Museum figures conceal a persistent pattern.
Visitors are drawn from households with a degree, whatever the ticket price.
Free entry, introduced widely, raised total numbers without changing that much.
The barrier turned out not to be money but a sense of not being addressed.
Wall texts written for specialists are the clearest example.
A label that names an artistic movement without explaining it tells a visitor that the knowledge was expected.
Institutions that rewrote their labels in plain language recorded longer and more return visits.
matters more than labels, however.
Evening opening, childcare and events organised with local groups shift the of the audience.
They also cost money and appear nowhere in a visitor count.
Digital access was expected to solve the problem and has instead deepened it in one respect.
Online collections are used most heavily by the people who already visit.
Where digital work has succeeded is with schools, which is a and unequal audience in the useful sense.
Every child in a class sees the collection, including the ones no would reach.
For a public institution, that may be the only form of access that reliably reaches everyone.