Intercultural publics and communication strategies : the case of Cultural Tourism at the Art Museum

(Excerto) This paper intends to present a study on global flows/encounters at a leisure space. The global flow is cultural tourism and the leisure space-scape is the art museum, where differences and identities may be articulated through communication strategies developed by intercultural publics. These translations may occur at the museum ‘physical’ space or at virtual scapes like museum web pages or multimedia devices resident in an art exhibition. Such a problematics constitutes a part of a project that received financial support from the Foundation for Science and Technology-Lisbon, Portugal, and is conducted in partnership with several cultural institutions: Belém Cultural Center, Institute of Museums and Conservation, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), Serralves Foundation (Oporto), etc.. The project is carried out in 2 main and articulated directions: 1) a sociological analysis of intercultural publics involved in public communication of art within physical and virtual museums. This process implicates the production, distribution, consumption and understanding of art in urban contexts. I. e, it assumes that art is a communicative and social phenomenon, requiring, in addition to artists and 'art gatekeepers', an 'active audience', who reproduces mass media and cultural institutions, but also transforms them. One public segment analysed is the touris