Wokeness / Wokeless

Experimental Studies on the Art Museum Object Text in Light of Current International Debates

PhD Project (2025–2028)

To what extent do art mediation texts influence the perception and interpretation of artworks, and what role do they thereby play within processes of social negotiation? To what extent do they contribute to the construction and dissemination of social conceptions of reality, and which notions of social order do they reflect, reproduce, or deconstruct?

These guiding questions form the starting point of this cumulative dissertation project, which addresses them through the study of a group of written art mediation texts. As these texts serve to function of mediating specific objects (or artworks) within the museum space (see fig. of the text panels), they are referred to as object texts.

To investigate the questions outlined above based on this text group, the object text is conceptualized within the project

as a cultural artifact that reflects discursively shaped conceptions of social reality, and
as a culture-constituting instrument that actively participates in the construction and dissemination of conceptions of social reality within the museum space.

To address the research questions and the guiding assumptions, several interconnected studies will be conducted. Methodologically, the project combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, including content analyses, iconographic-iconological analyses, mobile eye tracking, and semi-structured interviews.

Project Members

PhD Candidate: Sara Leitner
Supervisor: Raphael Rosenberg (Department of Art History)
Co-Supervisor: Manfred Glauninger (Department of German Studies)
Thesis Advisory Committee: Jutta Mueller (Department of Linguistics), Heiko Hausendorf (UZH)

There are two object texts, each providing different information about the artwork shown in the centre. The work itself shows a family portrait. The three figures depicted, who are in an interior setting, consist of a small child, his mother and his father. Whilst the object text on the left-hand side of the painting describes the portrait as a depiction of a young family showing their private side, the object text on the right-hand side interprets the image as an illustration of a patriarchal gender hierarchy. — Two versions of object texts attached to François Pascal Simon Gérards family portrait during the conduction of the empirical MET-Study in the Upper Belvedere, Vienna, in spring 2025. Whilst the object text on the left-hand side of the painting describes the portrait as a depiction of a young family showing their private side, the object text on the right-hand side interprets the image as an illustration of a patriarchal gender hierarchy.