Contemporary art museum websites in Amsterdam and Beijing

The thesis attempts to evaluate and compare the performances of contemporary museum websites in Amsterdam and Beijing. The purpose of this study is to explore how contemporary art museums are making use of their websites as a medium to support their other activities, what role of the websites are playing in the marketing of contemporary art museums considering Web 2.0 which highlights the interactions between websites and end-users. The comparison between Amsterdam and Beijing is conducted in order to get an idea of the situations of contemporary art museums in the East and West. Website content analysis and quantitative research methods are adopted to study five museums from Amsterdam and five museums from Beijing are studies respectively. The data are primarily collected from the official websites of the museums and then transported and analyzed through SPSS. By referring to frequency analysis, crosstabs, Cramer’s and Chi-square tests, some hypothesis are tested and some conclusions are reached. The discovery of the research is intended to give useful suggestions to the directors of contemporary art museums for improvement in their performances and to shed some light on the understanding of art museum markets in the East and West.