ABSTRACT
The targeting of groups considered to be representative of the composition of society as a whole, yet under-represented in the museum’s core audience is essentially a problem with the ways in which social categorization is used and interpreted by the museum. For museums, the problem arises in the conflation of statistical methods of socioeconomic and ethnic classification, with the historical notion of the public and civic realm. A further problem arises in the conflation of statistical categories with individual identities. Measuring the composition of core audiences repeatedly shows that art museums are overwhelmingly populated by people classified as white and of the higher percentiles of education and income. As a result of this stubborn fact, cultural policy in Britain, as elsewhere, has focused upon encouraging museums to find ways of achieving a greater diversity of their audiences in order to bring them more into line with regional and national demographics and in doing so produce a more inclusive culture. The means of achieving greater diversity of audience has been to target black and minority ethnic (BME) groups in the belief that if the museum can break down the initial barriers to access over the long term, then their audiences will change. However, the experience, as Tate Britain has demonstrated, is that such targeting measures over a long period of time have done little to change their core audience demographic. The Tate Encounters research project set out to understand in more depth the barriers for BME access and on the basis of its fieldwork, in talking to museum professionals and student participants, came to the preliminary conclusion that the attempt to realize the aims of cultural policy by targeting policies not only instrumentalized groups of people, but also essentialized them on the basis of racialized and ethnicized categories. More importantly the research found that such targeting on the basis of BME categorization was resisted and ultimately rejected by student participants as a basis for defining identities.
