Popularizing art for children at the MoMA: A multimodal analysis of the audio-delivered pictorial descriptions

The aim of this study is to investigate popularization practices in museum communication for children. More specifically, the study proposes a multimodal investigation of twenty audio-delivered pictorial descriptions in English specifically designed for children, available in the official website of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Manhattan. The scripts of the pictorial descriptions were retrieved from the website’s dedicated section and annotated by means of QDA Miner Lite according to a set of codes: ‘type of speaker’, ‘speech’, ‘music’, ‘sounds’, and ‘prosody’. Then, they were analyzed from a multimodal perspective in order to identify key popularization strategies, as well as to investigate how the different semiotic resources are combined to enhance children’s art experience. The results show that the encounter with the artwork is shaped as the child’s own discovery, in which observation skills and critical thinking are challenged by means of several popularization strategies. A key role is played by questions and invitations (to observe, to think, etc.), as well as by soundscape in which speech, music and sounds are meaningfully combined to increase listener involvement.