Digital performativity of the museum audience: an on-site ethnography at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate how museum audiences perform through digital self-portraits within the museum spaces, as a result of the pervasiveness of mobile devices. Visitors build their social identities and at the same time they visually communicate with their networks of relatives, friends, acquaintances or even unknown people, thanks to the widespread use of social media, where they share selfies that they take during their cultural experiences. As scholarly contributions already claim, social media represent a modern stage for self-presentation and impression management (Goffman, 1956), even if it is nowadays impossible to split virtual and concrete performances, because of the collapse of contexts. However, it is right inside those physical museum rooms that they actually take place, as a spectacle created in front of phone cameras. To provide an insight about the behaviour of museum visitors, I relied on ethnographic observation, which I have conducted at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice for the whole month of July 2021. Indeed, current research on museum visitors mainly focuses on the collection of statistical data to outline visitors’ demographic profiles, setting aside the sociological investigation of what concretely happens during a museum visit. I chose the ethnographic methodology as a way to provide a descriptive answer to my research question, because observation allows to physically enter the field of interest, to be immersed in the context, avoiding omissions of the other common self-report methods such as surveys. After reviewing the salient literature on the notions of performativity, identity construction and selfie-taking, I describe the state of the art of current museum ethnography, to eventually present the results of my qualitative research, which have implied recording visitors’ actions, to analyse how they make their inward facing cameras an integral part of their museum experience while building their own identities.