El conocimiento de los públicos y la gestión de las instituciones culturales. El caso de las instituciones de arte contemporáneo en Francia y en España

Our research operates within the framework of cultural management, adopting both its theorical and practical approach. Today more than ever questions on visitors and institutions’ social responsibilities are crucial (Donnat, 2010; Eidelman, Roustan, 2007; Mairesse, 2010b; Tobelem, 2013). Audience research as a systematic gathering of information about visitors’ experience was born in response to a request for cultural planning improvement and learning experience enhancement. This demand has therefore given a significant boost to the modernisation of visitor-institution relationship, with with a keen eye both on publicly supported cultural democratisation and on specific profit-driven cultural marketing strategies. Still, we cannot help but ask what role do visitors play? How do we evaluate them? How can we use this evaluation? In order to keep consistent with the present debate about visitor studies importance, we’ve developed our research project as a contribution to raise awareness about visitor studies in modern and contemporary art museums. We conducted a comparative study between two very effective examples, such as French and Spanish national contexts. Our research is based on a solid empirical approach, with a mixture of investigation methods focusing on quality and quantity. Our surveys explore the behaviour of professionals from institutions involved and feature interviews to thoroughly investigate specific issues that arose during the survey itself. Our research aims to contribute to the discussion about consequences and limits of visitor studies, not only speaking of museums, but also analysing the influence these studies could have on cultural management social dynamics. We concluded that the use of visitor research is however far from reaching structural cohesion, even in the French case, where a more established legitimation of these instruments should suggest an important difference in approaching the subject. Getting involved in the way information and data about current and potential visitors are used for program and administrative decision-making, we’ve come through a very heterogeneous set of responses by institutions and their members. We’ve observed very different reactions, with lots of pivotal variables and meanings, involving management and functional structures, ideals, social goals and marketing strategies. We’ve come through a sum of uncertain elements driving institutional strategies on the whole as well as they influence individual behaviour.