The Role of Context in Art Viewing Behavior: An Eye Tracking Experiment In The Belvedere Museum

Absztrakt (kivonat)

The ‘natural habitat’ of the artworks is the museum or the gallery. The way art is displayed in the exhibition space is a crucial part of how it is perceived. This study aims to find 1) a relationship between visitors’ eye-movement data and self-reported measures of comfort; 2) the narratives that dominate visitors subjective report of their time in the museum. To these questions the data from the Belvedere Before and After experiment is used; it is a large research project around the rearrangement of the permanent collection of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere, recorded with wearable eye-trackers. The results of the quantitative analyses are mixed. Only text readability was found to have an effect based on the eye-tracking measurements, but self-reported data did not confirm this assumption. The self-reported comfort with the museum space did not predict individual viewing time. In the qualitative analyses I identified five dominating topics in the narratives: the effects of 1) fame (the ‘van Gogh effect’); 2) overmarketing; 3) interpretive labels; 4) museum space features; 5) selfrelated memories. Finally, further research options are discussed.