Suggestions for the Zuckerman Museum of Art Website and Audio Tour

Website

    The website needs some work. The weird map with teeny images, weirdly angled photographs, and a student garden map that should probably be left out of the website entirely makes the website feel incomplete and not enjoyable to navigate. However, my immediate suggestion for the website is to fix the introductory paragraph at the very top of the website. After reading this statement I still have a lot of questions about what exactly I am looking at:

• What would I get out of taking the tour?

• Who created the tour?

• How long is the tour?

• Is there anyone famous you can name-drop to get viewers' attention?

    In the chapter titled “Defining a Museum” from Museums 101 it says, “At their core, museums are public institutions that require the participation of an audience for an educational dialogue to occur” (Walhimer 5). This validates why a persuasive and informative opening statement is so important. If you are not able to summon passionate and inquisitive visitors, the purpose of any museum, to spark educational dialogue, can not occur.

Audio Tour

    Knowing how your audience behaves appears to be vital in every industry. It is why it seems like every movie or tv show from the 80s and 90s has a reboot or remake – because people keep watching them and money talks. For the ZMA audio tour to be successful, it must cater to its audience like Disney but less cringey. In “How the Creative Use of Audio Guides is Attracting a New Museum Audience” it mentions that the British Museum researched their visitors' habits and found that “people want the freedom to explore a museum in their own way and in their own time” (Carlsson). I think the ZMA audio tour should run with this statement and also do some research of their own when it comes to their visitors. Learning about their audiences such as college students and what they like (hint: free food is one of them) can make the audio tour a beacon of rich educational dialogue.

    My last suggestion concerns the dialogue of the audio tour. The dialogue of the audio segments should encourage ekphrasis and not shove someone else's ekphrasis down their throat. The audio should have prompts that encourage viewers to reflect on the art. For example, one prompt could have viewers focus on a specific detail that caught their eye and the audio could imitate something similar from “Transactions with Beauty: A week of ekphrasis prompts” which says, "What is it about the detail that caught your eye? Upon longer and closer looking, what do you see? What does the detail tell you about the work, about life, existence?” (Lemay). I think that teaching ekphrasis in a non-traditional teaching style would be an insightful instructional move that could be incorporated into the audio tour.

Works Cited 

Carlsson, Rebecca. “How the Creative Use of Audio Tours Is Attracting a New Museum Audience.” 

Museum Next, Museum Next, 14 Mar. 2022, https://www.museumnext.com/article/how-the-creative-use-of-audio-tours-is-attracting-a-new-museum-audience/. 

Lemay, Shawna. “A Week of Prompts – Ekphrasis.” Transactions with Beauty, Transactions with 

Beauty,18AD, http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/weekofprompts.

Walhimer, Mark. Museums 101. Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.