Art Museum: from art temple to leisure centre?

The new challenges art museums around the world are facing now are many and difficult.
The first one is a main issue that compromises the existence of the museum itself: the lack of funds. Another concern of museums today is the policy of inclusion by which museums are expected to involve new potential publics, enriching the community and the social life of non-usual museum visitors. A third matter is created by a new competitive market: art museums have now to face other art or non art museums, entertainment facilities and also indirect competitors like the worldwideweb.
This peculiar situation has pushed art museums to rethink their relationship with the community, their image in society, their strategies and even their roles.
In recent years, one new approach has seemed to be common to most of the big national and private museums as a response to all three challenges: the leisure approach.
Museums try to reach new and larger publics adopting the most popular strategies of marketing, providing a variety of different experiences and additional corollary services such as shops and restaurants.
But, is this new approach taking museums to the result they are aiming for? Or is the evolution from museum to leisure centre dangerous and even misleading for the experience of art?
Some schools of thought see this shift negatively. They affirm that traditional main functions of museums, such as conservation, restoration and research, have been put in a secondary place of priorities by the one of being a space for temporary exhibitions that are able to attract more potential visitors. From being object-oriented, museums are more and more public-oriented by making themselves accessible to wider publics through blockbuster exhibitions, subsidiary activities and new interactive technologies.
Some theorists, on the contrary, see this contamination of functions as a positive and necessary evolution in museums roles. In contemporary society, as art shows, there is no more space for dogmatic principles and defined behaviours, but everything and everyone needs to mix and transform and reinvent continuously. Cultural and creative spaces must become flexible, participative, multicultural, democratic, places of production not of conservation. To them the role of museums is to serve its visitors, therefore, they should engage them and involve them, offering experiences in a learning and enjoyable environment. Culture consumers today are increasingly exigent, they don’t want only the product, but they want the experience with it. They don’t only want to learn but they also want to be entertained. Museums should respond to their needs.

Is this the correct and inevitable evolution of our museums? Or are they simply corrupting their nature to the rules of a consumerist society?

a.