3. From Social Inclusion to Audience Numbers: Art Museums in the New Public Management

In the administrative climate cultivated by the New Public Management (NPM), New Labour tasked museums in the UK with demonstrating hard evidence of social inclusion. However, the administration mostly failed to offer a clear explanation of the concept of social inclusion, and its relevance to art museums. This chapter argues that the ambiguity of the New Labour social inclusion agenda, coupled with the administration’s demand for evidence, meant that audience numbers – one of the only data sets that could be gathered quickly and cheaply – became a proxy indicator of social inclusion. The chapter concludes that the political and administrative climate fostered by NPM is a useful framework for understanding how the collection of audience numbers became a key data set for museums in the late twentieth century.