Jensen, E. A. (2016). Creativity and culture for all? Enhancing cultural participation in museums and galleries. In V. Glăveanu (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Creativity and Culture Research (pp. 535-548). Palgrave Macmillan London. DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-46344-9_26
Museums, galleries, and festival visitors have been the subject of a great deal of research interest in recent years. However, to date little headway has been made in terms of developing a rigorous and valid theoretical understanding of museum visitors, their reasons for visiting, and the value such visits hold for them. In particular, the ways in which the creative individual interacts with the curated creativity in a museum or gallery have received insufficient attention from museum studies scholars. Art museums and galleries should be places to celebrate the innate human capacity for creativity and its expression over the decades, centuries, and millennia. However, the failure to construct a sufficiently diverse and inclusive form of creativity in art museums and galleries may help to explain the exclusionary role they have come to play in modern societies. Access to the elite institutions of creative expression in Western cultures has long been the reserve of the privileged. This chapter reviews the current state of research on the role of audience creativity and cultural resources in engagement with formally curated culture. The chapter then presents an empirical case study that sheds light on the ways that cultural audiences (dis)engage when encountering opportunities for creative expression within a museum context.
