Art security in museums can do much more than protect your collection and provide a better experience for your visitors. These systems can also help to mitigate bad visitor behavior within museums and galleries.
Last year’s Smithsonian Security Conference highlighted the trend of increasing visitor bad behavior driven largely by social media. It was reported that visitors are becoming bolder in their quest to get the perfect selfie or “post-worthy” picture.
Some selfie-seekers wait for guards to go around the corner so they can get close to a piece of artwork or even to sit on a priceless art piece in a furniture gallery to get the pictures they want. Just one single incident of damaged art can be very costly to repair. In many cases, it costs tens of thousands of dollars to fix a single item. So, it’s a huge challenge to protect your galleries and precious collection in today’s age.
Museum security is more complex than protecting artwork from theft. Designed both to protect your collections and identify security issues, our installations have shown an average of 75X more object touches than security officers are reporting. Art Sentry can help museums like yours take measures to prevent your next incident.
Our customizable technology does much more than a motion detector. The security system for art and antique items allows you to draw an invisible protection zone around paintings and valuable artifacts. Combined with the audible alerts the system eliminates 92% of all object touches. This stops “selfie-seeking” damage before it can occur.
An unexpected benefit from this enhanced protection is that visitor experience scores have increased. With the Art Sentry solution, customers typically self-correct and do not have to be confronted directly by a museum security guard. They are gently and objectively reminded to step back from the art, which is proven to be less intimidating to customers. By implementing our art security system, visitors have a better experience overall. Since we can’t curb the visitor’s desire to capture selfies, we can at least stop them from damaging collections in a non-confrontational way.
An article by ArtNet News, “Here Are 9 Shocking Times People Destroyed Art While Taking Selfies,” showcases some of these attempts to capture “post worthy” pictures in their collection of true “perfect selfie” fails. The damage caused to the collection pieces is truly heartbreaking.
If you’d like to learn more about bad visitor behavior and how our security systems for art can prevent damage, read our preventative touch case study. For more information about security systems, don’t hesitate to reach out to us today.