In 1917, the French artist Marcel Duchamp submitted a store-bought porcelain urinal turned on its back and signed R. Mutt to the hanging committee of the Society for Independent Artists in New York. The object, titled Fountain, was never displayed, although the society had pledged itself to show any work by an artist who paid the entry fee. An anonymous article in The Blind Man, a journal published by Duchamp and his friends, argued that whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful
This paper discusses the "Gallery Enhancement" project completed between 1988-1989 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A summary of the project includes: the general modifications to the installation, the "collaborative" nature of the exhibit development process (between education, curatorial and others), the strategies employed for modifying the installation, the methods and results of the audience research initiatives, and the ramifications of this experimentation on future operations at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
This paper introduces a nonparametric statistical method for the analysis of time data in visitor research and evaluation studies. Measures of duration are often used to analyze visitor behavior and determine exhibit effectiveness in museum settings. Examples of duration measures include the length of a museum visit, the interval between a first visit and a repeat visit, or the period of time a visitor devotes to an activity, such as the span of attention to an exhibit, or the time spent reading a label.