DAY 5

READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below.
The Museum Dilemma
Can museums and art galleries make works of art both accessible to the public and
protected at the same time?
On any day of the week, tourists flock to museums and galleries such as the Louvre in
Paris and The Met in New York, willingly paying their steep entrance fees. This is in stark
contrast to the 55,000 local museums around the globe, who often struggle when it comes
to attracting visitors and the resulting much-needed funds. These institutions may be a
source of pride to locals, but are too often perceived as dusty cabinets – useful when it
comes to storing ancient things, but not very interesting to look at. The constant dilemma
for museum curators is that increasing visitor numbers also brings a far greater change for
damage, which can be deliberate, incidental or accidental.
Deliberate damage cannot be controlled for, as the perpetrators act in a determined and
destructive way. This was the case with the Leonardo da Vinci cartoon damaged by
gunshot in the National Gallery in London in 1987, despite the painting being protected
behind a glass screen. Incidental damage is easier to anticipate and often results from a
visitor’s innate curiosity and instructive urge to touch. This is mainly managed through the
use of signage, gallery attendants, or with a physical barrier such as a rope. Gallery
attendants are the more expensive but preferred option as written warnings tend to be
ignored. However, cutbacks in funding mean fewer and fewer attendants.
Rope barriers are commonplace but their very nature renders them ineffective – visitors
can still get quite close to a painting. It was in recognition of this that staff at Huashan 1914
Creative Park in Taipei decided to place a raised platform between the barrier and a
valuable 17th century oil painting as a reminder to visitors to not get too close.
Unfortunately, the platform inadvertently contributed to extensive damage when a young
boy tripped on it and put his hand through the painting while trying to break his fall.
Many galleries would rather not use barriers at all because they tend to spoil the overall
look, and some have resorted to technology to get around this issue. In the past, museums
such as the Stederlijk Museum in Amsterdam used alarms triggered by lasers to alert
visitors to their proximity to a painting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trade-off between
aesthetics and noise means this idea has not been taken up universally.
Nevertheless, technology does appear to solve the issues of attracting visitors, and there
are more interactive displays popping up. Even so, incorporating the occasional exhibit that
encourages visitor engagement can mean that visitors then assume it is acceptable to get
up close and personal with all works of art. The ensuing surface damage is often not
immediately apparent, but when thousands of subsequent visitors reach out to touch a
beautiful sculpture, the effect builds up cumulatively causing irreversible damage to the

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patina of materials such as bronze. While the surface of a painting does not offer quite the
same tactile allure, they too can suffer similar consequences.
Despite these challenges, technology use in museums seems likely to grow, especially as
they are uniquely placed to take advantage of augmented reality, where real people and
ancient artefacts can be juxtaposed in a virtual world. Tools such as these are being used
to construct exciting experiences that can bring a dull museum visit to life while also
keeping visitors away from precious and fragile objects.
One such example is an augmented reality project that was initially trialled at White Sands
National Monument in New Mexico with great success. Staff there showed visitors how, by
scanning a code with a smart phone camera, a troop of mammoths would appear to walk
over the horizon. Curiously though, when the same idea was later deployed with The
Etches Collection, an exhibit in Dorset, on Britain’s Jurassic Coast, no one engaged with it.
Rather than a lack of interest in the technology, the failure appears to have been due to the
reluctance of visitors to download the museum’s app onto their own phone. The best
technology in the world can’t fix that.
A key challenge is the lack of insight into what visitors actually want and expect from a
museum visit, and a recent study at several cultural sites in Scotland has tried to provide
this. Through questionnaires and interviews, researchers made some surprising
discoveries. While it had been assumed that more visual experiences would need less
narrative, the study shows the opposite is true: visitors still see information about the place
as important, whether the experience is virtual or not. Interestingly, although audiences do
enjoy immersive visitor attractions, if an exhibition is purely a simulation, they like to be
able to handle objects at the same time for extra realism, such as at Culloden Battlefield,
whose visitor centre has artefacts such as 18th-century weapons.
The clear message is that, although technology has much to offer the museums, and is
arguably essential to their survival, there is clearly some way still to go. It can bring
museums to life to the benefit rather than the detriment of the precious artefacts and
artworks they are home to, but only if it gives visitors the experience they want.