If you visit almost any major city in Europe or the US, you are likely to become aware, without any conscious effort, of the major exhibitions that are running. Simply because information is usually highly visible, reiterated throughout the environment, largely in the form of poster or billboard or related or perhaps other forms of advertising. With just the occasional exception (the Francis Bacon Studio at the Hugh Lane and the forthcoming Impressionist Landscape show at the National Gallery of Ireland come to mind), this hardly happens in Dublin. Presumably it hardly happens because billboard advertising is a relatively expensive if highly effective, simple and direct advertising medium, and Irish cultural institutions by and large subsist on budgets that are extremely modest by international standards.

Yet it seems obvious that visibility, visibility beyond the more or less closed circuit of an artworld audience, and beyond the confines of the institutions themselves, is a fundamental necessity in the cause of drawing people in and, one presumes, of enlarging the audience. Perhaps one contentious element of the process is the fact that entry into the advertising arena entails more than just the dissemination of information: it has to do with entering the consumerist culture. That is, it implies that you are marketing and selling a product, a product that happens to be a cultural experience, but essentially just another piece of merchandise.

There may quite reasonably be resistance to the idea of art as a consumerist experience, a feeling that the nature of the transaction between artist, art institution and visitor should not really be one of producer and consumer, vendor and customer, with the whole concomitant nomenclature of the market economy that that entails. That is, notions of clients, consumers and service providers. The problem here is the not-so-covert push towards making us consumers rather than citizens, the attempt to convince us that we are all small capitalists.

The commodification of cultural values and the delegation of engaged other to the status of customer with rights, gripes and a credit card is, by most accounts, not the best basis for fruitful cultural exchange. And there is more than a whiff of the hard sell to some of the advertising of cultural events elsewhere. The bottom line is that, as with advertising strategy everywhere, the product must be invested with desirability. You have to feel that you are being sold something you want. You may not know you want it, but it's up to the advertiser to bring you to the realisation that you do.

Even given all this, however, there is still surely a role for advertising in the broadest sense of the term. It is, for example, thoroughly acceptable for musicians and music groups of all persuasions, from underground to mainstream, to advertise their presence via posters without feeling that they are selling out. In fact it is an established part of the culture. Perhaps part of the problem in relation to visual art is that it falls too readily into the role of high or fine art, that exclusivity has become a habit. Certainly some, if not much contemporary art seems to cherish the difficulties it poses the viewer - difficulties that are rarely assuaged, admittedly, by the exegetic branch of the enterprise.

Yet anecdotally it is clear that there is an appetite for contact with contemporary visual art, there is a public that could be drawn, engaged and expanded. The question of promotion, information, advertising - whichever way you look at it - is more important in this process than has hitherto been allowed. As things become tougher - and the inescapable fact is that they have and they are going to go on doing so - Irish cultural institutions are going to have to devise way to woo, maintain and increase their audience.

Aidan Dunne