ABSTRACT
Gallery talks are an important technique museums use to engage their audiences. Despite their importance as a museum practice, little (arts) marketing research explores how guides deliver gallery talks and provide audiences with ways of looking at and seeing works of art. This chapter examines gallery talks as a particular “form of talk” (Goffman) given to live audiences in the National Gallery London and posted on the social media site YouTube. Drawing on an analytic and methodological approach derived from ethnomethodology and conversational analysis, the analysis investigates how museum guides orient to the exhibits and the audience around them, how they display what exhibit features they are discussing and how they want the audience to see them, and how guides account for and explain the selection of exhibits and exhibit features for inclusion in their talk. The chapter explicates the relevance of a detailed examination of gallery talks for marketing research and practice as well as outlining future research trajectories.
