When the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Rooms opened at the Broad in Los Angeles, visitors were given exactly 45 seconds inside each mirrored chamber. The time limit wasn't about conservation or crowd management alone—it was calibrated for the perfect Instagram shot. In that brief window, the artwork's meditative potential compressed into a single purpose: capture and share.

This scene has become emblematic of a broader transformation. Museums, once temples of quiet contemplation and scholarly inquiry, now function as sophisticated experience-production machines. The shift didn't happen overnight, and it wasn't driven by any single force. Economic pressures, changing audience expectations, and the gravitational pull of social media created conditions where the museum's primary output is no longer knowledge or aesthetic experience—it's content.

Understanding this transformation matters because it reshapes not just how we encounter art, but how art gets made, curated, and valued. The implications extend far beyond museum walls, touching questions about attention, authenticity, and what we actually want from cultural institutions.

The traditional museum model operated on a relatively simple premise: acquire significant objects, preserve them, display them, educate visitors about them. Revenue came from endowments, government funding, and modest admission fees. Success was measured in scholarly publications, collection growth, and educational impact.

That model began cracking in the 1990s as public funding declined and institutions faced existential financial pressures. Museums discovered what economist Joseph Pine and James Gilmore would famously call the experience economy—the principle that in a post-industrial marketplace, experiences themselves become the primary economic offering. Disney wasn't selling rides; it was selling memories. Starbucks wasn't selling coffee; it was selling a third place between home and work.

Museums adapted accordingly. The Guggenheim Bilbao, opening in 1997, demonstrated that architecture itself could generate tourism revenue sufficient to transform a declining industrial city. The building became the attraction; the art inside was almost secondary. This 'Bilbao effect' launched a global competition among cities to commission ever more spectacular museum structures.

Inside these new temples, programming shifted from permanent collection displays toward temporary exhibitions engineered for maximum visitor throughput and media coverage. Blockbuster shows featuring recognizable names—Van Gogh, Monet, Frida Kahlo—proved that name recognition drove ticket sales more reliably than curatorial innovation. The museum's core competency gradually shifted from collection stewardship to experience design, from education to entertainment. Attendance figures replaced scholarly impact as the primary success metric.

Takeaway

When institutions measure success by attendance and engagement rather than knowledge transmitted, they optimize for what draws crowds, not what rewards attention. The metric becomes the mission.

Contemporary artists haven't simply ignored this transformation—many have made it their explicit subject matter. The most interesting critical responses don't reject spectacle outright but interrogate its mechanisms from within.

Hito Steyerl's installations frequently address the circulation of images in digital capitalism. Her video works, displayed on screens scattered across gallery floors, force visitors to negotiate their own bodies in relation to the viewing apparatus. You can't simply consume the work; you must confront your physical presence as a viewing subject. Similarly, Trevor Paglen's photographs of surveillance infrastructure and data centers make visible the hidden systems through which our images travel and multiply.

Other artists have embraced what might be called critical complicity. Olafur Eliasson's immersive environments—artificial suns, indoor waterfalls, colored fog—generate exactly the shareable moments museums crave. Yet Eliasson insists his work investigates perception itself, making visitors conscious of how they see and experience space. The Instagram photo becomes evidence of the perceptual experiment, not a substitute for it.

Perhaps the sharpest critiques come from artists who refuse photographic reproduction entirely. Tino Sehgal's 'constructed situations'—live encounters with performers in gallery spaces—prohibit photography and video by contractual agreement. Nothing remains but memory and word-of-mouth. In an economy of infinite reproducibility, Sehgal creates deliberate scarcity. The work exists only in the moment of encounter, resisting transformation into content.

Takeaway

The most effective artistic critiques don't simply reject the spectacle economy—they reveal its mechanisms while operating within it, making visible what usually remains invisible.

Acknowledging that museums have become content factories doesn't require abandoning them. It requires developing what we might call critical spectatorship—a mode of engagement that neither naively accepts the experience as designed nor cynically dismisses all museum-going as empty spectacle.

The first strategy involves attention to temporal manipulation. Notice how exhibition design manages your movement and pacing. Timed entry, one-way pathways, and strategically placed photo opportunities aren't neutral infrastructure—they're choreography. Recognizing this allows you to make conscious choices about your own tempo. Sometimes the most subversive act is simply standing still where the flow wants you to move.

Second, consider the difference between recognition and attention. The content factory model rewards recognition—I saw the famous painting, I captured proof. But actual aesthetic experience requires sustained attention, the willingness to stay with an object long enough for it to become strange again. Try spending ten minutes with a single work. Notice what happens to your perception after the initial recognition fades.

Finally, seek out what the experience design marginalizes. Every blockbuster exhibition surrounds the marquee works with less celebrated pieces that don't appear on promotional materials. These works often reward attention more richly precisely because they haven't been optimized for quick consumption. The permanent collection galleries, often empty while crowds pack the special exhibition, frequently contain the museum's actual treasures—objects that have sustained interest across generations rather than trending this season.

Takeaway

Critical engagement means recognizing you're participating in a designed experience while preserving your capacity to have experiences the design didn't anticipate.

The transformation of museums into content factories isn't simply good or bad—it's a structural condition that shapes possibilities for aesthetic experience. Understanding the forces driving this change gives us tools for navigating it thoughtfully.

Museums will continue optimizing for attendance and engagement because their survival depends on it. The question isn't how to reverse this transformation but how to maintain space for encounters with art that exceed their content-value. Some of this work falls to institutions willing to resist complete optimization. Much of it falls to visitors willing to bring critical attention to designed experiences.

The museum as content factory produces experiences calibrated for capture and circulation. But within that factory, moments of genuine encounter remain possible—when we stop moving long enough to let an artwork become strange, when we notice what the design wants us to overlook, when attention deepens beyond recognition into something closer to seeing.