Considering images of museum audiences throughout the twentieth century, one can notice a shift: Its representation as an enlightened citizenry gave way to the visual construction of spectators who expressed discrepancies in their approach to high culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, the opening-up of museums as part of their civic mission and the need to expand the cultural public sphere made visible the naturalisation of cultural inequality and the need for a post-bourgeois model of public space, since the existing one was founded on structural criteria of exclusion of large parts of the population, based on property and class, gender, race and ethnicity. The visual representation of the demographic opening of museums then became a privileged agent to show the functions that education and leisure played as spaces for the realisation of social achievements, in Western welfare states, as well as in the countries of the Soviet orbit. This popularisation of museums transferred to them the tensions between high and low culture of the new mass society and its media cultures, as demonstrated by the increasingly unconventional images of visitors in the process of transforming themselves into tourists.

The debate around equal accessibility to museums aimed to make visible social classes untrained in the habitus, that is, in the set of embodied and socially structured practices, a process that the photographers of the time began to observe exhaustively. Hence, decisive moment type of photography proved to be a fundamental means of generating an expanded imaginary of these maladjusted publics and their bodies. The snapshot replaced the pose, the candid shot substituted the portraits, and the formerly enlightened citizens were displaced by new bodies with disruptive and performative behaviours. To this opening must be added the desire of some contemporary artists to reinforce the consciousness of spectators as spectators, fostered by participatory or performative practices and the crossovers between these and phenomenology.

While photographers made visible these estranged visitors and the emerging mass tourism, art historians, in the 1970s and 1980s, preferred to theorise about a contemplative, attentive and solitary spectator, more interested in reflecting on the development of a discourse on gaze, vision and visuality than on the thematisation of incarnated and situated spectators and their experiences as social beings in concrete contexts. This being said, the growing questioning of the bourgeois cultural sphere and the development, within the field of critical theory, of the notions of counter-publics and communities as spaces of emancipation and resistance, as well as the embodiment of the gaze, of desire and pleasure of spectators, within cultural and film studies, and the analyses of the subjectification of audiences (redefined as observers) regarding consumption and new technologies have finally diversified theoretical approaches to spectatorship and public(s). A final twist is being determined by the effects that digitalisation and the new mobile devices are having on the visual self-design of audiences and that exemplifies the dissolution of the frontiers between spectators and authors.