Le paradigme des publics dans la muséologie des années 1990

In the 1990s, museology of education, mainly British, fundamentally changed the approach of museum public studies. Instead of assuming a homogeneous audience of standard visitors, it gives some importance to the diversity of experiences. On one hand, the concept of publics plural replaces the on singular one of public. On the other hand, instead of presenting a complete message, the museum is considered as a device offering a multitude of opportunities for reinvestment and interpretations. However, this change seems not to have been pushed to its consequences by most museum professionals of that period. If the communication models they defined seek to understand what makes each visit individual, their results are used to define typologies of a priori visitors characteristics and in same time to adapt institutions to this diversity of their publics to transmit them their predefined message in a most effective way. Upstream, appears different publics, but each group is considered homogeneous. Downstream, is produced a homogeneous audience insofar as each visitor must have understood the same information, even if it is by different ways. If it seems that this uses dominate, some museum experts act the need to put forward individual specifications, without subsuming them in a normal standard a priori or in a posteriori normativity. This raises the double question of the relevance of the concept of public— because it is becomes to subsume each visitor in a set—and of the concept of communication to analyze what is being played on a museum visit—because its success or failure is no more dependent on the understanding of a predefined message