MARKET RESEARCH IN ART GALLERIES.

MARKET RESEARCH IN ART GALLERIES. The Wall Street Journal (August 18) has an article by Isaac Arnsdorf about observers in museums doing the kind of research that supermarkets do. The article focuses on the efforts of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which has six observers who collect data on how visitors use the galleries (rooms) in the museum. It’s been known from studies in the twenties that visitors like to turn right when they enter, just as people do in a supermarket. The Detroit observers record the amount of time a visitor spends looking at each item in a gallery. The article gives an example of a male visitor who is recorded as spending 1 minute and 5 seconds in the Rubens gallery. For me, they would record that I try to pick out one item in each room and spend time looking at just that item. (Our family record would be the two hours we spent looking at Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.) The Detroit studies have led to extensive redesigns of galleries and exhibitions.