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This week’s readings, particularly Museums See Different Virtues in Virtual Worlds, highlighted questions that I had not started to fully consider before completing the readings.  Specifically, I became interested in the notion of funding and revenue for museums.  As a World Arts and Cultures major, I tend to focus on the content and curation of museums when i am considering them.  However, as we further discussions about museums’ transition to the digital, new factors begin to arise. As the Gat article highlights, shifting to technology shifts the dynamic of the museum-goers.  Understanding new ways to determine success becomes crucial within this transition.

With the transition to the digital space, museums must consider and contest their goal with their financial concerns.  By this I mean to suggest that museums often, when speaking of their digital information, claim that the transition will make the pieces within the museum more accessible to the public.  However, at what point does making a collection available online hurt the museum’s profit.  Will museums eventually become more concerned with making a profit than distributing their information to the general public? Will they eventually begin charging people to look at their collections online?

The answers to these questions will be very interesting.  It is my hope that museums will be able to keep people visiting in person and online.  However, if this trend is not the case, museums must critically consider what they believe their role to be within society.  Museums that decide to disseminate information to the public in the hopes of expanding education and interest in art will have a very different answer than museums that simply hope to make a profit.  I believe that this transition to the digital gives museums the option to redefine their own role.

The readings for today raised a lot of questions, and also illustrated the diverse ways in which museums are publishing on the internet. I find it interesting how the internet allows for radically new forms of engagement, while also providing a place for museums to perpetuate the same sorts of engagement that they do within a museum setting. E-publishing platforms are simultaneously democratizing and controlling.

For example, the Met’s attempt to make their collection freely available to global publics, which may not be able to access the collection otherwise, is a noble goal. At the same time in doing this the Met is perpetuating traditional art historical narratives (i.e. the art history timeline). Additionally, publishing platforms like the Walker’s are amazing examples of how museums can situate their exhibitions and objects in a broader network of intersecting values and theoretical concerns. Yet at the same time, the museum is responsible for selecting and publishing materials that align with their own ideologies without providing a space for dialogue or external voices with opinions that challenge the museum. However, do the downsides of these digital publishing practices mean that museums should not create these digital platforms?? Do the pros out weigh the cons? 

However, my analysis of these digital platforms is very binary. I think the Walker’s site provides a good starting place of what an institution’s online presence can be: a place where ideas can be exchanged and connected between art scholars and public audiences, and where audiences can be exposed to perspectives beyond the museum. I do agree with the author Orit Gat, that museum’s should invest in creating more digital platforms which aim to foster public engagement and dialogue. Perhaps one way to create meaningful dialogue, would be to post a series of related articles/essays/materials then host some sort of online event, in which people could engage in real-time?

 

 

Museums have undergone a shift from displaying objects as art to experiences as art to now… the entire act of museum-going act as art?

Many museums have instituted rigorous social media campaigns, encouraging patrons to engage with artworks in the digital realm. As part of these efforts, museums have taken to inspiring patrons to post images of artworks on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, with various hashtags designed to increase the viewership of those posts and, by proxy, those works. This strategy has proved particularly successful for experience-based works that utilize an element of spectacle in their production. Searching the hastags #rainroom, #lacmalights, and #infinityroom on Instagram produced 33,507, 12,077, and 11,494 results respectively. Patrons connect with the pieces, it seems, as much by physically experiencing the works as by documenting and sharing their experiences on social media.

On one hand, this trend has the positive power of engaging patrons from around the world, who would not otherwise have the opportunity to view the pieces. Although a viewer on the other side of the world, for example, might not have the means to travel to Los Angeles and walk within the rain room, she can still gain some sense of the piece by viewing photos of it on Instagram. Some engagement with art (however removed from the intended form of interaction with the piece) is still better than no engagement with art.

Yet, in our culture, the pressure to document and share our experiences can overwhelm the experiences themselves. In my museum going, I have observed patrons focusing more on getting the perfect photo of a piece of artwork than on merely being in the presence of the work and reveling in the act of looking. I, too, have found myself guilty of this fault on many occasions. In fact, I have even used my camera as a means of distancing myself from various events or situations (the viewfinder creates a physical barrier between the scene in front of me and my perception of it, allowing myself to detach from what’s playing out).

So, should art be about the object or the experience? And, if a museum or patron involves social media, is art really about either of those things or something completely different?

“Eight years ago, we were saying the Internet is the way to become broad,” Ms. Bernstein said. “I think we should be thinking about that in moderation now.”

The New York Time’s Museums See Different Virtues in Virtual Worlds highlighted two different museums using social media to expand their reach to audiences–the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While the first is a smaller, locally-focused art museum, and the other “an isle in the global archipelago of leading museums,” both museums had similar goals in overcoming geographical boundaries by engaging far-away audiences through digital platforms, the goal echoing that “anyone, anywhere, could participate and would, if given the chance.” Both of these museums explored their options in achieving this goal, and ultimately these two museums diverged in their results: the Met continues to utilize Instagram to give global audiences sample tastes of what the museum has to offer, whereas the Brooklyn museum continues to use their internet presence to give their local audience more intimate insights of the museum’s featured artists.

The article brings up a great argument that digital media’s reach can vary greatly, depending on the goals and intentions of the user. The Met was (seemingly) successful in achieving the global reach that the Brooklyn Museum wanted but could not attain. However, that does not go to say that the Brooklyn Museum is failing to use such technology successfully in their own right; they simply have a different goal from the Met now. The article describes the Brooklyn Museum as using social media’s reach in moderation, with attention now being shifted from a global reach to attain brand-recognition, to a local reach to attain a more well-rounded and intimate artist-audience relationship. Yes, social media holds the potential to transcend physical boundaries and reach global audiences, but there is still value in smaller-scale digital outreach, like when the Alhambra police department began using Wechat to engage with their local (majority) Chinese-speaking population. Although this isn’t an art example, it was an example to me that demonstrated that local audiences are just as important as global audiences; we (and museums) should not lose sight of that capability when it comes to utilizing digital platforms. The impact is different, but effective and meaningful, nonetheless. The Brooklyn Museum therefore can’t be considered necessarily less successful than the Met in their use of digital outreach.

And another point that I found interesting was the Met using Instagram themselves to reach audiences. It goes to show that when trying to reach a larger audience through social media, museums have two options to go about it: either through their own account and their own content, or through their audiences’ accounts by providing engagement.Being in LA, we have so many public art pieces such as murals and even specialized museums (Broad, etc) that allow us to–and actually encourage us to–blast them on our accounts as a tool to generate social capital (while at the same time giving publicity to the art.) The Broad’s digital presence is successful by using the latter, and I wonder if the Met has done that as well.

In all three articles you can tell that big debate going on is what the museum digital presence should be – what should they post, how should they post it, and how those publishings alter the museums relationship with the public. There is a general consensus that a museum’s digital presence has both positive and negative effects. One of the most important results of this is the public’s relationship to the art in the museum. The Art in America article Hromack and Giampietro emphasize the point that many publishing of images deters visitors from coming to the museum to see the work in person. They raise the question of “what does it mean for us to encounter an artist’s work for the first time via Facebook or Instagram or Vine?” This is a valid question – what does it mean for both the viewer and the museum when people choose to experience art through a mediated for only? How much is lost in this exchange, and are museums deterring their own patrons? After all, how likely are you to wait in line to see something that you can see for free and with no hassle from your living room?

I have had this exact experience with art, Jackson Pollock to be exact. We had to look up images of his paintings online after watching a brief documentary about how he creates them. The image of his work in digital format aren’t too great. For example:

That just looks like a lot of splatter on a tan background in the digital format. It wasn’t until years later that I saw a Pollock in person, and got to see the texture on the canvas that I had any appreciation for Pollock’s works at all. Digital formats can tell you nothing of texture, or scale which are frequently two of the most important parts of art (they are usually the “wow” factor, that wonder effect), as is depicted in the article with the example of Walker’s statue.

When I think about what a class on ‘Museums in the Digital Age’ would be about, the New York Times article by Anand Giridharadas perfectly encompasses that. This article was fascinating to read – it was nice to compare the different digital initiatives taken by two huge museums to show that going in a ‘digital’ direction doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing. It was interesting to read about the Brooklyn museum and how instead of just letting their initiatives linger, they took into account that they were only affecting the proximate audience and deciding to try something new. To use the Internet and digital platforms to create an exhibit that is chosen by digital users is brilliant. I would absolutely go to various artists’ studios to check out their work if I thought I might be contributing to something that could end up in the museum. What a perfect way to engage local users, since they were the ones spending the most amount of time on the site anyways.

 

When reading about the Met, I couldn’t help but think back to the digital storytelling video we watched in class about Mr. Peanut from the National Museum of American History. The digital director at the Met commented on how he wanted to enhance the scholarship of the museum, not detract from it. I feel like it’s easy to think of digital platforms detracting from the work because looking at art online isn’t going to give the same effect, but people might not stray from the comfort of their couch if they have access to something there. Instead, he found a way to add to the scholarship by allowing the audience to see what they hadn’t been able to before a digital age. Now he is able to document the restoration of a work, from the time it arrives in its crate to the time it is put on display at the Met. This is similar to the unveiling of the cast iron Mr. Peanut in the Founding Fragments video. I loved being able to see the ‘behind the scenes’ aspect of it, as I’m sure everyone else does as well.

The common theme in all three of this week’s articles the discussion of experiencing objects online through media versus seeing and experiencing them in person. The main distinction between experiencing an object being present at the museum  and viewing an object online is that sense of wonder and resonance – that sense of transcendence and insight you experience when you truly analyze something on a deeper level and learn to appreciate it.

Personally, I don’t frequent museums often, unless the exhibit features something I am already interested in, or something that piques my interest. But how is this interest generated, on a large scale, for the big audience? And what is the role and impact of the Internet? The approach that I think is very smart and effective is the Met’s idea to reveal the upcoming Charles Le Brun collection exhibit in a playful and curious manner by emphasizing the process of taking the paintings to restoration, instead of posting direct pictures of the objects themselves. This strategy really reminds me of the concept of “Gamification” I learned about in my Management class (I’m not permitted to upload the actual article I read for class, but here is another one available online that describes it pretty well). The approach basically holds that in order to be successful in retaining their customers and attracting new ones, brands should “game-ify” their products, meaning they need to have a certain aspect that catches their users’ attention, and keeps them interested, coming back, and wanting more. Brands and companies thus develop clever marketing and promotional campaigns and create ways for consumers to engage with their new products before they even come out.

I think in dealing with the online environment and presentation, museums can learn a lot by looking at how other industries are dealing with “the possibilities of the Net” in order to achieve their goals. But, in making strategic decisions, the most important thing for each museum to consider is its “value proposition” (another business concept, which I think really fits here) – in other words – what is the mission that the museum is trying to accomplish? what impact does it want to have on society with what it has to offer?

The Met’s strategy will obviously not work for all museums, not to mention for all exhibits. The Brooklyn Museum, as discussed in Anan’s article, for example, found that creating games and public engagement platforms online did not end up generating the “global reach” they were aiming for. Instead, they re-assesed their role, goals, and possibilities  and used the technology to maximize their engagement with the current visitors, which turned out to be a more effective use of the technology.

As the director of the Brooklyn Museum reflected on their approach “It exemplified a means of enhancing the local, physical experience of art and of the museum’s collection, as opposed to a way of taking the museum to the wider world”.

In the end, I guess my point is that the question of whether or not to the Internet as a tool for creating digital collections, or promoting upcoming exhibits, or creating deep conversations – is a subjective one, that each institution should answer by considering its role and mission within our global society: “Digital “is not the holy grail…It’s a layer.” 

 

Hromack and Giampietro’s article on “The Art Interface” makes an interesting analogy about the state of museums as they are caught transitioning into the digital world. The idea of art that is no longer an object, but an interface, signifies a transformation in the medium of art’s communication. Art must now speak through technological apparatus, which detractors say dilute the traditional museum-going experience. Further, given that digital platforms are also curated, we are perhaps one step further away from engaging with the art piece in a personal and unmediated way.

Physical aspects of an art piece such as scent, scale and perspective are arguably lost when we try to convey a museum’s collection through non-physical means. However, I think the change in medium can be accompanied by strategic thinking about how to convey information and engage users in ways uniquely catered to that medium. For instance, several software engineers and people in technical professions are being trained in UI/UX design and Human Computer Interaction, learning aspects of which are promising for aesthetically sensitive, yet functional and effective design. A good example of this would be graphic and web designers who have creatively reinterpreted a classic document- the resume. In order to make their applications stand out, developers such as Bobby Leonardi have built themselves an interactive resume.

While these interactive sites are cool, I don’t think they replace the need for a PDF resume, especially when faced with more traditional employers. In the same way, I feel that digital interfaces and the museum experience can enhance one another, but separately can still cater to different audiences. The digital does not attempt to, and is not a replacement for the physical, so digital experiences should in some way attempt to supplement the experience of one visiting a museum. A movie interpretation of a novel should be able to stand on its own, but it is distinct from the novel itself.

Having established that digital interfaces are promising given the increasing amount of attention being accorded to engineer-designer collaboration. I agree with Cat that an institution’s presence online does not make them global, but it does make them more accessible. How they want to leverage and measure their accessibility as a gauge of their success will become easier as more possibilities emerge for infrastructure to be molded to fit institutions’ programming, administrative and outreach needs. Accompanying such changes will be the development of a vocabulary and set of metrics/ indicators to assess how well a museum is doing.

The Internet facilitates new interactions, experiences, and understandings of art within a museum setting. It has spawned new conventions of display that has drastically changed the museum-going experience as a whole. As a generation that exists online, museums have had to adapt beyond catering solely to visitorship and embrace the ever-growing presence that exists online. One thing that the Internet loves is content. They want access to that content and more. They want to download it, hack it, upload it, and remix it; most importantly the online community wants to be a part of the conversation. The difficulty that museums face with the advent of the Internet and new digital platforms is what conversation they want to have. Should a museum’s online presence seek to develop scholarship? Should it entice the online world to step away from their screens and onto the museum’s steps? Should the goal be to reach an audience that would otherwise not have access to or the means of visiting and experiencing the museum itself? Or has the ubiquity that comes with having an online presence demystify and discourage online users from experiencing their works in real life? I personally find this last question most interesting. As someone who loves to actively visit museums and scroll endlessly through Instagram, with the new “hyper-visibility” that applications like Instagram, Snapchat, or Vine propagate, I do feel that objects loose their sense of wonder and resonance when I’m bombarded with their image over and over again online. I don’t think it replaces the experience of actually going to view an object in person, but I think something is lost. With the proliferation of the same image of the same object, I also can get a sense of the kinds of interactions we have with objects today within a museum setting. It has become almost less about the object, and more about the response to that object. People love to comment either through their posting of an image, or a thought on twitter, or a status update on Facebook. I find it interesting that our interactions with the objects themselves have shifted from passive viewing to actively critiquing in our own, small ways.

All in all, I’m for museums having a larger presence online. I think you can gain access to some great works that maybe otherwise wouldn’t have been accessible to you before.

This is one of my favorite online exhibitions (and artists).
Check out this interactive Cindy Sherman exhibit: http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/cindysherman/#/0/

This week’s discussed two different museum’s use of new technologies and digital media to expand and enhance their collections. Both museums shared a similar end goal—to excite audiences and extend their reach far beyond their walls. While the Brooklyn Museum ultimately decided not to continue with their efforts, the Met, on the other hand continues to do more social media activations to expand their reach. For example, to work around the setbacks that China’s bans on Twitter and Facebook created, the Met used Weibo to get in contact with Chinese social media users.

The work that the Met put into their social media accounts are incredibly impressive and it easy to see why they would win awards for it. It is interesting how they were able to achieve a strong balance of both education and scholarship, as well as the technology. They found that the general audiences want to see something raw and unrefined—something they won’t see at an exhibit, a “behind-the-scenes” look.

This actually reminded me a lot of Youtube culture, especially the videos of beauty and lifestyle gurus. These Youtube content creators gain popularity because they give their fans a glimpse of their life. For example, Judy Travis, also known as “itsjudytime,” “itsjudyslife,” and “itsmommyslife,” has millions of avid followers for her lifestyle and beauty channel. While she first started off as a beauty blogger, her channel expanded when she expanded her content to include more of her personal life. Recently, her pregnancy blogs and her daily vlogs with her husband, Benji (“ItsJudysLife”) is watched by millions of fans from around the world. It goes to show how much society values organic content that showcases real life rather than cut and polished videos.

Beyond ItsJudysLife, it is just incredible to see the Youtube culture expand and grow in such a way. If random people from Seattle or Kansas or Los Angeles are able to get their big break and have their reach expand to people they’ve never even met before, an institution as prestigious and large as the Met should be hopeful that they can too achieve the same goal.

Here’s a video from ItsJudysLife for reference: