ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts some of the narratives of exclusion, ambivalence and uncertainty that were provoked by the actual and the idealised participation of these entrants into the field of art spectatorship. The different mechanisms and debates concerning access to the early British Museum and Royal Academy respectively, whilst different bodily techniques, such as looking and walking, identified some of the challenges facing the museum novice in the acquisition of appropriate comportment and a requisite display of cultural competence inside the institution. The chapter is therefore intended to complement these perspectives. It deploys a number of contemporary visual representations that reveal the ways in which diverse visitors were idealised, satirised and observed by artists within the museum. The capacity of both empirical and archetypal bodies to apprehend the socio-cultural script of the art museum through accounts of actual and fictive visitors, and through their visual representations.
