Journal | magazén
Monographic journal issue | 1 | 2 | 2020
Research Article | Digital Heritage Consumption: The Case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Digital Heritage Consumption: The Case of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Abstract
Cultural consumption is increasingly moving into a digital realm where art and non-art spaces blur in an all-inclusive image-rich environment online. While cultural consumption studies remain limited to a defined cultural environment (e.g. the museum website), we will analyse the patterns of consumption of 119 paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in an all-inclusive online environment, Wikipedia. We will find paintings in art as well as non-art related articles and compare visibility to the institutional physical and online exhibition, a purely art environment. We will find a greater share of digital cultural consumption takes place in non-art related articles, inferring accidental consumption, while fact-checking and the presence of articles about obscure paintings satisfy a utilitarian information use. We will argue that digital cultural consumption can expand the user base when positioned outside of the expected art context, enabling new forms of hedonic and utilitarian consumption. Our results suggest that the adoption of the online encyclopaedia by superstar museums reflects a new conceptualisation of authentic taste that includes digital consumption, highlighting the collection’s information value.
Submitted: Oct. 9, 2020 | Accepted: Nov. 12, 2020 | Published Dec. 22, 2020 | Language: en
Keywords Cultural consumption • Wikipedia • Digital paintings • Museums
Subtags Image data Institutions Technology Works of Art Communication Afterlife Participation Visualisation Collection Communities Monuments
Copyright © 2020 Trilce Navarrete, Elena Villaespesa. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/mag/2724-3923/2020/02/004
