. These two instances represent the two poles of a scale of the visitor’s contact with the museum, containing the two pairs’ novelty/recurrence and differences/regularities. The less familiar the visitors are with the museum, the more novel they would perceive the museum’s program and the more different from their consumption habits they would perceive this experience (the novelty-differences pole). Conversely, the public which is more familiar with the institution would recognize recurrences in the museum’s proposals and would perceive the visit as forming part of their lifestyle (the recurrence-regularities pole). The experiential promise operates at the novelty-difference pole, while the visiting contract operates at the recurrence-regularities pole.

Oscar Traversa (2017) explained that the industrial nature of cinema establishes certain modes of discursive circulation turning it into a triadic entity with a particular and, at first sight, contradictory objective: to carry a novel difference that must be stable enough for the public to accept and “enjoy.” Thus, the film works at the same time as “a film-text which is shown as a spectacle and shows differences, as a non-filmic film which is integrated as a double-announcer of those differences with different processes (the critique or the street poster) and, finally, as the one that embodies the role of transit and economic product, the film-merchandise” (p. 116).

By applying this logic to it, the museum visit can be understood (a) as a cultural experience that periodically shows differences, (b) as an experiential promise that operates as a double-announcer of these differences, and (c) as a consumable experience that involves specific modes of access.

This experiential promise must be configured by the intermediary discourses of the museums in connection with and in consideration of the expectations of visitors and the social representations of the modern art museum visit in the twenty-first century (which have been presented at the beginning of this chapter).

Conversely, visiting contracts require stability and recurrence to be sustained over time. These contracts go beyond the differences presented in the programs and are built on the reiteration of certain modes of visit and the recognition of the discursive operations recurrently staged in the museum space. This is why different visiting contracts may be defined by their positions concerning the duos: interest in the general experience/interest in a particular experience (that is to say, the whole museum experience/a particular program or part of it), everydayness-exceptionality, guidance-freedom, and learning-entertainment⁷. These duos are materialized in different spatial discourses-trajectories and different enunciative strategies.

The promise and the contract are thus understood as complementary opposites based on which the bonds between museums and their visitors take shape. These two instances can be graphed in the museum territory in the following way (Fig. 6.1):

Fig. 6.1

The passage from the experiential promise to the contract of the visit represented in the museum territory

The beginning of the museum experience would be located on the pavement in front of the institution, the first physical space where the passer-by may already initiate its link with it. This first step toward the construction of the visiting contract corresponds to the experiential promise that, configured by the intermediary discourses, emerges at the moment of crossing this parcel of museum’s territory and entering the esplanade of the building. In this graph, the potential bonding with the museum is illustrated (metaphorically) with a maybe decreasing gradually in size along the way to the exhibition room.

The passage from the second step (the esplanade) to the third step (the entrance hall) will depend on the enunciative strategies applied in the architectural discourses of this area and its capacity to convey the experiential promise: Does the building invite me to enter? Does it invite me to do so today, tomorrow, or during the weekend? Can I simply stay there? Can I simply contemplate or interact with the artworks located in the public space?

The last two questions also apply to the next stage, which is, logically, the entrance of the museum. At this point, the size of the maybe diminishes, but at the same time, the operations of the intermediary discourses must be even more effective to delimit the reading contract and to identify its strengths and weaknesses, its areas of ambiguity, and its eventual inconsistencies (Verón, 1985). It is precisely at this step that the institution proposes the contracts to the visitors and that the bonds may start to consolidate.

This progression is crucial since through these intermediary spaces the promise becomes the experience (regardless of whether or not the visitor continues to the exhibition rooms). The services, activities, and leisure spaces offered in the margins of the museum could, we assume, consolidate bonds as strongly or more strongly than the exhibition rooms⁸.

Identifying these promises and contracts requires analyzing the instances of production and reception (recognition) of institutional discourse (Verón, 1985). This analysis includes the observation of the functioning of the selected architectural spaces, including all types of devices located therein (posters, counters, screens, display cases, benches, chairs, flyers, staff organization, security devices, entrance processes, etc.) and an ethnographic work focused on the trajectories, routes, and actions enabled or prohibited by these spatial configurations, without neglecting the temporal factor. The performances of the people who inhabited these spaces have been observed and categorized as different types of visiting contracts.

This leads to the conclusion that each museum discourse has its types of experiential promises and visit contracts based on its institutional styles and its notions of museum, visitors, and art history. However, they all coincide in the following:

• (a) The proposal of an interdisciplinary promise that includes artworks, sociability, consumption, and enjoyment.

• (b) Sociability takes place beyond the physical territory of the museum and includes sharing the experience in other discursive scenarios, social media, for example.

• (c) The configuration of a particular visitor: the frontalier.

Art, Eat, Shop: Case Study

The museum visit in the twenty-first century is characterized by its particular time-space dynamism underlying the manners in which its intermediary discourses-spaces anticipate everything that can (and cannot) be done inside the building. In the terms proposed by Eliseo Verón (2013), the modalities of enunciation built by each of Centre Pompidou, Malba, Moma, and Tate Modern configure its model visitor (Fig. 6.2):

Fig. 6.2

Model visitor

The Malba’s experiential promise is sustained by the idea of the museum as a space for entertainment, learning, enjoyment, and sociability. Its model visitor is similar to Verón’s fishes and lobsters (1985) with whom the museum establishes two types of experiences: the complete and the concrete.

First, the Malba experience (complete experience) addresses a new visitor fish (Verón, 2013) who passes through, but also poses. The bond established with these visitors is based on the socialization enabled by the independence of the intermediary spaces of the building: the cafeteria, the boutique, the cinema, the park, and the esplanade that possess sufficient autonomy to be inhabited without even approaching the exhibition rooms. In the Malba experience, the contact with artworks is present as part of a multidisciplinary proposal and must involve doing something with the museum. That something must be socialized both in the physical space and in the social media (as indicated by the hashtags on the walls of the museum and in the spaces especially conceived for this purpose). The aim is to offer an attractive cultural experience for a specific social class: the Argentinian⁹ middle class.

On the other hand, the concrete experience leans toward the pedagogical and specialist function of the museum. The contract that is established with the visitor is equivalent to the lobsters who only take what interests them. These visitors, for example, access the free space destined for contemporary art, even if it is uncomfortably located behind the boutique (and not always available). The spatial trajectories enabled by the museum acknowledge its existence, but they are opaque and not obvious to everyone. They undoubtedly have a bond with the museum, since this type of appropriation of its space reveals a certain familiarity with institutional life, but the trajectories of these lobsters show that they avoid the spaces of socialization and everydayness of the museum. The museum experience is based exclusively on the artistic proposal.

In the case of Moma, the intermediary discourses (of its old building) evidence an experiential promise based on the assumption that being an art museum implies teaching about, supervising, and protecting the artworks exhibited. The institution assumes that it must guide the visit, establish user manuals, and impose rules that cannot be modified. For this reason, the tours are designed so that order, the protection of the most valuable artworks of modern art in the world, and good habits prevail. Their model visitors are the ants.

Santos Zunzunegui (2003) questions the inclusion of this institution in the category of the modern museum given that nothing in its building comes close to abandoning hierarchy or rigid itineraries, nor does it bet on the retinal experience, nor does it trust that the visitor is capable of dispensing with mediations. Therefore, visitors pass through, follow the instructions, and learn.

Moma also offers its visitors a variety of services such as restaurants, cafés, bookshops, and shops but the order must prevail and these facilities, unlike the rest of our corpus, are reserved for those users who have paid the entrance fee. To preserve institutional norms, the Moma Design Store has positioned itself as a brand and is located outside the museum. Moma also recognizes itself as a brand and as a must-see place for tourists with cultural aspirations or interests.

The Centre Pompidou sets up an experiential promise based on the museum as a pedagogical and critical agent and as an educator of citizens, which in turn involves representing the culture of the country. The architectural discourse builds the four model visitors proposed by Verón (2013) which we have grouped into two types of contracts. On the one hand, the outsider visitor would include ants and butterflies who are offered a unique experience in an iconic building located in the center of Paris. Here, the term outsider refers to familiarity with the institution and the frequency with which it is visited: exceptional, unusual, almost alien. This experience implies effort: understanding how the building works, where the entrances are, what to find on each floor, and where and how to find information (including understanding the French language)—in short, understanding its bureaucracy.

On the other hand, there are the locals or everyday visitors who are a mixture of fishes and lobsters, to whom the institution speaks in a complicit manner and even insists that they be part of the membership program and attend more frequently. They are invited to take ownership of the building, debate, have a coffee, visit the bookshop and the boutique, join the library, live unique experiences in contact with art and artists, and come back. For them, the visit is offered in a more pleasant, more accessible, practical, familiar, dynamic way and involves less effort: no queues, no tickets. These visitors do not come to the Centre Pompidou; they are part of Beaubourg. They pass through and reaffirm their belonging, while the foreign visitor passes through and learns or completes the checklist (as Moma, it is a must-see place for a particular type of tourist even if both remain less visited than their city’s main museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Musée du Louvre, respectively).

Finally, the visitor of Tate Modern passes through but also enjoys it. Its experiential promise is based on the idea of the museum as an open and interactive space where to learn while enjoying. Conscious of the impressive size of its building, the institution offers keys to visitors to organize their routes, but, once these keys have been given, it frees them and lets them be. It is a museum that trusts in people’s ability to find their way and choose what they want to do. For this reason, Tate Modern establishes its visiting contract with fishes and lobsters, whether those are coming to live the complete or specific experience.

Tate Modern invites the public to spend a large part of the day there, offering everything they need to stay within its boundaries. There are facilities dedicated to eating, resting, reading, shopping, photographing, playing, and learning inside and outside the building. The museum encourages the visitor to come frequently, whether alone, with friends, with a partner, or with the family, as it offers different experiences for everyone. It even highlights (on the walls or flyers) its free access to the collection and the freedom to return whenever possible.

Although each museum’s experience has its particularities, the contemporary visit is a matter of activity and no longer of contemplation. So much so that each category of the Veronian bestiary has to do with a passing and a doing. In the four cases, the visitors (Fig. 6.3):

Fig. 6.3

Model visitor’s action

In this way, the museum proposal implies being in the museum and doing something within and with it. Institutions work toward making the visit more and more recurrent and offer not only exhibitions but also services, products, and the possibility of designing and sharing a customized experience. Hence, the importance acquired by memberships that grant discounts in shops and cafés, exclusive events. Most importantly, they ensure their members access to the exhibitions without waiting or queuing, thus guaranteeing a faster visit and the possibility of spending some time in the margins of the museum where the promise of enjoyment, encounter, conversation, sociability, and doing something is fulfilled.

The Frontier Visitor: Amplitude and Speed

This frontalier visitor emerges from the enunciative recurrences that highlight the habitability and importance of the spaces adjacent to the exhibition room. In this way, the frontalier underlines the experientiality of the museum visit. The category arises both from the proposal of the architectural discourse and from the observation of the visitor performance in the museum space.

According to the spatial trajectories observed, these visitors share the features of the lobsters (Verón, 2013) and apply their strategies to the whole museum, taking only what they are interested in. They resemantize the museum’s functions: it is a boutique, a café, a place to meet with others, a refuge from the heat or cold, a library, a bookshop, and a background for some pictures.

The frontalier establishes a different bond with the institution, emphasizing the sovereignty of the visitor who makes use of the museum facilities in his or her own way, establishing spatial hierarchies based on the time he or she allocates to each space. This signifying body materializes two fundamental concepts for the contemporary modern art museum visit: amplitude and speed.

Amplitude is an attribute of the buildings, their offerings of activities, and their audiences, while speed marks the contrasting paces of the trajectories inside the exhibition rooms and their surrounding spaces. The two concepts allow us to underline the existence of a reiterated experiential promise that requires much more than contemplating artworks.

The amplitude is observed not only in the scale of the buildings but also in the habitable intermediary spaces and in the possibilities for the visitor to appropriate them. It can also be seen in the programming and the size of the collections since it seems necessary for each museum to expand its collection with a certain frequency.

Amplitude is also accentuated, fundamentally, in the destination of the intermediary discourses (Traversa, 2017) capable of configuring experiential promises that appeal to different types of audiences, from children to the elderly. How? Museums redesign the esplanades, entrance halls, and façades to expose a large panorama of things to do.

The contrast in the speed of the routes through the museum spaces highlights the tension between two museum experiences: the traditional one and the one of the twenty-first century. The former could be described as one whose assumption about effects (Traversa, 2017) would include contact with the artworks and the apprehension of knowledge, whereas the latter’s assumption about effects would be living an enjoyable multidisciplinary experience in connection with art.

In this sense, the acceleration within the exhibition rooms (already mentioned by Huyssen in 1994) contrasts with a deceleration of the time visitors spend at the edges of the museum. The entrance halls gain a place as exhibitors of services that host their visitors with care and invite them to enjoy themselves. The latest refurbishment of Malba and the new entrance hall of Moma as well as the Tate Modern’s turbine hall and its large side vitrine exemplify this trend. The same is true of the aisles of the Centre Pompidou. Even their esplanades and parks, where some artworks or activities are located, invite one to spend time there, thus keeping the public longer in the museum territory.

Of course, the visitor’s sovereignty lies in the freedom to spend time within the boundaries of the museum, as no such possibility would seem to be available within the exhibition rooms. While the exhibitions are the space of institutional and curatorial discourse, the boundaries of the museum belong to and are conceived for the visitors. The counterparty to the extension of the boundaries of the museum is the perceived narrowing and streamlining of the spaces dedicated to exposing art. The exhibitions are reached by escalators and the visit is paced. Shops, cafés, parks, and terraces are reached by foot, without haste nor pressure, and are advertised as part of the museum experience.

#TheMuseumExperience

A visit to a museum in the twenty-first century must include a nice café and a gourmet restaurant, a terrace with a magnificent view of the city or the open air, designer boutiques where you can buy exclusive products both for the home and for children, bookshops where you can find publications on current art, but also diaries, notebooks, and all kinds of merchandise, not forgetting that all the exhibitions must have beautiful catalogs. Who hasn’t experienced a slight frustration when faced with a modest gift shop in a museum?

As Claire Bishop (2018) has pointed out, what some museums would seem to understand by contemporaneity is a good institutional image that positions them and links them with “the new, the cool, the photogenic, the well-designed, the economically successful” (p. 19).

The museum public of the twenty-first century is made up of active subjects who need to do things, more and more things. Intermediary discourses (Traversa, 2017) have highlighted a thematic recurrence linked to utilitarian notions and the controversial social function of art: to teach, to raise awareness, and, above all, to entertain … a notion that implies the mobilization of the subject, the enjoyment promoted by consumption at the edges of the exhibition experience (Fig. 6.4).

Fig. 6.4

Museum experience

The end of the tour of the exhibition room is extended metaphorically: the visit does not end without shopping for a souvenir in the boutique, enjoying the café, taking a selfie in front of an artwork, or a panoramic view because our visit to the museum only exists if we follow the museum’s advice by sharing our photos on social media. The spatial design, the photo booths, and the interactive artworks in the entrance halls or on the esplanades seem to indicate that, in the twenty-first century, a museum that does not successfully encourage visitors to take pictures will surely be empty.

Consumption is not limited to its most immediate action, i.e., shopping. The recurring hashtag present in the galleries, but also certain spaces in the hall and the visual materials, highlights the museum’s need to expand its borders to offer its visitors a customizable experience, to allow them to be creators of new images, and to participate in the promotion of the museum experience. In this way, we answer the initial questions: the intermediary spaces of the museum contribute to the consolidation of this new type of visit.

This had already been anticipated by the most visited museum in the world:¹⁰ the Louvre is the paradigmatic example of an institution exploiting its intermediary spaces. Its famous pyramid is only the visible surface of a museum that has extended its borders to the underground platforms, bus stations, and car parks. The transformations undergone in the museum during the late 1980s, which opened to the public in 1993, reorganized the entrance hall as well as an underground area including boutiques and services functions that are completely independent of the visit but constantly remind people that they are under the civilizing mantle of the Louvre Museum.

Even the once controversial—and now iconic—glass structure operates as an experience in itself: a nice picture in front of it seems to have the same value on social media as a photo with its greatest masterpieces. This is what the number of tourists observed taking selfies in front of the Louvre pyramids during the period of closure of the museum in 2020 suggests.

The selfies, not only in front of a painting but also in the most emblematic spaces of the museum, become almost mandatory proof that one has been there. The building becomes the scenography of an experience. The modern art museum has already understood these changes, and the adoption of strategies to exploit and extend the time of the visit at its edges seems to be its new paradigm.

#IWantToGoToMuseum

Acceleration has also affected the speed of the bodies passing in front of the exhibited objects. The disciplining of the bodies in the shows in the interest of the growth visitor statistics works with such subtle pedagogical tools as the walkman tour. For those who refuse to be put into a state of active slumber by the walkman, the museum applies the most brutal tactics of overcrowding which in turn results in the invisibility of what one has come to see: this new invisibility of art as the latest form of the sublime. And further: just as in our metropolitan centers the flaneur, an outsider already in Baudelaire’s time, has been replaced by the marathon runner, the only place where the flaneur still had a hiding-out, namely the museum, is increasingly turned into an analogue to Fifth Avenue at rush hour—at a somewhat slower place, to be sure, but who would want to bet on the unlikelihood of a further speed-up? Perhaps we should expect the museum marathon to be the cultural innovation of the impending fin-de-siècle. (Huyssen, 1994)

When Andreas Huyssen (1994) proposed the term acceleration to describe museum visits, he warned that he was tempted to enter the polemics against the reconciliation between the masses and the muses. Such polemics, he clarified, lead “straight back to a nostalgia for the old museum, as the place of serious contemplation and earnest pedagogy, the leisure of the flaneur and the arrogance of the connaisseur” (p. 24) and do not explain the popularity of the museum and the desire to visit exhibitions and to live cultural events and experiences, which is common to all social classes and cultural groups. After all, as the author has said, the desire exists and should not be rejected no matter how much the culture industry may stimulate, tempt, seduce, manipulate, and exploit.

The interest in analyzing the physical and virtual footprints of visitors in the museum’s intermediary spaces comes precisely from the need to understand this desire as a symptom of cultural change. The existence of the frontalier visitor highlights the place that these cultural institutions occupy in the lives of citizens. Choosing to have a picnic in the park of Tate Modern, meet with friends to listen to music on the esplanade of the Pompidou Centre, or set up a rendezvous at the Malba café instead of heading to another park, square, or café is surely a symptom to pay attention to.

What motivates the appropriation by visitors of the boundaries of the museum? Are visitors expressing their desire to spend more time in the museum territory? Or is the desire to maintain the old image of the museum as the ancient guardian of high culture still present and, in reaction, pushing the masses out of the exhibition halls?

Studying the existence of the frontalier visitor would allow a better understanding of the motivations and needs of museum publics to conceive complex museum experiences capable of responding to their expectations, taking advantage of contemporary communications trends, and achieving academic excellence in exhibition design. This seems to be what museum visitors demand in the twenty-first century.