The experience economy

This article reminds me very strongly of instagram museums (like the museum of ice cream) which seem pretty shallow and also kind of boring. With these kinds of “experience” museums, people get a nicely themed place with a good aesthetic for taking generic instagram pictures. I can understand why they’re cool to visit if you want to take cute pictures, but I’ve never been particularly active on social media, so I’ve only ever been able to see the experience museum as really dry. There’s something extremely superficial about the whole idea, which only feels amplified after reading the passage - when you’ve distilled the experience museum down to such a clinical science it feels more consumerist than cute.

What makes a satisfying museum experience

This paper kind of surprised me - in particular in how extreme the gender breakdown was for visitors (both first time and especially returning). I visited the SF MoMA recently with my friend, and remembered seeing a lot of couples, but not really picking up on such a large gender disparity.

I wonder how much the results of this paper have changed in the 9 years since it was published. Taking into account the modern “experience” museums, I might naively (as a non social media user) have guessed that the prime demographic visiting museums would become skewed much younger.