Does popularity and proximity to a solo exhibition have an impact on online attention?

Online based research inherits opportunities for visual artists and exhibition spaces that have not yet been extensively explored. Specifically, the primary art market is usually avoided in research, related to issues such as uncertainty and non-transparency. Platforms such as Artfacts.Net and Google Trends offer research opportunities that can be applied for contemporary research. For this master thesis, the impact of 208 exhibitions on online attention in the Netherlands has been explored. Within the framework of the quasi-experimental design the time-series analyses have been used to define both popularity and proximity impacts on online attention before and after the exhibition. While the results show a significant impact of popularity on online attention, the trend has rather a short-term impact. The proximity of an exhibition has been explored for the province of the Dutch capital; North Holland in comparison to the other provinces in the Netherlands. Although this analysis shows a relation of the online attention to the proximity, due to a small sample size it is deemed non-significant. In other words, scaled online attention is on average higher in closer proximity to North Holland, but the results should further be confirmed by a larger sample of observations.