Televisie & Cultuurparticipatie

This Master Thesis discusses whether television has influence on cultural behavior of people. There are many cultural television programmes, which enables people to participate in culture and arts in an accessible manner. The question is whether a television programme can make sure that more people participate in culture. The main question of this thesis is: Does the television programme Museumgasten lead towards an increase of the visitors of the discussed museums? This will be examined by first describing the background characteristics that influence the degree of museum visits of people. After that the objectives and the scheme of the programme Museumgasten will be discussed and a content analysis of three episodes of Museumgasten will be committed. With the content analysis we can see which elements of the television programme can have influence on the behavior of viewers. With a survey I have examined whether the visitors of the museums visited the museum because of the episode of Museumgasten that they have seen. The literature shows that the most important elements with visiting museums are age, education and social background. Most frequent visitors are high educated, HBO or scientific level, they have no children and they are between 35 and 65 years old. Cultural education also seems to be important for participation. The same characteristics appear in the results of the survey that is conducted with the visitors of the discussed museums. This research also agrees with the literature that art museums attract an extremely high educated audience. The only art museum of the three discussed museums attracted an extremely high educated audience, clearly higher educated then the other two museums. The last characteristic is that mostly frequent visitors watch cultural television programmes, like Museumgasten. In the first years of the programme the AVRO worked together with the Museumvereniging on behalf of the programme Museumgasten. The purposes of these two parties were not completely alike. The purpose that the Museumvereniging had with Museumgasten was to surprise viewers with the astonishing diversity of museums and to stimulate them to visit the museums. It is not the purpose of the AVRO to stimulate people to visit museums, but when that happens it’s a positive side effect. The discussed episodes of Museumgasten refer to the Bredius museum, the Automobielmuseum and the Textielmuseum. Especially the positive reactions of the guests of the programme and the extensive explanation about the pieces of art are elements of the programme that can have influence on the viewer. The audience receives a lot of information about the museum and their collection, with this they can measure out whether they’d like to visit the museum. Most visitors go to a museum because acquaintance recommend the museum. But there are also many visitors that go to the museum because they saw a television programme about the museum. 80% of the visitors who saw the episode of Museumgasten about the museum got the idea to visit the museum because of this episode. The programme was, by the three discussed museums in this thesis, especially of influence for the Bredius museum. And the programme has more influence on the frequent viewer then on the random viewer. For almost all visitors who came to the idea to visit the museum because of Museumgasten this was the first time they visited this particular museum. So the programme attracts new visitors that are stimulated by Museumgasten to visit the museum.