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So far, most studies in cultural tourism have looked at visitors in relation to the experience itself. This study aims to bring a broader view on what constitutes the daily environment of younger visitors and how museums could use this knowledge to develop a service delivery that is more adapted to their needs without sacrificing the museums’ integrity and authenticity. As such, this research brings a unique and deeper analysis of young visitor behavior, in relation to arts and cultural practices that could be expanded to other areas of tourism experiences.

The present study examines the main art and cultural tourism activities among adolescents. Using 32 in-depth interviews with adolescents between 13 and 18 years of age, this research takes a closer look at their experience and perceptions of art museums and exhibitions.

The findings show that adolescents’ perception of arts and exhibitions do not correspond to museum art criteria held by cultural tourism professionals. Based on the key theoretical themes emerging from the empirical investigation, a conceptual framework of adolescents’ attitudes toward arts and exhibitions is now presented to provide insights into the dimensions of adolescents’ art consumption in today’s western consumer society. Figure 1 provides a graphic model that visualizes adolescents’ art consumption experiences and summarizes the main findings and marketing implications in the arts field.

Based on these findings, new ways of engaging with adolescents in the field of arts are suggested to create new business opportunities for the museum. The findings lean toward the necessity to develop a more youth-centric approach, which differentiates between how adults define art and what adolescents believe art is supposed to be. Thus, the findings demonstrate that adolescents’ art consumption experiences are deeply anchored within the context of their social environment and the value judgments of their peers. The adolescent-centric logic within the arts experiential context is taken into account to underline the gap existing in many current arts marketing strategies that are targeting young visitors – and especially adolescents.

This paper aims to identify the key quality attributes a museum or art gallery should possess and enhance to become an attractive business event venue.

The research adopted a two-stage case-study methodology. Firstly, three museums were selected in Manchester, UK, to explore the venues’ approaches to hosting business events. These were the Lowry Art Centre, Salford Museum and Manchester Art Gallery. Secondly, a business event at another museum in the city, Science and Industry Museum, was accessed to explore the audiences’ perceptions and industry requirements regarding the organisation of events in museums. In total, 21 qualitative semi-structured and structured interviews were conducted with the event delegates, event planners and museums’ management.

Thematic analysis was applied to identify three key attributes: venue character, memorability and functionality and feasibility. Venue character refers to the overall appeal of a venue, including its history, status and interior design. Memorability refers to the authenticity and uniqueness of the attendee experience at a corporate event organised in a museum. Finally, functionality and feasibility deals with the availability of functional facilities, space flexibility and diverse venue regulations.

The findings of the research provide valuable insights to both museums and event companies. The research reveals the main benefits and drawbacks of using a museum or an art gallery as a venue for business events and suggests key aspects to consider while staging a business event in a cultural institution. Museums could apply the findings in marketing to emphasise their uniqueness, authenticity and flexibility.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the adoption of major exhibitions, often called blockbusters, as a sub-branding strategy for art museums. Focusing the experience around one location but drawing on a wide data set for comparative purposes, the authors examine the blockbuster phenomenon as exhibition packages sourced from international institutions, based on an artist or collection of quality and significance. The authors answer the questions: what drives an art museum to adopt an exhibition sub-brand strategy that sees exhibitions become blockbusters? What are the characteristics of the blockbuster sub-brand?

Using extant literature, interviews and content analysis in a comparative case study format, this paper has three aims: first, to embed exhibitions within the marketing and branding literature; second, to identify the drivers of a blockbuster strategy; and third, to explore the key characteristics of blockbuster exhibitions.

The authors present a theoretical model of major exhibitions as a sub-brand. The drivers identified include the entrepreneurial characteristics of pro-activeness, innovation and risk-taking, while the four key characteristics of the blockbuster are celebrity; spectacle; inclusivity; and authenticity.

These exhibitions are used to augment a host art museum’s own collection for its stakeholders and differentiate it in the wider cultural marketplace. While art museum curators seek to develop quality exhibitions, sometimes they become blockbusters. While blockbusters are a household word, the terms is contested and the authors know little about them from a marketing perspective.

Art museums are non-profit, social organisations that serve the community. Art museums therefore meet the needs of multiple stakeholders in a political environment with competing interests. The study draws on the experiences of a major regional art museum, examining the characteristics of exhibition sub-brands and the paradox of the sub-brand being used to differentiate the art museum. This paper fills a gap in both the arts marketing and broader marketing literature.

The use of the identified characteristics develops theory where the literature has been silent on the blockbuster sub-brand from a marketing perspective. It provides an exemplar for institutional learning on how to initiate and manage quality by popular exhibition strategies.

In recent years, OpenGLAM and the broader open license movement have been gaining momentum in the cultural heritage sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine OpenGLAM from the perspective of end users, identifying barriers for commercial and non-commercial reuse of openly licensed art images.

Following a review of the literature, the authors scope out how end users can discover institutions participating in OpenGLAM, and use case studies to examine the process they must follow to find, obtain and reuse openly licensed images from three art museums.

Academic literature has so far focussed on examining the risks and benefits of participation from an institutional perspective, with little done to assess OpenGLAM from the end users’ standpoint. The authors reveal that end users have to overcome a series of barriers to find, obtain and reuse open images. The three main barriers relate to image quality, image tracking and the difficulty of distinguishing open images from those that are bound by copyright.

This study focusses solely on the examination of art museums and galleries. Libraries, archives and also other types of OpenGLAM museums (e.g. archaeological) stretch beyond the scope of this paper.

The authors identify practical barriers of commercial and non-commercial reuse of open images, outlining areas of improvement for participant institutions.

The authors contribute to the understudied field of research examining OpenGLAM from the end users’ perspective, outlining recommendations for end users, as well as for museums and galleries.

The chapter focuses on two interrelated research questions: why are museums so popular? and what can commercial enterprises learn from them? The chapter explains the popularity of museums by elaborating on the special characteristics of the cultural and economic roles of these institutions in society based on evidence in academic research and in policy documents. The chapter then provides data from a survey of 6,419 visitors and 5,065 non-visitors of the 18 most well-known (art) museums spread among 10 countries around the world. It provides evidence regarding what factors differentiate the reputations of the most reputed museums from those that are less appreciated based on museum-related factors, along with factors related to the country and city where the museum resides. The chapter concludes by examining reputation management lessons, the business can draw from the way museums operate and how they are perceived.

Today's museums seek to be more representative of the social diversity of the communities they serve. Their intention is reflected not only in the exhibitions and public programs they offer, but also in the development of their collections and their uses. The colonial origins of the collections and the gaps in the major art historical narratives that have provided their primary interpretations are more widely recognized. Several recent initiatives are revisiting, for inclusion purposes, the principles of exemplarity, uniqueness, internal organization, and material integrity on which acquisition and its valorization were until recently based. This chapter considers current initiatives undertaken over the past 10 years by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, in the development and use of their collections. It is done by taking as support three strategies established by Maura Reilly (2018) to foster inclusion in exhibitions. These three strategies – areas of study, revisionism, polylogue – are loosely adapted for collections. The four museums were selected for (1) the interest of their initiatives, (2) the complementarity of these institutions, in terms of collecting scope (contemporary, national, or “encyclopedic”), institutional status (major museums, two provincial, one federal, one nonprofit) and location (in major cities, metropolis, or capital city), and their partnership in the “New Uses of Collections in Art Museums” Partnership (SSHRC 2021–2028) of the CIÉCO Research and Inquiry Group. This portrait, through the collections of four institutions, is paradigmatic of a fundamental transformation in Canadian art museums.

This paper aims to summarize the conditions under which participatory art museums and local commercial traditions can have positive and sustained interactions.

The methods include studying the quantity and content of exhibitions in the four cities of the Bay Area, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Shunde, to compare their academic positioning and influence on local commercial production. Through interviewing curators, artists and university scholars who are active in the Bay Area and are invited by the museums on a regular basis, it will let us understand the attitudes from the government, public and capital towards the regional art museums and how these attitudes influence the choice of theme in the participatory art museum practice.

To summarize the findings, the author concludes that a participatory art gallery with commercial production in the Bay Area requires the following: a long tradition of local business and wealth accumulation; a local area is of a size where the community of acquaintances can interact on a regular basis; continued interest of a diverse local elite, including a mix of businessmen and gentry, government officials and various sectors of the public; and museums serving as intermediaries to coordinate the effective integration of the commercial and traditional resources.

Participatory approaches and their impacts are a shared area of interest across urban planning, heritage studies and the creative arts. Crucially, solely relying on either the Latin bottom-up community-oriented approach (Barnes, 2003) or the British top-down policy-oriented approach (Heijnen, 2010) did not maximize benefits, though these distinctive two approaches were convinced that museums should play a larger role in becoming agents of contemporary social change. By contrast, in focusing on Chinese Art Museums, this study will explore participatory practice in the Asian context. In doing so, it will not only diversify the emerging literature on the social and economic impacts of arts and heritage organizations but also challenge the Western lens through which participatory approaches are viewed in the interdisciplinary literature. As Lefebvre acknowledged his lack of non-Western regions in his research, this study will offer new perspectives on museology and its contributions to the Production of Space.

This study aimed at understanding the use of paintings outside of an art-related context, in the English version of Wikipedia.

For this investigation, the authors identified 8,104 paintings used in 10,008 articles of the English Wikipedia edition. The authors manually coded the topic of the article in question, documented the number of monthly average views and identified the originating museum. They analysed the use of images based on frequency of use, frequency of view, associated topics and location. Early in the analysis three distinct perspectives emerged: the readers of the online encyclopaedia, the editors of the articles and the museum organisations providing the painting images (directly or indirectly).

Wikipedia is a widely used online information resource where images of paintings serve as visual reference to illustrate articles, notably also beyond an art-related topic and where no alternative image is available – as in the case of historic portraits. Editors used paintings as illustration of the work itself or art-related movement, but also as illustration of past events, as alternative to photographs, as well as to represent a concept or technique. Images have been used to illustrate up to 76 articles, evidencing the polysemic nature of paintings. The authors conclude that images of paintings are highly valuable information sources, also beyond an art-related context. They also find that Wikipedia is an important dissemination channel for museum collections. While art-related articles contain greater number of paintings, these receive less views than non-art-related articles containing fewer paintings. Readers of all topics, predominantly history, science and geographic articles, viewed art pieces outside of an art context. Painting images in Wikipedia receive a much larger online audience than the physical painting does when compared to the number of museum onsite visitors. The authors’ results confirm the presence of a strong long-tail pattern in the frequency of image use (only 3% of painting images are used in a Wikipedia article), image view and museums represented, characteristic of network dynamics of the Internet.

While this is the first analysis of the complete collection of paintings in the English Wikipedia, the authors’ results are conservative as many paintings are not identified as such in Wikidata, used for automatic harvesting. Tools to analyse image view specifically are not yet available and user privacy is highly protected, limiting the disaggregation of user data. This study serves to document a lack of diversity in image availability for global online consumption, favouring well-known Western objects. At the same time, the study evidences the need to diversify the use of images to reflect a more global perspective, particularly where paintings are used to represent concepts of techniques.

Museums wanting to increase visibility can target the reuse of their collections in non-art-related articles, which received 88% of all views in the authors’ sample. Given the few museums collaborating with the Wikimedia Foundation and the apparent inefficiency resulting from leaving the use of paintings as illustration to the crowd, as only 3% of painting images are used, suggests further collaborative efforts to reposition museum content may be beneficial.

This paper highlights the reach of Wikipedia as information source, where museum content can be positioned to reach a greater user group beyond the usual museum visitor, in turn increasing visual and digital literacy.

This is the first study that documents the frequency of use and views, the topical use and the originating institution of “all the paintings” in the English Wikipedia edition.

A new form of “museum” has emerged which takes advantage of the Internet′s seemingly limitless format options for electronic presentation and ability to tailor in‐depth presentations to niche audiences. Constraints of ownership and geographic location are lessened as Internet‐based museums point to sources across the globe. Collections which are physically impossible to construct are being mounted electronically. Offers a sampler of museums and galleries around the world which are making use of WorldWide Web or Gopher servers.