thesis
Museums, discourse, and visitors : the case of London's Tate Modern
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Abstract
This thesis examines the conceptualization of the visitor within the discursive construction of the
contemporary public art museum. It takes the rhetorical formulation of the interaction between the
theorized visitor figure and the discursively rendered museum to constitute the ‘visit’. This work
argues that the position of the visitor within museum discourse has radically shifted in the past
generation; the primary claim being that the visit is reconceived as a personally customizable
experience less oriented toward the transfer of information from the curator (regarded as expert
and educator) to the visitor figure (regarded as ignorant pupil), and more oriented toward meeting
the particular needs and preferences of the visitor. This conception currently appears in museum
discourse and in the minds of influential actors who shape this discourse. To analyze this claim,
this thesis draws on the institutionalization of the visit via a case study of the Tate Modern
museum, which provides the primary empirical evidence demonstrating the above claim. The
resulting study relates the questions, structure, and findings of a systematic investigation into the
historical, social, and museological conditions necessary to an institutionally manifested
personalized, visitor-centered visit. The conceptual development of the visitor figure is traced
through implicit accounts of the visit within academic studies of the museum, institutional
records, marketing reports, advertisements, and the public discourse convened around Tate
Modern’s opening thematic displays that served as an extension of Tate’s marketing and audience
development programs. This visitor figure is now coextensive with and conditioned by a
neoliberal participatory agenda that trades on the notion of personal agency and enlightened
cultural consumption, which is, in turn, undergirded and conditioned by the intertwined forces of
consumerism, marketing, and branding