In comparison to studies of museum visitors, studies of NON-visitors are much rarer. But, just as we do not consider museum visitors as an amorphous population, it would be wrong to lump all non-visitors into a single group. The reasons people choose not to visit are just as varied and interesting as the reasons behind why people do visit.
The seminal paper in non-visitor studies is “Staying away: why people choose not to visit museums” published in Museum News in 1983 by Marilyn Hood. In a Google search for a link to this paper, I didn’t find it (I’m not sure if it’s available online) but I did find this very helpful summary of non-visitor research (limited as the field is in relation to visitor research).
Hood’s work found that visitors and non-visitors varied in what kinds of experiences they valued in their leisure time, and the extent to which museums offered (or were perceived to offer) these experiences.
I have recently read a paper that offers an interesting complement to Falk’s ‘Identity’ model of Museum Visitors (as described here) by incorporating categories of non visitors: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert’s “Museum Perceptual Filters” or MPFs*. Stylianou-Lambert describes the MPFs as ‘spectacles of perception’ that frame the way people think about (art) museums. There are 8 MPFs, five of them relating to visitors and three to non-visitors. The MPF model emerged independently of Falk’s work, although the author acknowledges the parallels. I’ve related the five visitor MPFs to the nearest Identity in Falk’s model (any error in their allocation is mine):
- Professional – artists or museum professionals who visit the art museum to inform or inspire their work (Falk’s Professional / Hobbyists)
- Art-Loving – these visitors valued the aesthetic emotional connection to art rather than increasing their knowledge about it. These are the sort of visitors who stop only at a piece of art that ‘speaks’ to them in some way. (Falk’s Rechargers)
- Self-exploration – people who come to expand their horizons and learn new things; following a personal and introspective quest (Falk’s Explorers)
- Cultural Tourism – people who visit art museums mostly on holiday, as part of taking in the cultural offerings of a destination (Falk’s Experience Seekers)
- Social visitation – visitors who come to the art museum primarily in a social context, particularly in the company of art-loving relatives (Falk’s Facilitators)
Stylianou-Lambert extends the Falk model by characterising three main MPFs of non-visitors:
- Romantic – people who have a positive view of museums, but for some reason decide that the museum is not for them. This MPF includes people who might feel intimidated by the museum or their lack of knowledge about art.
- Rejection – people who view the museum in a negative light, as places that are pretentious or snobbish and full of incomprehensible things. By contrast to the Romantics, who placed themselves as being somehow inferior to the museum, Rejecters appeared more self-confident in their dismissive attitude to museum’s importance.
- Indifference – people who felt that art museums had no personal connection or relevance to their lives. This category is probably the one most closely mirrored in Hood’s work about the disconnect between the leisure expectations of visitors versus non-visitors.
*Reference: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (2009): Perceiving the art museum, Museum Management and Curatorship, 24:2, 139-158 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09647770902731783