The Willing Visitor & the I’d Rather Nots

This post was written by IMA Public Affairs intern Margaret Sutherlin. She is a senior at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN, and plans to graduate as a double major in English Writing and Political Science. Post graduation she hopes to find a job before attending graduate school.

Working at the IMA for the past few weeks has only seemed to heighten this nagging observation I noticed years ago. There are two types of people when it comes to any, but especially, an art museum visit: those willing visitors and those who would simply rather not. Each side is a simple preference, like cats over dogs, or vanilla over chocolate, Cubs or Cardinals. The preference exists in our families and friends, each side representing itself at one time or another. But this ‘preference’ to go or not go visit an art museum, seems to be a bit of an annoying, elusive thing to solve or make sense of. I have rarely heard of a middle ground on the subject, nor experienced it, and it always seems to be people either do or do not want to go to an art museum. In a recent 4th of July adventure to St. Louis I experienced the two-sided argument once again.

Fireworks in St. Louis. Photo: Childgrove Country Dancers Web site

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Art Museum Interactivity

To our delight, The Davis LAB opened on the first gallery level of the IMA Saturday. (To learn more about the LAB, read Daniel’s most recent post.) From my opening-day-experience, I found that a wide range of museum visitors were drawn into the space, tempted by the shiny touchscreens or the cool pseudoscience, atomic age design and lighting. My favorite comments from the day included a little boy who was squeezed into a chair with his older sister watching live ArtBabble projected in HD on the wall.

“This is really cool,” he said timidly, referring to the space. Daniel showed him the new animated trailer for ArtBabble, to which he replied, “That was not cool…I mean that was not long enough.”  Read the rest of this entry »

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