Museums and Their Publics

What is it about?

Museums in Austria- Hungary were an integral part of the public sphere in the late nineteenth century. Yet despite their declared commitment to reach out to the broader public, they remained popular only with some segments of the population, gradually embracing the middle and lower middle classes. At the same time, due to wider social changes, such as electoral and administrative reforms, urbanization, incorporation of the suburbs, the widening political franchise, and expansion of education, the public was itself changing. An originally small cohort of distinguished amateurs gradually became more heterogeneous, with distinct groups of professionals, patrons, intellectuals, and socialites, as well as aspiring lower classes, which were further differentiated by age, gender, and supposed nationality. These publics—and one can speak of them in the plural—graced museums with their presence differently on different occasions and had different expectations from them. Furthermore, a significant section of the museum public remained essentially invisible. This was the public usually mentioned in press reports as the “numerous crowd” that welcomed and hailed the great men of power and culture with “welcome and celebratory acclamations.” One of this chapter’s aims is to explore this public and to reveal its nature, composition, and behavior within the changing public sphere. Another aim is to assess museums’ ability to reach out to the local public at a time when the number of visitors was expanding at an unprecedented rate.

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