Go on an Art Adventure: Popularizing Art for Children through Museum Websites

Freed from its elitist connotations, art has recently become a key focus in children’s non-fiction. Books on artists’ lives and art movements proliferate in the market addressed to children, thus opening the doors of art history to very young aesthetes. Conversely, art in the World Wide Web is still mainly limited to “arts and crafts activities” for kids. This tendency seems to be exceptionally overridden by a counter-tendency led by few museums and galleries. As a matter of fact, museums are no longer “cultural islands” but active cultural agents (Bondi 2009) that market and popularize themselves through their websites. With regard to children, most museum websites briefly present workshops and events they organize for children with a marketing intent (Sabatini 2017). However, few of them offer online materials and sections explaining the art and life of the protagonists of their collections, hence relegating the promotional discourse in the background and giving prominence to art popularization. An interesting case is Tate Kids, the website of the Tate Gallery family entirely dedicated to children. In the context of research on specialized knowledge dissemination to adults (e.g., Ciapuscio 2003; Calsamiglia, van Dijk 2004) and children (e.g., Myers 1989), we shall therefore concentrate on the different strategies that Tate Kids adopts in order to market itself and, most importantly, to disseminate art knowledge among children, who do not only lack specialist knowledge but also have a different stage of cognitive development (Myers 1989).