I admit to not being a museum head myself. Now that I'm a parent though, I've gone to them all, multiple times. Before that, I'd not gone to any of them unless they're world famous.

If it wasn't for kids, nobody would go to most museums (non-famous ones especially)

Kids are simply the demographic, because every parent is looking for activities to entertain the kids every day.

Interactive non-screen based exhibits that are designed for kids are the best, but if you can't have that for cost/know-how reasons interactive multi-media exhibits are a good second on the "it did a good job entertaining my kid" spectrum.

Actually learning anything is a secondary demand from the consumer when it comes to museums unfortunately. Entertaining the kids is number one, bonus points if it also managed to entertain the parents.

It smells like grant consultants from here. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to get new money for digital high tech exhibits (don’t you know that’s what kids are into?) than maintaining what already exists.

Agree a lot of “museums” are turning into less of cool items and more of a lot of text and visuals and electronic displays. I could just do that at home and skip the inconvenience, cost, and exposure.

Nothing really to add, but the NSA museum outside of DC is really cool. I think this is a good example of a museum that works well for adults/kids alike.

My experience of "the culture": cultural spending cutbacks mean exhibitors are often forced to fall back to the minimal spend of a screen.

It's literally all they can afford.

A museum here plays an inaudible voice recording on a 30 min loop with the speaker persistently building on previous context. It was like browsing an unfamiliar code base.

Why not? Not every museum is rich enough to exhibit original works. And is digital art is no art anymore?

I’m inclined to believe that this happens because there are strong incentives to being able to add to your resume “Directed digital modernization of Museum of Note”.

Old enough to remember when most museums and art galleries were absolutely free.

This had pretty much ended by 1980, unfortunately, and now they are enormously expensive.

Why bother with hardware when you can just use software?