Comunicación y difusión transmedial del patrimonio cultural y artístico

Abstract

The art museum is currently undergoing a moment of transformation: a paradigm shift linked to the growing centrality of its visitors, the revision of the narratives that the institution generates around its works of art and an incipient search for new forms of relationship with audiences. In a context marked by the reduction of public investment in culture, the immersion of museums in the logic of cultural tourism and the consequences of the COVID-19 health crisis, the use of digital media is strategic to materialize fundamental objectives and needs of these organizations. This thesis seeks to understand the characteristics adopted by the communication and dissemination in digital media of a group of Spanish museum institutions: the Prado National Museum, the Reina Sofía National Museum Art Centre, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) and the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB). To do so, we employed tools from museology and new media studies, with the aim of implementing a set of analytical methods (specifically, in-depth interviews, participant observation and comparative analysis of websites and platforms such as Instagram) to understand from different angles the complexity of our object of study. The results of the analyses carried out reveal that the biggest change in the digital communication and dissemination of the institutions analyzed has to do with the shift from a model focused on promoting their own activities to a communicative scheme centered on the dissemination of their heritage. The most innovative actions —especially, the ones related to more significant forms of user participation in digital media— are still isolated and atomized initiatives in the museum’s work, and thus fall far short of characterizing the fundamental features of the communicative model of these organizations.