Director of audiences and media at London’s Tate galleries talks about communicating with public in digital era


The audience is completely changing, said Marc Sands, director of Audiences and Media at Britain’s Tate, just as it was when Tate Modern opened in 2000.

“That was the moment when the audience changed both in terms of numbers and the type of people that came. Tate Modern brought contemporary art from the fringes of culture to the mainstream,” said Sands at a press conference on Monday at National Museum of Art, Deoksugung, in central Seoul.

Now the same kind of change is occurring online, and now art has become “a part of everyone’s vocabulary,” he said.

Tate, a family of four art galleries including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives, is one of the most renowned art institutions in the world. The galleries together hold about 72,000 artworks and attract over 7 million visitors every year. Significantly, about 60 percent of the visitors are aged under 35.

This is not surprising, as Tate was one of the few art museums to place emphasis on digital media in the mid-2000s. Tate Online, the website which launched in 1998, is considered Tate’s “fifth gallery.” Along with information on exhibitions and collections, the website has since 2008 featured Tate Channel composed of video clips of exhibitions and artist interviews. 

The website is going through a major renewal process to be loaded with a sophisticated search engine that will enable everyone, from children to academics, to easily browse all of its collections; and to liven it up with discussions and debates. The refurbished Tate Online will open in 10 days.

“The general public remains unsure about art, but the online development is allowing us to have them completely involved with the artworks. So we develop online debates and discussions that you simply cannot do in physical space and which will allow them a much deeper relationship with art. The re-launch of the website is all about completely opening up Tate. All barriers of artistic institutions are coming down,” he said.

Tate was also the first to participate in the Google Art Project which allows internet users to explore the galleries as if walking through them and take a close look at selected artworks. Among 17 participating museums so far, Tate is the only one showing a contemporary artwork through the project ― Chris Ofili’s “No woman no cry.”

“My question is, why only 17? One of the big things about the digital space is that no one is exactly sure what they are doing. So my philosophy is that you have to say ‘yes’ to a tryout,” said Sands.

Tate Liverpool curator Lee Sook-kyung, who also worked as a curator at NMOCA for several years until 1996, pointed out that the workplace ambience for the curators is freer at Tate, compared to NMOCA 10 years ago.

“As the only state-run contemporary art museum, NMOCA allowed little space for curators to get involved in the museum’s strategies. An exhibition was allotted to a curator who was then expected to be in charge of it,” said Lee.

“At Tate, however, everything starts from the curators’ ideas. We take into consideration the audience’s responses but we are free to choose what to do about it. And we ponder on for a long time, for example, whether the exhibition we are planning is apt to rival those held at other prestigious museums worldwide, why it should be held at Tate at that particular time, or what kind of legacy it will leave,” said Lee.

Tate’s Department of Audience and Media conducts surveys of a panel of 12,000 people of different levels of artistic understanding about the museum’s affairs, from deciding on exhibition posters to the exhibition features, and transmits the results to the curatorial department. This is to see where the audience is at and to communicate with them, said Sands.

Lee and Sands agreed that today communicative skills are very important for artists as well. No matter how good their works are, they may end up in the dark if no museum recognizes, not to mention introduces, them.

“Artists need to have someone beside them who helps them with the digital strategies,” said Sands.

By Park Min-young  (claire@heraldcorp.com)