Virtual viewing / At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw many museums embracing virtual experiences. The Black Country Living Museum in the UK attracted 360,000 followers on TikTok by creating videos of its staff playing characters from early Industrial England, while the J Paul Getty Museum in America created a tool that allowed fans of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons to decorate their in-game environment with images from its open-access collection of artworks.
What makes the Vienna Tourist Board’s campaign interesting is that it doesn’t matter how many people visit the brand’s OnlyFans page – the contentious issue of censorship and the brand’s decision to take an unexpected political stand against it is enough to earn the tourist board great PR.
This isn’t the first time that the cultural institutions of Vienna have made their voices heard. In fact, in 2017 a woman posted a photo on Facebook of Venus of Willendorf, a 30,000-year-old statue that depicts women and fertility, but the social media platform ruled it pornographic. Vienna’s Natural History Museum released a statement arguing that ‘an archaeological object, especially such an iconic one, should not be banned from Facebook because of nudity, as no artwork should be.’ Facebook apologised. Vienna’s Tourist Board also took the debate to the streets of London that same year, with an outdoor campaign starring the works of Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele that were dubbed too racy to show in their full glory (unless you go to Vienna).
In with the old / While Vienna’s museums and galleries boast an array of renowned artwork (such as Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss and Albrecht Dürer’s Young Hare), the tourist board has to continually find new ways of promoting these masterpieces. By taking well-known pieces of art and putting them in a modern setting, Vienna’s tourist board is able to reignite interest in the works and increase the likelihood of travellers considering it for their next trip.
The Los Angeles Country Museum of Art caused a similar stir by creating a number of amusing ‘snaps’ on Snapchat that overlaid modern themes onto classical works of art. The British Museum even recreated its building (as well as a selection of exhibits) within Minecraft to broaden the institution’s appeal.
