Looking For Non-publics

2. Personality

Chapter 2 PERsonALIty a factOr influencing art museum attendance hana gottesdiener1 université paris ouest nanterre La Défense Jean-Christophe Vilatte1 université nancy ii In research studies on museum attendance, the most common approach is sociological, but introducing a psychological perspective should enable us to understand what leads to establishing or not establishing a visiting practice. Particular attention will be given to those personality traits that might impede a decision to visit. Examining barriers to museum visits involves specifying which categories of people the investigation will select. One idea might be to work only with the non-public, but for whom should this designation be reserved? Those who have never been to a museum in their entire lives? Or those who have made no visit over the past year? In Les pratiques culturelles des Français. Enquête 1997 (Donnat, 1998), findings showed that 23% of French citizens aged 15 or over had never been to a museum, whereas 67% had not visited a museum within the last 12 months. 1. centre norbert elias (uMr 8562); Équipe culture et communication; université d’avignon et des pays de Vaucluse. 28 | Looking for non-pubLics In a study on museum practices in France carried out in 2005,2 the CRÉDOC (Centre de recherche pour l’étude et l’observation des conditions de vie) surveyed people who declared they had not visited a museum within the previous 12 months (67% of the sample) on the reasons why they had not gone in that period of time. Forty-three percent of them (or 29% of the population) answered that it did not interest them (Goldstein & Bigot, 2007). Are they the ones that should be studied or should we not select, following the classification of statements about museums proposed by this same study, all those whom it is more or less difficult to convince to come to, or to return to the museum? In addition, account must be taken of those who are “reluctant” or “critical” (33%), not to mention “impervious” (13%). In addition, we know that visitors’ “careers” are sometimes continuous , other times discontinuous, and that one may be a visitor differently at different times in one’s life (Eidelman & Roustan, 2007). Each person can, therefore, at different times in his or her life be a more or less receptive public (Azam, 2004). Any categorization of the publics of cultural facilities seems both porous and arbitrary, as Donnat and Octobre remark (2002). To the extent that the distinction between public and non-public underlines the existence of a cultural barrier or phenomena of cultural exclusion, we prefer, like de Mengin (2002), to investigate the distinction between visitors and non-visitors. In our work on the barriers to art museum visits, we chose to categorize the respondents based on their stated attendance over the previous 12 months. To understand what differentiates varying types of practitioners, or what characterizes a lack of practice, we first examined socio-demographic variables. In a study on art museum publics in Europe published in 1969, Bourdieu and Darbel found an over-representation of visitors with secondary or higher education and belonging to the highest socioprofessional categories. Since then, all investigations, whether French or foreign, whether undertaken at the homes of those surveyed or at the exit to a museum, have confirmed the weight of cultural and economic capital (Donnat, 1998; Mironer, 2001). And yet, behaviour within socio-cultural categories is not homogeneous. This variability is what interested us. How are museums perceived by the public and by the non-public? A great number of research papers can be found informing us about the perception of this or that museum by its public. A number of studies examine the actual and potential public of a particular museum. Finally, and much more rare, are the national studies which cover the population as a whole. 2. a study on a sample of 2,000 people, representative of the french population, aged 18 or over. personaLitY | 29 In two already dated national studies, one Canadian (Dixon, Courtney, & Bailey, 1974), the other American (National Research Center of the Arts, 1981), what is striking is everyone recognized museums as important institutions for the country. In confirmation of this importance granted to museums, the vast majority of the population were in favour of allocating public funds to museums, which was not the case for other cultural institutions. Recognizing a museum as important to the community...