The local art museum is heavy on physical art, lighter on image art. I don't solely mean sculpture. Highly detailed items where the experience can't be handled by a smartphone pix. There's an outdoor sculpture museum in central Wisconsin thats pretty cool to experience. Near the river, in Wausau? Not all art is low res, or low res paintings. I liked your link to the dots, that would be interesting to see.

My limited maker faire experience is its VERY art heavy, for certain specific styles of art. Partnering with a stodgy old fashioned museum sounds like a winner. Put some tents up on that unused temple-like grass lawn, get some people looking at all kinds of art, not just old or new stuff.

I am as mystified as op that the gift shop usually has nothing on topic. I can buy a tour book of italy or a kids coloring book, but not a poster of my favorite painting. Why not? Thats an epic fail. It would be like going to a food store that sells everything but food.

I feel most people don't like art itself and only go to be seen as a patron. Back in my dating days I took dates to several museums. Its a cool date idea. More interactive and interesting than a movie. Lets be honest, I was paying more attention to my date than the art, that was kind of the point of taking a date to the museum. I've been kicked out of museums early because a corporation rented the whole building for a christmas party or whatever, money talks, and I hope at least some of the employees looked at the art vs just eating at the buffet and getting drunk. But this kind of social activity sets a very low bar for the "art experience". Its just an extremely nicely decorated social hall.

One failure in the article is $0 admission, in the "urban" areas, means homeless people living / sleeping in the museum, parents treating the facility like a free day care... It'll be just like the libraries problem. More money and more guards can kind of fix this problem, but still...

The six second anecdote reminds me of the zoo or flea markets. People will glance to be polite, but they don't really care. I spent a lot of money to drive a long way to see a traveling dutch masters painting exhibition maybe 20 years ago. I think it was time and money well spent. I admit I almost "ran" thru the rest of the museum, taking those six second glances, to get to what I wanted to see, and it was pretty cool. So its not like "six seconders" don't care about any art, they just don't care about six second art. What I wonder about is people who run the entire zoo, or entire museum, all at the six second pace. Did they ever see anything they liked? I run into people like this at parks and on trails too, if you're not going to stop and look at anything, get out of the way and stay home and look at google street view.

The article has another failure, it fails to acknowledge that art can be leased. The megacorp at work is in a semi-questionable urban area, so it has a 24x7 security guard, which is better than all but the best art museums can provide for their best pieces, so rent us a "nice" painting for our reception area please, maybe not the nicest most expensive, but ... Technically our reception desk area is public and someone in the general public could walk up, look at our art, and walk out without the guard detaining or harassing them. Better on our wall behind our guard on a long term lease in public than locked in a vault in private. For enough money a service company could maintain a plastic box containing the art and its lighting every month, or week, or whatever. For a very large amount of money they could provide a guard. Maybe a startup idea here?