Demographic characteristics found in visitor survey on Hockney exhibition

The Seoul Museum of Art’s “David Hockney exhibition” garnered great attention, attracting 375,350 visitors. In the last month of the exhibition which ran from March to August this year, some people went as far as to line up outside the museum before the opening time to see the exhibition. However, there were also other people who were not familiar with the artist and his works. A new visitor survey has now revealed the demographic characteristics of the visitors.

Famous exhibitions are usually popular among parents. However, the “David Hockney” exhibition was most visited by people in their twenties and thirties who already knew much about the painter and were interested in art and developing their own “taste.”

The Seoul Museum of Art conducted a survey of all visitors from May to July and selected a valid sample set of 1,003 people for analysis. According to the analysis, the exhibition was most visited by people in their twenties (31.4%) and thirties (28.4%), followed by teenagers (16.7%), those in their forties (12.8%) and in their fifties (7.6%) and those aged over 60 (3.2%). While 53.3% of the participants cited “interest in culture and art” as the reason for visiting the exhibition, only 10.5% said they came on a field trip or a group tour or for assignment. “We saw many middle-aged visitors at the exhibition, but they were not captured in the survey because their children bought the tickets for them or came as a group,” said Lee Seung-ah, the curator of the exhibition.

It is also worth noting that it became popular by word of mouth. The museum did not invite any “influencer” to promote the show. The survey also shows that 45.1% of the respondents said the exhibition was recommended by friends and family compared to 21.7% who found out about it on social media.

Another keyword for the exhibition is “seriousness” given that 78.8% of the visitors already knew about the exhibition, and 47.8% of them had basic knowledge of the painter and the theme of the exhibition. In addition, the museum received many questions about the painter and his works from visitors, and quite a few visitors stayed and finished watching a one-hour long documentary.

Meanwhile, June was the quietest month with 2,665 visitors a day.


Min Kim kimmin@donga.com