Estratégias de Comunicação e Marketing de Exposições nos Museus de Arte: o Museu do Chiado e o Museu Calouste Gulbenkian

Both as owners of large collections of art and producers of culture, through the exhibitions each one stages, museums are key institutions in contemporary societies. Ever since their historical origins, more than two centuries ago, museums underwent a process of growing openness, democratization and massification, gathering new publics, made out of visitants and consumers of new artists and new art forms. In the dialogue with the society they are immersed in, museums had to reinvent and enlarge languages, instruments and strategies to become growingly visible and attractive, investing in what nowadays is already consolidated as cultural marketing. Originally created within the world of publicity and aimed at selling mass consumer products, marketing can and must be a part of the museum's communication with the public, and its basic importance is a given in any strategy of museum management. The present dissertation sets from the evolution of the concept of museum, and from some general context considerations on cultural marketing, the status of the work of art, the profiling of cultural consumers and museum visitants and the various supports of communications and marketing, to analyse the Portuguese situation, namely the practices of two distinct art museums, a public one (Museu Nacional de Arte Contemponmea - Museu do Chiado), and a private one (Museu da Funda<;:ffo Calouste Gulbenkian). Through the study of the communication and marketing strategies developed by both of them to publicize two art exhibitions - on the Portuguese painter Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro, in the former case, and on European Still-Life painting, in the latter case - the aim is to contribute to an enlarged portrait of the present situation, needs and advantages of cultural marketing as a privileged medium for arts and culture in Portugal