Museums and youth: between misunderstanding and disappointment. Youth perceptions and arguments about the cultural consumption of museums in Chile

Young people are less explored in museum audience research; this is a paradoxical situation when considering its strategic location in the cultural reproduction and if considering the high performing cultural consumption compared with other sectors. The phenomenon of museums consumption by young Chileans who are self recognized as public and non-public museums is explored from a qualitative approach. It was conducted with focus groups in the three largest cities in Chile (Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción). They identify the museum as a cultural institution in full force. However, in questioning museums activity youth reveal the specificity of their cultural matrix. This is referred to a social temporality based on the fragment, the discourse of familiarity, proximity and instead of breaking and critical. They claim a museum aesthetic / historical experience based on pleasure and enjoyment. An overview is proposed to further clarify the youth cultural consumption to characterize more precisely the place of the museum in the set, to design more effective policies museums.

Death Aesthetization in Contemporary Artistic Practices

Starting from the famous and enigmatic quotation of the Aristotle’s Poetics, who argues that the human has a natural desire and pleasure to see corpses if mediated by art, is intended to show the relationship between the attraction for the horror and some contemporary art practices surrounding the depiction of death, particularly with regard to the ultimate use of the human corpse as an artistic resource. Avoiding any kind of ethical approach or questioning of the limits of the artistic production, is meant to highlight the phenomenon through the examples brought out by the work of some contemporary artists such as Andy Warhol, Eric Fischl, Damien Hirst, Von Hagens, Andres Serrano, Joel-Peter Witkin and Teresa Margolles: From those who use the corpse in and turn it in something aesthetically pleasant, to others who turn human corpses in sculptures of scientific value, and further other kind of artists who assume the morbid and dramatic life of the corpse in their art production as something structural.