Art Museum Audience: The Arguments of Consumer Choice

Diversification of artistic supply and growing competition in the market of cultural services lead to the fact that the quality of artistic product (performance, concert, exhibition) is perceived as increasingly relative and loses its former importance as a decisive argument of consumer choice. What guides people in their communication with art? What are the determinants of their consumer behavior and are there any patterns in it? The chance of overcoming communication barriers and establishing a constructive dialogue between cultural institutions and their potential audience depends on whether the answers to these and other questions will be found. The article deals with the cultural aspect of this interaction — the role of motivation and individual preferences in art consumption, their influence on people’s cultural activity. The article is based on the results of a large-scale sociological study of visitors to the State Tretyakov Gallery, conducted by a research group from the State Institute of Art Studies. The museum’s audience was studied not only by the objective parameters traditionally described by art sociologists, but also by a number of difficult-to-measure content features that go far beyond socio-demographic descriptions. The study allows us to get closer to understanding some general patterns of consumer behavior in art, to determine the nature of consumer motivations and individual preferences’ influence on cultural choice. The article proves the existence of a statistically significant connection between these subjective behavioral determinants and the measure of personal cultural capital. The use of methods of mathematical statistics and econometrics expands the traditional potential of sociology of art and provides a qualitatively new level of reliability of results.