Museums and art centres are taking on an increasingly active role in listening to their visitors’ opinions. Learning how to analyse their users’ comments allows them to gain a better knowledge of their public and to measure the impact of the contents the museum offers.
This post is only a poetic reflection, a counterpoint to the cold analysis of the data and the indicators that were collected in the Fundació‘s spaces throughout the summer of 2018.
Anonymity
Dear traveller, dear visitor to the Fundació,
Today we are breaking your anonymity and using this blog to share some of the personal and confiding gestures that you have expressed during your visit to the Fundació. Miró said that only through collective art could we achieve the universal. Each one of your words, each one of the emotions you have transcribed, is a collective desire that has no age, no gender, and no borders. Your voices are most varied. There are those who describe their experience in the museum as a journey through the soul and those who request leaflets in Portuguese; those who are moved when they recognize one of Miró’s characters and those who complain because there are no publications in Italian. Those who don’t understand a thing and those who find everything inspiring; those who approach the work with respect and those who view it with scorn and whose lack of understanding distances them from it. All of them! All the comments are little voices in an anonymous, collective call that gives meaning and transcendence to Miró’s work. Miró didn’t paint for himself. He didn’t paint to please himself or anyone else. Miró painted so that you, dear traveller, knowledgeable or incredulous visitor; you, enthusiastic and expert viewer, or you, who are sceptical but curious by nature, can ask yourself: why this?
Because every time that you, dear visitor, knowledgeable or disbelieving, stop to look at one of the works trying to decipher its hidden meaning, every time you feel moved by a brushstroke or a burst of colour — every single time you discover a bit more of the secret soul of this painter poet artisan philosopher: of this global artist. And that is why you, you, and you too — all so different, yet so similar — are capable of contemplating, understanding and feeling the power of his message and convey it to other visitors; and the individual gesture of the painter locked up in his studio, almost like a mystical act, becomes a universal symbol. It is in your perception, in your understanding and in your emotion that the artist’s greatness lies. That is why today we are asking you to let us break the anonymity. Because by sharing your feelings and your expressions you will be a bit complicit in the great mystery we call art.
Translated by Deborah Bonner