Too much to look at"”sea, seagulls, art!' : the experiential appeal of art exhibitions in public leisure spaces

It is no longer new to suggest that leisure spaces are increasingly designed around the premise of a visitor who is active, rather than passive and who seeks to participate rather than observe. Likewise, the liminality of some visitor spaces have been well observed, for their novelty and sometimes critique of established spaces and the norms that come to be associated with them. This is part of a context in which cultural institutions like museums and art galleries are under pressure to adjust to changing demands in the public sphere and to become more deeply embedded in a variety of other social institutions with which they share a cultural boundary. Through this new process of sharing, boundaries themselves are crossed, obfuscated or reinvented as both producing and consuming leisure experiences are better understood as negotiated, and less determined or predictable. This has become observable in established museums and art spaces, and can be expected to be even more pronounced when the gallery space is constructed at the most popular city beach in Australia. For the twentieth consecutive year, Sculpture by the Sea has transformed Sydney's iconic Bondi Beach and coastal walk into a sculpture exhibition. Commencing in 1997, the event in Sydney now draws over five-hundred thousand visitors across two weeks and has now extended its reach to include exhibitions at Cottesloe Beach, on the Australian west coast, and at Aarhus in Denmark. This paper examines how the recent Sculpture by the Sea exhibition at Bondi performs as a temporary art gallery. Specifically, we will examine how visitors experience the art through a setting that is not neutral, but intervenes as a physical, aesthetic and socialized place.