To Succeed, Museums Must Capture Attention Online and Cultivate It Offline
Observer ·
In an economy built on distraction, Voorlinden director Suzanne Swarts argues that cultural institutions should resist adding more spectacle. Space, silence and time may be the most valuable things they can offer visitors once they pass a museum's threshold.
Offline is punk. That is the text on one of the buttons we made to celebrate the opening of a brand-new bookshop in our museum, with a curated selection of art books, special editions and more. An adventurous endeavor in this attention-seeking world: who would want to spend their time reading offline books when the online world has so much to offer? But it is something we strongly believe in at Museum Voorlinden: the importance of offering a counterpoint to the fast-paced world we live in, where our online behavior increasingly spills over into our offline lives.
We live in an economy designed to interrupt us. Online, our attention is measured, traded and competed for in ever smaller increments. Museums are part of that economy too. We count followers, measure engagement and think about what people will share. And rightly so: museums need audiences, including those who may not yet feel that a museum is for them. But there is a strong distinction to be made between online and offline: the difference between capturing attention and cultivating it.
Capturing attention is immediate: the dramatic entrance, the photogenic installation, the irresistible artwork that stops you in your tracks. Cultivating attention takes longer. It asks you to stay with an artwork, an unfamiliar thought or a feeling you cannot immediately name. The stimulation does not come from outside. You have to do some of the work yourself. And that is precisely what makes sustained looking so rewarding.
At a time when so much is designed to fragment our focus, museums should have the courage to offer the opposite: a place for concentration, curiosity and contemplation.
Museums compete online not only with other cultural institutions, but with the infinite scroll, streaming platforms, restaurants, festivals and outings that seem designed to generate content—from the food on your plate to the selfie taken in the public bathroom mirror. Increasingly, art is first encountered through a screen, cropped and absorbed into an endless stream of images. And we bring that behavior into the museum, photographing works before we have really looked.
The exact numbers vary, but studies suggest that the average museum visitor spends between 15 and 30 seconds in front of a work of art. That may not sound like much, but in the age of Instagram, it can feel surprisingly long compared with the speed at which we scroll past images online.
There is no single correct way to look at art. Not every artwork demands 10 minutes of solemn, silent contemplation. And visitors should feel free to browse, skip, laugh, talk and find their own way through exhibitions. But museums should be wary of answering distraction with more distraction. More works, more visual noise, more immersive effects, more spectacle. Online, museums can and should compete for attention. Offline, we have a different responsibility. We should not reproduce the attention economy inside the museum. We should offer a way out of it.
At Voorlinden, that begins before you even enter the museum. The estate forms a green oasis in the middle of one of the busiest parts of the Netherlands, right between The Hague and Amsterdam. Whether you arrive by car, bicycle or public transport, the final stretch is always on foot. You have to slow down to get here, leave the attention-seeking world behind you.
Once inside, we try to cultivate a different state of attention. Architecture plays an important role in that. A museum should not be neutral in the sense of being empty of feeling. It should be hospitable to focusing your attention. We try to remove rather than add—less can be a form of generosity, an invitation to actually take your time and look. There are no wall texts telling you what to think , no visible climate systems, no guards yawning in chairs in the galleries. Everything in the daylight museum, from the sightlines to the acoustics and the gallery spaces, is all designed to bring you closer to the individual artworks, rather than let them compete with each other. We show a maximum of around 100 works at any given time, because we believe an artwork needs room, literally and mentally, to breathe. The ultimate aim of the museum is simple: to leave you charged, not overloaded.
Art cannot eliminate the noise of modern life, and museums should not become sanctuaries detached from it. Art can be uncomfortable, political, confrontational and loud. But museums do not have to reproduce the frantic conditions of the world outside in order to engage with it.
A recent show, “Stillness in the storm,” put this idea into practice. It was designed to offer a moment of reflection within a whirling world, to show that stillness can be a source of strength. We saw the immediate effect of the works, how quickly the exhibition changed people’s behavior. Already in the first gallery, visitors seemed to adjust to its rhythm. They slowed down. Voices became softer. People stayed with artworks longer. The stillness of the “Stillness in the storm,” which eventually made way for our celebratory exhibition “ Celebrating the Icons of Art ” marking our museum’s 10th anniversary, seemed to produce stillness in the visitor, opening up their senses, focus their attention.
That matters. Because a museum is one of the increasingly rare places where you can practice looking without immediately having to respond, swipe, judge or move on. You could call that mindfulness, but I think it is more fundamental than that. A museum can train our capacity for attention. We see the same thing every weekend during our Silence on Socks hour. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, from 10 to 11 a.m., a limited number of visitors can experience the museum in silence and in socks. No conversations, no notifications and no sound of footsteps on the gallery floor. It is a small intervention that completely changes the rhythm of the museum.
It is not about prescribing a “correct” way to experience art. It is simply an invitation to discover what happens when some of the noise disappears. And people love it. Some visitors are hooked and tell us they never want anything different, to return during normal museum hours. Quiet attention, it turns out, can be addictive too.
A screen is incredibly good at delivering images quickly. Museums have something else to offer: scale, materiality, physical presence and, perhaps most importantly, time. They allow us to stand in front of something without immediately having to respond to it. To look again. To move around it. To discover that an artwork that did not demand our attention at first can become the one that stays with us longest.
That ability to slow down is becoming increasingly precious . And museums should protect it. Online, art institutions have to compete for attention. We need to be visible, relevant and inviting, and use the possibilities of the online world to reach people who might otherwise never walk through our doors. But offline, we should resist playing by the same rules.
As our online lives become faster and more fragmented, that offline experience becomes increasingly valuable. Museums can offer a counterpoint: a place where attention is not constantly redirected, where we do not have to scroll on to the next thing, and where there is time and space to engage deeply with art. It’s the punk attitude museums need today: capture attention online, cultivate it offline.