Contemporary Art Representation in Social Networks by Russian Museums

Nowadays it is more difficult to define the “museum” phenomenon than in years past. Museums, especially museums of contemporary art, are the space where visitors face authentic, aesthetic, inspiring and educational events and feelings. However, the Internet transforms museum’s visitor, his needs and way of perceiving. The activities of art museums in media landscape, Facebook and Instagram news as well as modern means of information transfer and images distribution have a great impact on art perception. Consequently, study of contemporary art representation in Russian social media by art museums has potential logical and effective results. The research question of this study is to determine how the message translated during contemporary art representation by museums in social media correlates with realization of functions by these museums. The research was carried out within the framework of the semantic analysis. On the instruments of analysis we used interpretative content-analysis of publications of six Russian museums in Instagram during the period of May 1, 2017 to May 1, 2018. The total amount for the year is 2,816 publications. In addition, expert interviews were conducted with representatives of museums from our sample selection during the research.