ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the question of how audiences engage with, or relate to, exhibitions; and how this can be researched. The research on visitors to Food for Thought was rather different from ethnographic research on the exhibition’s making. Visitors’ own experience of the exhibition was relatively fleeting: typically, they would come just once, for half an hour or so. While most of our visitors did not specifically give education as a motive for visiting the museum, there were some who did. A maths teacher, for example, told us: ‘It’s educational. Visitors undoubtedly bring much ‘outside’ information – drawn from their own lives and experiences – to bear as they visit the exhibition or talk about it. Food was regarded by its makers as challenging ‘authoritarian’ exhibitionary modes in its attempt to remove barriers between visitors and exhibits. The reading in of a categorical statement from the Museum was evident in other prevalent narrative, that of ‘good and bad foods’.
