Ivory Tower or Discotheque? The Commercialization of Superstar Museums

What is central in the current public debate is the trade-off between the necessity of making a charge for entry a must for the institution to survive and giving museum free access1 to the public in order to match the idealistic objective of being a culture incubator; restrictions on public funds make museums wonder how to create new customer retention initiatives, concentrating on visitor composition and introducing new and innovative strategies to implement the “visitors’ pool”. Consequently the word “strategic”, in this new way of managing museums, means highilighting or creating what can be called a U.N.I.Q.U.E.13 (Schouten, 1995) experience or uniqueness: the contribution that a single museum can make to its overall cultural sector or market segment, whereby it differentiates and distinguishes itself from other museums (Davis & McIntosh, 2005), which can be defined as similar in terms of their macro-focus (i.e. contemporary museums, natural historymuseums etc.).
The necessity of making this uniqueness the leading characteristic of museum strategy is not only due to the importance of differentiating the single istitution from other similar institutions with the very same objective (i.e. spreading culture among the pupulation), but also differentiating the museum, as a category, from other institutions which are part of the bigger “cultural and entertaining environment”.