Away with the basics? Exhibition design, experience economy and polyphony

Today’s market economy effaces the operational divide between museums as financial entities and as educational–cultural institutions. With the retraction of public funding and in a highly competitive neoliberal context, museums are pressed into creating new investment opportunities, which range from renting out facilities and services to high-end architecture and bespoke design that fuel an experience economy. In 2017, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam undertook an entrepreneurial experiment by redesigning the display of its permanent collection as Stedelijk BASE. The museum’s largest space, its 1,350-m2 open-plan basement, was filled with bespoke-design partition walls and transformed into a labyrinth where the collection was exhibited both chronologically and thematically. According to the institution, the intention was to create an experimental, open-ended, non-hierarchical and non-traditional display, which resembled the experience of browsing and invited multiple perspectives and unexpected connections. In practice, the endeavour was costly, overwhelming and entangled in an official enquiry for conflict of interest, resulting in the resignations of the museum’s directors and managing boards, as well as the withdrawal of many private donors.

This chapter provides a close examination of the exhibition design of Stedelijk’s BASE I in relation to institutional rhetoric and marketing. It suggests two frameworks for understanding and evaluating museum entrepreneurial practices – experience economy and polyphony – and demonstrates the extent to which space participates in meaning-making. Experience economy concerns the commoditisation of experiences themselves, and polyphony the different voices, agencies and capitals (cf. Pierre Bourdieu) that entrepreneurship introduces in a museum setting and which can be selectively employed in order to best define and market a museum’s assets. Working with these two concepts allows us to address the different ways by which the logic of the market enters the field of culture (and therefore the commons) and transforms its production, organisation and distribution. As this chapter demonstrates, BASE sought to capitalise on a new type of museum visit experience, which the author qualifies as the “art fair experience”. Yet, this ultimately failed to be meaningful because its staging was permeable and created dissonance with the museum’s identity, shifting focus from learning to entertainment.