DOI: 10.18848/1835-2014/cgp/a503 ISSN: 1835-2022

Open-Ended Mediation and Visitor Attention at the MSU Broad Art Museum

Carlota María Fanjul Alemany, Javier Antón Sancho, Mikel Martínez Ciriero, Javier Yániz
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This article examines open-ended mediation practices implemented at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University (MSU), within a research project on museum practices, art spectatorship, and mediation. It investigates the strategies that the museum uses to direct visitor attention while avoiding predetermined meanings, fostering inclusive forms of participation through visitor agency and self-directed meaning-making, and acknowledging that museum spaces and mediation inevitably shape visitors’ encounters with artworks. Grounded in the fieldwork conducted in March 2025, the study draws on observations of mediation events involving secondary school and university student groups, semi-structured interviews with museum staff, and a review of institutional material. The findings highlight several techniques that promote visitor agency in museums. These include minimal or delayed contextualization, open-ended questioning, and dialogical educational practices, sensory and material affordances, embodied activities, spatial cues, and dialogue-oriented approaches to group interactions. The analysis draws on three key concepts: attention, mimesis, and resonance, and explores how open-ended mediation does not remove institutional authority but rather reconfigures it as a facilitator. The article concludes with a discussion about the balance between interpretive openness and contextual guidance, the challenges of sustaining visitor focus and measuring engagement metrics in museums, and the reconfiguration of interpretive authority within inclusive museum practice.

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