Making Sense of Things: Constructing Aesthetic Experience in Museum Gardens and Galleries

Abstract

Studies of museum behaviour in sociology often examine how external environments shape organizational practice. Through an ethnographic study, this article considers programmes for visitors with disabilities at a major metropolitan art museum and botanical garden to ask how ‘sensory conventions’ vary across museums, and with what effects. I trace how museum staff construct the aesthetic experience of art and nature differently to shape how visitors use their senses, and which senses they use, when interacting with museum collections. Examining aesthetic meanings across different kinds of museums reveals these institutions’ differing local cultures and how such cultures affect visitor experience. In particular, aesthetic practices across museums facilitate varying opportunities for perception, and interactions that may privilege particular embodied capacities.

Key words: art museums; botanical gardens; aesthetics; senses; disability