IN-PERSON Barcelona. Section B

Abstract

The National Museum of Ancient Art, Lisbon, led an unprecedented, successful six-month collaborative gamified funding campaign (2015/16) for the purchase of “The Adoration of the Magi” (Rome, 1828) by painter Domingos Sequeira. The campaign was part of a multidisciplinary strategy: museum brand repositioning, architectural extension, and urban requalification. Failure to collect €600 thousand (€861K today) would be a loss to national heritage. Digitised into 10 million €6 cents pixels, it evolved into esoteric pixel art as the funding progressed. Donating was a gamified online “shopping” process: “Which part [pixels] of The Magi will you sponsor”? Questions: 1) Were the strategy, the marketing communications, and the online experiences the major funding levers? 2) Is the painting a landmark in the history of Portuguese art, a qualified driver of the giving movement? 3) Were other non-recognised, subjacent, implicit factors, not orchestrated, decisive to meeting the funding target? Methodology: Mediated Discourse Analysis. Answers. 1) Social capital for giving created by leveraging hierarchical and “weak” networks, transparency, accountability, timely communications, and tech-enabled experiences leads to the build-up of trust in the donation process, to a sense of artifact appropriation. 2) Sequeira dutifully applied the Renaissance cannon, used long-established diagrams, and adopted Turner’s mastery of light resulting in good enough but seductive art. 3) The extraordinary millenary reputation of the Magi myth, “the most joyous of all Christian myths”, enmeshed in the habitus of European populations, was the major non-orchestrated overpowering factor, though absent from campaign communications. The Magi myth, like all myths, secretly connects the visible to the invisible, harbouring persuasive factors in the senses, producing a clinching effect leading to the giving disposition.