Psychology at the Art Museum

Whenever a lot of money is at stake, psychology gets involved sooner or later. That is obviously true for marketing and advertising, but even for professional sports, where there is more and more reliance on professional psychological consulting. It is surprising, though, that psychology appears to play a less important role in the art world. I am not only thinking about the psychology of art auctions, which is clearly a gold mine, but about museums.

Major museums — this may not be obvious — are billion-dollar operations. They are among the institutions not just with the most valuable assets (and the highest insurance costs), but also with the largest cash flow. Many museums charge around or over 20 USD for entrance fee and have several thousands of daily visitors. One would think that they could benefit from experimental research to tailor the museum experience to visitors’ psychological needs.

And there is a lot of research on exactly this. Many studies measure the time spent in front of various paintings, our eye movements when engaging with these paintings, and our emotional reactions, as measured by heartbeat and skin conductance. But these studies are rarely used in paving the way to a more rewarding museum experience — and sometimes they are misused.

A case in point is the newly reopened Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. It has one of the most important collections of European paintings in the world and the museum had been closed for more than 12 years for a major, and much needed, refurbishment. It reopened two weeks ago.

There are some rookie mistakes in the building, from a psychological point of view. One important finding about museum behavior is that when viewing large canvases — for example, by the German painter, Anselm Kiefer — visitors tend to go back and forth: They approach the canvas to try to make out a detail and then step further back to take in the whole composition. In the case of Kiefer’s work, he often sticks small objects in the canvas, and so this effect is even more pronounced. Hence, Kiefer’s paintings are routinely exhibited in very large rooms that allow visitors enough room to walk back and forth. (This was true of the last exhibition at the Antwerp museum before its closing in 2010, which happened to be on Kiefer.). But the only Kiefer on display in the newly reopened museum is displayed four meters above the visitors, so it is physically impossible to get closer.

There are systematic problems as well. In the old days, the collection was displayed the way it is displayed in most museums: roughly chronologically. But we know from some empirical research that this is not ideal. The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp decided to replace its chronological ordering with a thematic one: There is a room on ‘suffering,' one on ‘fame,’ one on ‘the horizon,' and so on. The problem is that this way of organizing the collection makes even less sense from the point of view of the visitor’s experience.

Chronological ordering is not ideal from a psychological point of view, but thematic ordering is even worse. If you are interested in, say, 15th century Flemish art, you have to rush through all the many rooms because what you seek is distributed all over the place. But the real problem is that while there are some people who just don’t like, say, post-17th century art and want to focus on the Old Masters, it is difficult to imagine that there are potential visitors who are only interested in, say, the topic of suffering and only want to see those rooms and not any others.

In museum circles it is a widely used principle that the little descriptions next to the artworks should be written for an audience with a 9-year-old literacy level. I have always been somewhat bewildered by this, as the average age of the people who would actually read these texts is much higher. But organizing some of the most important and most valuable art in the world according to themes like ‘suffering’ or ‘fame’ amounts to treating visitors as if they were even younger. And I’m not sure who benefits from that.