ABSTRACT
Exhibition spaces provide the stage for the theater of the museum visit. While people’s actions on this stage are not scripted they are fashioned in ways that render them intelligible as “fitting” with the museum situation. People are at the same time actors in the gallery and an audience to the drama of life that unfolds around them in the same space. The museum visit therefore can be seen as a special kind of “social drama” (Chaney 1993) that entails an “interaction order” (Goffman 1983) “recognizable” as “museum visit.” At the center of the “museum drama” is the ritual through which people constitute the sacredness of works of art; that is the actions through which people enable each other an undisturbed appreciation of the objects on display. The ritual of museum visiting includes the slow progression from exhibit to exhibit that may be conceived of as “interaction ritual chain” (Collins 2004) that generates the rhythm and atmosphere in which people have aesthetic experiences in museums. In the past, studies have focused on the “museum experience” (Falk and Dierking 1992) and people’s cognitive response to exhibits while the interaction order that forms the basis for the emergence of aesthetic experiences has been neglected.
