A story is not just a collection of things or a sequence of events. In this I think breaking down some distinctions between Story, Plot and Narration is very useful.
The framework I like to use, borrowed form numerous scholars in the field over centuries, is that Plot is a sequence of Events, Narration is how those events are Told and Story is what the Viewer experiences through the combination of the Plot being Told in a certain way… or in other words Plot + Narration = a Story Experience in the mind of the Audience.
Once we engage with this idea we can get away from the vacuous notion that ‘everything is a story’ and actually focus on bringing to bear the mechanics and craft to generate an engaging story experience – dramatic questions, a cause and effect chain, a distinct voice in the ‘telling’ of the story, clear point-of-view, characters who are flawed and have desires and obstacles – a story that’s worth experiencing.
How do people who work in museums (curators, exhibit designers, marketers, digital content creators, everyone) learn to tell good stories? Where do they learn that art? Is it taught in school? If you took museum studies, was there a course on story development like a filmmaker or writer might take? Or is the craft handed down, curator to curator? If it isn’t taught formally, should it be?
What do you think? Where do museum story-tellers learn the mechanics and craft of story-telling to tell worthwhile and compelling stories in museums?
I’ve been thinking about blogging and social media lately; about what it means to ‘grow up’ professionally in public, and about what the indiscriminate opportunity to publish – open to anyone, but grasped by relatively few – is doing to our professional dialogue. The longer I think about these issues, the less certain are my conclusions.
This form of instant and global self-publishing, made possible by technology widely available only for the past decade or so, allows for no retroactive editing (apart from fixing minor typos or small glitches) and removes from the act of writing any considered or lengthy review. It is the spontaneous expression of instant thought—impermanent beyond even the ephemera of daily journalism. It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory. The consequences of this for the act of writing are still sinking in.
The consequences for museums, and museum professionals too, are also still uncertain. In his post, entitled Why I blog, Sullivan further proposes that “…the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.” But if this is a broadcast medium, it lingers like a publication. What are the consequences of this for our profession, or for those individuals who choose to engage in this space regularly? Although there are some museum blogs that have been around for years, it is a form still in its nascency.
In November, I have two opportunities to reflect on these questions. The first is in a panel on blogging at MCN2012 with Ed Rodley, Eric Seigel and Mike Murawski, which will consider blogging from both a personal and institutional perspective. We’ll ask what it means “to learn in public, and be an active and consistently open communicator? Where does blogging fit into an institutional, professional and personal identity? How do you manage multiple online identities? How do you deal with the inevitable public criticism and negative reactions to your work? What impact has blogging made on your career and life more generally?”
I’m super eager to work through these questions with smarter and more experienced heads than mine, particularly at a conference like MCN. I loved MCN last year, and with the program for MCN2012 looking great, I cannot wait to head back to the USA. The conference is kicking off with an Ignite session to pop the mood into “stimulating” from the start. MCN2012 will also be a chance to catch up with so many museumers who challenge me, and to follow up in person with some of my favourite museumgeek guest bloggers like Janet Carding, Liz Neely and Matthew Israel. I’m feeling inspired already.
I will also be reflecting on social media as a disruptive force in museum discourse at INTERCOM2012 in Sydney. INTERCOM is ICOM’s International Committee for Management, which “focuses on ideas, issues and practices relating to the management of museums, within an international context.” The 2012 conference has #museumchallenges as its theme, which recalls Rob Stein’s discussions from 2011 (I wonder how the conversation will have altered in a year). The INTERCOM program looks great, and I’m looking forward to learning what museum directors and speakers from around the world see as being the greatest immediate and long-term challenges facing museums now (plus, Jasper will be here!). How different are the concerns of museum professionals in China, Finland or Colombia from my own? And what can we learn from their experiences?
No doubt I’ll pick up lots of new insights to share with those playing at home, too.
Are you attending MCN2012 or INTERCOM2012? Do you think that social media has impacted your work or profile as a museum professional? How do you feel about its influence on your own career, or the sector at large?
It’s not just my newly-found geekout obsession with Geocaching either. It’s been happening on the pages of the Cooper-Hewitt collection alpha, launched last week and designed to let you lose yourself in its pages. For me, at least, it’s been working. But there’s lots at play in this collection, so I thought I’d run you through some of the elements that catch my eye and mouse-clicks.
A collection that’s “of the web” The opening gambit that the collection makes is that it’s the first one self-proclaimed to be “of the web”, linking to (edit – and pulling in from) outside sources like Wikipedia, Freebase and other museum collections. This idea that a museum can gain authority by pointing to/sharing other useful and authoritative content is something that Koven Smith, Nate Solas and others have been talking about for sometime (the Walker being the first to take this approach to their website more generally), and it’s exciting to see it realised on a collection. Just as interesting is the way Cooper-Hewitt reaches out to its users to build the knowledge around the collection via external links, asking:
Do you have your own photos of this object? Are they online somewhere, like Flickr or Instagram? Or have you created a 3D model of one of our objects in SketchUp or Thingiverse? If so then then tag them with ch:object=18452119 and we will connect ours to yours!
This is an exciting move, and I will watch with interest to see how it develops (I cannot yet find an example of an object where a user object has been incorporated in with the museum record, so I don’t know what it will actually look like in practice). This doesn’t seem to actually invite the audience voice into and onto the collection record directly (ie through comments); but it holds promise to weave in external interpretations and iterations of the museum object with the museum’s own interpretation, acting as a form of digital citation. The museum collection record can then act as anchor for discussions/interpretations around the object itself, which to me seems to be an interesting take on the idea of “authority”.
I am curious to see how people react to the invitation to link their images and interpretations of collection objects with the museum’s. Will amateur collectors share their images and knowledge about the objects, and if so, will that force more attention onto the collection itself as the centre for a bigger conversation? (An aside – the museum asks people not to steal their images, so I wonder what the implications are of providing links to other people’s own photographs of collection objects. Does this provide an interesting way to make available images of collection objects without the museum providing them itself?)
A collection that speaks using a natural tongue While I think the inclusion of externally-derived links/information on the collection is the big move that will get museum people talking, there is much more to like in the collection alpha. One of my favourite touches is the plain-text descriptions of works (often also accompanied by images). I am totally charmed by these textual descriptions. Not only does the language seem far less confronting than traditional museum-ese, but in the cases where an image of the actual work is unavailable, this conjures up a beautiful sense of the object itself. I have a peculiar urge to create tshirts and art products from these descriptions, and hang them on my body or my walls (before photographing them and linking them back into the collection, of course). This is my current favourite.
Night scene of a skyscraper consisting of a massed cluster of low tiered sections below culminating in a monumental tower. The structure is illuminated by the city street lights below and streams of light from a chapel- like central section. A white cross is visible at the top of the tower. Pedestrians walk among silhouetted leafless trees below. Photostat #1964-5-13
How beautiful is that? Wouldn’t you love to get 50 different people to draw or create a work of art that met this description, and see what they all looked like?
Simple design solutions These descriptions also serve as a stand-in (as do other natty little invisible design objects) for images where they are unavailable, in a gorgeous response to the problem of digitisation and permissions, otherwise spelled out in this disclaimer:
We can’t show you any images of this object at the moment. This may be because we have not yet digitized this object or, if we do have a digitized image, we don’t hold the rights to show it publicly. We apologize for any inconvenience.
The Cooper-Hewitt has found seemingly simple design solutions to the problems that all museums are facing, of digital rights and access and the cost of massive digitisation projects.
Working with what you’ve got What else? I think it’s great that this collection has been done as an ‘alpha’ release, a minimally viable product. I like that the eccentricities of the raw data are acknowledged. I enjoy the nomenclature used when acknowledging the “village of people” involved in making an object, and the focus on people/creators as well as objects. I love the way that the inconsistencies in data are explained, such as in the “Periods” section.
Our curators use the term period to refer to a chronological timeframe, historical period, or artistic movement.
While dates may be fuzzy or unknown, and the boundaries of some artistic movements are open to interpretation, these descriptions help to create connections among works.
Different curatorial departments use descriptive terms in different ways. Over time, this creates tremendous diversity in the vocabulary that appears in collection records. Inconsistencies, incomplete information, and obsolete terminology are par for the course, and we are working to reduce the instances in which they occur.
These sorts of descriptions explain why an object fits under the umbrella of a particular term, and why some of the descriptions are imprecise or less than perfect. It allows for imperfections in the data, but also acknowledges why they exist. Each period description also includes the number of objects you’ll find within it, and the percentage of the online collection that it holds, ie “American Modern — there are 531 objects made around this time which is about 0.43% of our online collection” which helps give context and proportion to the period in comparison to the larger collection.
Navigating a dozen ways, but still delightfully lost There are nice ways of navigating this collection, which give credence to both what the museum thinks is important (ie departments), some classic parameters (countries, periods, media), and also the options for searching by people, their roles, or random. I also like being able to click on a time period, like “1900”, and getting a page that says this “We may not know what everyone in our database, did during the 1900s but we know about a few of them.”
At the moment, the display seems to be weighted towards those individuals or periods with the most number of objects, and therefore the largest percentage of the online collection, which would be a logical choice in terms of highlighting collection strengths or at least the weight of the collection. I’d be interested in whether there were future ways to weight the collection that might put emphasis on individuals in the collection who were considered to be important, but who doesn’t necessarily have a lot of objects, but right now the approach is logical.
Because there aren’t many images at the centre of the navigation, I tend to click on the most interesting or random words, and I wonder whether this is typical search behaviour or not. I will be interested to see how other people navigate this collection, and whether they get as sucked into it as I do. But so far I have indeed been wandering serendipitously.
There is much more I could write about, but I’ll leave it here. This is a very exciting step for the Cooper-Hewitt, and for online museum collections in general. I look forward to seeing how it develops and is received. Congrats to Seb, Aaron and Micah on the launch. Also, I think that both Aaron and Micah will be at MCN2012, and Aaron is a keynote at NDF2012 in New Zealand. Now is the time to swot up on questions to ask at these conferences on both sides of the world next month.
Have you had a play in the Cooper-Hewitt collection yet? What do you think?
Museums Australia 2012 is wrapping up today with a day targeted at regional, remote and community museums, which I will only get to a little of due to flight times. However, I wanted to write up my experiences of the rest of the conference, which has been hugely interesting. Of particular use was the opportunity to meet people from small, medium and large museums and galleries within Australia; to talk to directors, academics, curators, students, museum marketers, web and digital project managers, business developers and many more, all in the one place. Such close connection with people right across the sector, at all levels, is a rare and precious thing.
The parallel sessions often had multiple strands of talks that I wanted to attend, in large part because of this diversity. There were discussions relevant to my own areas of focus, but also ones that provided very interesting context to other work.
My personal highlights from the program included:
Assoc Prof Joanna Mendolsson’s fascinating presentation on changes in leadership AGNSW in the 1970s, which had interesting resonance with what I’ve been reading lately about the LA MOCA situation.
the session I chaired with Jareen Summerville, Cath Styles and Angela Casey, Jonny Brownbill, and Nicolaas Earnshaw, which provided fascinating insight into mobile and social media, and their complexities. We had time for a great discussion about some of the nuance of physical (and digital) situational complexities; technology and education, and much more.
In an excellent session on developments on exhibition practice, presentations from Georgia Rouette on the experiences of exhibition designers in Australia partnered with Jennifer Blunden’s cool work on meaning and language in exhibition text, Regan Forrest’s consideration of design factors in visitor experiences, whilst Janet Mack and Penny Grist spoke to permanency in permanent exhibitions.
the keynote presentations, particularly from Dr Catherine Hughes (Atlanta History Center), Nigel Sutton, and Michael Mills on museum theatre (with free massages!), and Victor Steffenson from Mulong Productions on living and connected knowledge.
Keynotes from museum directors Roy Clare (Auckland War Memorial Museum) and Dr Robin Hirst (Museum Victoria) both provided interesting context to the work and thinking happening in the sector from a leadership level.
Holly Schulte giving a really fascinating overview about the nuance and complexity around releasing old police photographs from the Police Museum forensic photography archive (like what happens if someone’s grandfather turns up online, and they didn’t know he had a criminal record?).
Dr Dennis Stevenson spoke about living collections and DNA taxonomic testing (really cool innovations in science)
In a great session on art collections as a resource, Assoc Prof Alison Inglis spoke about museums and historiography of Australian colonial art, while my old university lecturer Lisa Slade spoke about contemporary art and the colonial archive.
Joe Coleman sang my song, speaking on open collections.
#drinkingaboutmuseums with a whole pile of newly met colleagues
Even in that snapgrab of highlights (there are many more I could talk to), there is a sense of the depth and also diversity of presentations here at MASA2012. This is something you cannot get in the same way with a niche and targeted conference, which shows why it is so important to have both kinds of event.
But as with all of these kinds of conferences, it was the opportunity to talk to, exchange ideas with, and learn from, engaged and engaging members of the profession that was the most valuable; and it’s the stuff you can only get from being in the room. From being a member, and coming to the conference. From listening to the stories and experiences of others (and only not in the sessions); from finding those like you, and different from you. I genuinely think attending conferences in this sector has been my most valuable professional development tool, whether a museum tech conference, or MASA2012.
It has been an incredibly rewarding week. It has also been a difficult one; posting as I did yesterday. Although not intended to be disrespectful, the post certainly didn’t make clear the respect I do have for the experience and knowledge of people working in the sector, and for the huge amount of work that goes into this kind of network and event. Rather, it was a post motivated by sudden realisation of my own visibility in an incredibly deep, diverse and complex environment; and my grappling with my own inadequacy to speak to what really matters.
But it was also motivated by a real sense of realisation of the vitality and importance of Museums Australia, which I hadn’t had before I attended. This was a catalysing event for opening my eyes to its purpose as a critical mechanism within the museum sector in Australia. MA brings together all the diverse voices, each with different needs and concerns, into a single place to share ideas, talk and learn. Our whole sector is strengthened by its presence, but because it is a member organisation, it is necessarily strengthened by ours.
So if you had a similarly rewarding conference experience to my own, why not:
1. Go home and share what you’ve learned with colleagues
Have a brown-bag lunch session with others from your museum, and share your highlights from the conference with other people. Bring the news of the conference home with you, so that others are aware of the conversations that started and continued here in Adelaide. Spread the news about why attending the conference is a great idea.
2. Recruit a new member
Bring someone new into the organisation. Invite an emerging museum professional or more experienced colleague who isn’t already a member and get them to (re)connect to the organisation.
4. Put in a proposal for #MA2013.
The theme of the conference next year is How museums work: people, industry and nation. The call for abstracts opens next week, so it’s a great opportunity to continue the conversation. Why not find some other people with interesting stories to tell, and connect to put together a whole session? I have already heard cool ideas for sessions for next year; I look forward to seeing how these initial ideas develop by May next year.
5. Email someone you met at the conference.
Given that some of the best things about this kind of thing are the people you meet, make sure you follow up with at least one of the people you connected with at the conference in the coming week.
7. Identify one thing you want to act on after the conference (could be an idea, or a connection with someone new), and follow it through.
This was a great piece of advice given to me during the week. After taking in so much information at a conference like this, it can be hard to distil everything down. Rather than trying to do everything, or act on all the great ideas that you will have absorbed, find one. And follow through on it in your own institution, or your own career.
What about you? What were your highlights? What will you take home with you from Museums Australia 2012?
Thank you to all those who worked so hard on this conference, and on putting together a program that I really enjoyed. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have gained so much new appreciation for the complexity of our sector from being here, including questions about stratification of museum funding. I look forward to seeing how those conversations develop over the coming months before MA2013.
I am writing to you from a quiet dawn moment of sleeplessness whilst at the Museums Australia Conference in Adelaide, South Australia.
This is my first mainstream museum conference, and also my first Australian museum conference. Until now, I have been closeted safely within the confines of the museum technology community, and have been more exposed to American museumers and the stories of their experiences than those of my local sector.
Attending has been eye opening and challenging on different levels. I am learning a lot, and becoming very aware of some major gaps in my knowledge about the sector in Australia. It has only really whilst being here that I’ve really started to consider the complexity of the funding structure that includes federal, state and local government organisations. Despite an awareness on some level that there were these different levels of support with different concerns and mandates, it had not really hit home how much that stratafication shapes what is possible and achievable within the sector. It is something I will have to think much further on.
I can see this complexity emerge most readily in conversations I’ve had about the role, purpose and future of Museums Australia itself. For all is not well in the world of this sector body. There are signs that it is an institution in crisis, with dropping membership numbers and fewer attendees at the conference. On Tuesday the organisation held a meeting to discuss its future, painting a fairly grim picture about the uncertainty of the organisation’s direction, path and, more than anything, relevance.
At that meeting, I spoke up about the fact that I had barely joined the organisation myself, and had only done so for the conference. I addressed that question of relevance of this seemingly slow-moving organisation that feels (to me) so removed from the robust and valued discussions I have about the sector in other spaces. I don’t know whether it was out of place for me to speak up, but I was one of only a very small number of people in the room who appeared to be an emerging professional, and so I felt the need to do so.
What I spoke to was my experience that there doesn’t seem to be the same mechanisms for discussion, for really pulling apart what the sector is doing right now in context of the changing social and economic climate as I have experienced elsewhere – whether at the conference, or as part of the network more generally. Although I am really enjoying this conference, and getting huge benefits from the insight into different areas of the sector, and about the complexities of working within the Australian government structure, there seems to be comparatively little room for joint problem solving or actually trying to nut out what the changes in our world mean for the sector here. The conference has been largely filled with show-and-tell papers, many of which are hugely interesting, but don’t necessarily provide people with either practical skills or the space in which to think through issues confronting them with colleagues. Now, that stuff of course happens in the conversations around bars and dinners, over meals, but this lacks the robustness of debate that can happen when professionals with different experiences are plonked down with microphones and a good facilitator and actually invited to talk about real problems.
Yesterday I did what may have been a professional misstep, and what was certainly a gamble, and ditched my prepared speech in order to just talk about my concerns that we still really don’t understand the point of (many) online collections, beyond the idea of “access” (obviously picking up from Koven’s work in this area). My original talk was stronger than the one I actually presented, and would likely have made my point more eloquently… but in going freeform, there became some room for debate and discussion (and heated temperatures – my session chair did not agree with me on some issues).
A frequent concern that I carry is whether I have the right to speak up about the sector at all. What right do I have to do so? What happens if the noise I make proves to be a diversion away from the issues of real importance; a terrible nag that ignores the things that matter because I am too blinded by my own interests. We all have our own biases, and it is certainly not correct that simply being noisy about an issue means you have something meaningful to say. I ask questions about the things that I cannot or do not understand, and it’s great to get answers. But that doesn’t mean these are the things the sector should be talking about.
This is also why there need to be strong mechanisms for debate; for calling someone out on a bad idea or working out why something cannot or will not work. A comment that someone senior in the field made to me this week was that “People are terribly polite in this sector.” I think he was right. It’s actually one of the lovely and charming things about working in museums, that museum people very much do want to work for the good of the community, and they carry an awareness that causing offense unnecessarily is something to be avoided (it’s an issue people grapple with so often in exhibition curation etc). But politeness can also be a problem, surely, if it prevents people from speaking up when something is rotten in the town of Denmark.
We need more people to join in the debate, and we need to encourage the people from small institutions to speak to their challenges as well as their successes, because without it we cannot even know if we are trying to address the things that matter. It is important not to be blinded by that which is shiny and present (or easy) at the expense of that which matters.
What do you think? What are the most pressing issues facing the Australian museum and gallery sector?
I should say at this point that I am only here at MASA2012 thanks to receiving a partial bursary from the MA Museum Studies National Network.
Superquick post. I just noticed that Jasper Visser has written about the blurring of boundaries between things; between art fairs and libraries, between shops, restaurants and galleries. The delineations between institutions or organisations once seemingly quite distinct are becoming less so. Or, as Jasper puts it, “The label becomes less important.”
As much as we’ve relied on art or museum classifications to tell us about the things in our collections, as institutions we also rely on classifications to tell us about ourselves and each other. Are we an art museum, or a small museum, or a zoo with only the lesser pandas? Are we a museum, or a library, or a librarymuseum? What relationship does a shop located in an airport that sells goods from the Met have to a museum?
Maybe museums, too, need a classification system more attenuated to nuance, like The Art Genome Project. Could we have a Museum Genome Project; in which all our institutions were assessed according to different characteristics or “genes” so that we could better understand how they relate to one another, and to other like institutions (imagine including the whole GLAM sector)? Genes could be created for factors including size, collecting or non-collecting, live animals or not, and so on. The relationships between a museum with books and a library with objects could probably be far more clearly demonstrated than simply with the labels “museum” or “library”. Taking such an approach to the labelling of museums (rather than just their objects) could provide an interesting and highly descriptive imprint of the sector, and the relationships different institutions have with each other. That knowledge could then be used to develop appropriate standards and best practices; or to correctly advocating for the needs of the sector.
What do you think? Do you think a Museum Genome Project would be a useful way to understand the sector, and the complex ways in which different institutions relate to, or differ from, one another? Could this be a useful approach for tackling sector-wide problems, like advocacy, or developing appropriate standards and best practices? And what would the essential genes include?
P.S. – In case you didn’t notice, my imagination has been captured by The Art Genome Project. Fortunately Matthew Israel is going to be at MCN2012, and I am very much looking forward to picking his brain there.
How could anyone think this little guy was less then a Panda?
How different might museum catalogues be if they had been designed for public consumption from the start? A couple of weeks ago, Mia Ridge mused on this question via Twitter. Her timing was impeccable, for even as she asked I was setting up a chat with Matthew Israel, Director of The Art Genome Project at Art.sy which could be a good starting place for those interested in an answer.
Here, I speak to Matthew about the project. (Fair warning – this is a long post, but an interesting read.)
Matthew Israel
[S] Hi Matthew. Can you tell me a little more about The Art Genome Project, how it started and how it all works? What exactly do you mean when speaking of “genes” in an art context? How do they differ from traditional classifications?
[M] Hi Suse. Thanks so much for your interest in the project and for including the project and Art.sy on museumgeek. Before I begin I should say that the best way to learn about how Art.sy and The Art Genome Project work is to go to the website and if you’re interested in learning more of the specifics of The Art Genome Project, we have set up a tumblr.
In short, The Art Genome Project is sophisticated, nuanced metadata that informs and enables related art search. Genes are our names for this kind of metadata (you can also think about them as the possible characteristics that one might apply to art). Examples include art-historical movements, time periods, techniques, concepts, content, geographical regions and even aspects of an artwork’s appearance. There are currently over 500 “core” genes in the project and another 400+ which capture influences on artists of both other artists and art-historical movements.
It’s important to note that the genes we have created are not by any means just invented by us. Fortunately we are the beneficiaries of hundreds of years of art-historical scholarship; we source from discussions in books, periodicals and on the web surrounding contemporary art; and most importantly, we have established consistent communication with all of our partners (i.e. the galleries, museums, foundations, collections and estates that feature their work on Art.sy) in order to understand their thoughts on the genome and the genoming process.
What’s also really significant to explain is that every artist and artwork has their own genome in order to show how different, for example, Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre (his collected works) is in comparison to individual works he created and how greatly individual works can differ from each other. For example, in the case of Picasso, this enables us to explain to users the differences between Blue and Rose period works or between papier-collé works done in 1912 and his almost surrealist works of the 1930s.
Additionally, genes are not tags — though we have many tags on the site — because tags are binary (something is either tagged “dog” or not). Genes, in contrast, can range from 0-100, thus capturing how strongly a gene applies to a specific artist or artwork. While the specific numbers are not important, this enables us to explain to users that Warhol is highly related to the term Pop Art, while an artist who might have been associated with Pop at points during their career–say Ray Johnson–can be represented as less associated to Pop.
[S] I’ve been following The Art Genome Project Tumblr for a little while now. Many of the posts are about the evolution of the genes; about how and why particular genes come into being. For instance, on this post on “Double Genes” Holly Shen discusses how, in early work, you sometimes “combined two separate but related characteristics into one gene, knowing that eventually the time would come when each characteristic would gather enough artworks and artists on its own”, whilst this post speaks of the evolution of economics-related genes. What prompts an evolution in the ‘genetic code’? Were any genes initially created that you’ve since discarded?
[M] It’s really so great for us to hear you’ve been following the tumblr. Please feel free to comment on any of our posts! Your question is a good one. It gets to the crux of how a new format for organizing knowledge evolves (and must evolve) over time. I think at base, since this is the first time anyone has tried to systematize the vocabulary for art history in this particular way, and as with any significant research project, initial ideas always need to be re-evaluated. People say writing is 10% writing and 90% editing and I would say the same of the genome project. That’s the fascinating part. It’s like more traditional art-historical work. You’re given a set of objects, you create sets according to certain similarities and then see how they hold up to scholarly inquiry and then you re-evaluate and re-evaluate again, etc.
A basic example of how we have split up a gene is a gene we created for Light. We initially thought having works by Impressionists in which light is a central aspect of the image would be interesting to see next to contemporary works which use Light as a medium. However as time went on, we realized more and more that this was confusing for users and these were really satisfying as their own categories. And there were enough objects in each category to split them apart.
[S] How do you ensure consistency across the different genetic coders or mappers, particularly with a system that is still evolving?
[M] Consistency is a huge priority, maybe one of the top priorities of The Art Genome Project. Historically, the kind of data entry we are doing and the production of a shared set of knowledge for how to use a system such as ours has been undervalued or unsystematized because the set of users is a set of specialists working in disassociated institutions or contexts. Hopefully our focus on the public and emphasis on the fact that this vocabulary is an educational tool will bring more exposure to and appreciation for this type of work. Though we can improve on consistency at Art.sy, we are doing various types of things to establish standards, such as our establishment of an Art Genome Wiki (a kind of knowledge base for genoming); weekly Genome Team meetings; and our use of programs like Basecamp, Trello, Pivotal Tracker and teamwide chat to keep revisions and discussions as transparent as possible. In this way, we have realized maintaining consistency is not just about top-down review and establishing rules, but it’s also about constant dialogue.
[S] When you and I recently spoke about the Project, you mentioned a desire to document aspects of art that are more integral to an artist’s practice or concerns than might be included in traditional classifications. What genes have emerged in response to this idea?
[M] Good questions. Regarding other criteria for art, traditional art object classification systems (and I generalize here, because there are various exceptions) really have focused on the specific details of objects (dimensions, medium, provenance) and one subject heading, however The Art Genome Project–while we capture all of these more specific details–is focused much more on what is going on in the work and in an artist’s practice. It’s more like what one would lecture about to educate someone about an artist or artwork.
Regarding “new” genes, yes, we represent the well-known aspects of an artist’s works but also try to show additional aspects that maybe most users don’t know about in order to give voice to the diversity of ways to understand and interpret artists and works of art but also to the complexity of works of art in a way maybe traditional avenues have not had the ability to do. What’s also interesting is we have the advantage of not having to be held within the boundaries of a book or its formatting. This is definitely a liberation for art-historical thinking I think, yet at the same time it is something entirely different to create what such an educational experience looks like, feels like and translates to the user.
[S] Something else that resonated when we spoke was your expressed desire to create ‘valuable educational metadata’. There are a couple of things that I want to explore about this idea. The first is the implication that you are rethinking art classification with a public end user in mind; and more specifically, a public learner. What impact do you think this has had on the planning and execution of the Project?
[M] I would say this has been the major priority of the project. We see The Art Genome Project as the structure for a new pedagogical experience. Many of those involved in the project are educators or come from an educational background and I think this experience informs so much of what we do. One major example is the fact that we define our genes on the site, so that in the process of searching and clicking on things you like or gravitate towards or find interesting, you are being given educational texts that explain specifically why you might enjoy these connections. We also have made a real effort to create text on all parts of the site (but primarily in our artist biographies and gene definitions) that is very clear to the user but not “dumbed down.” I don’t think this kind of content is that available to the mass audience.
[S] You’ve written about mapping serendipity with the Project. Do you think that the Project could actually challenge or disrupt art education, by drawing equivalencies and parallels between works of art that might be “genetically” related, but not historically? In a Time Magazine article (behind paywall), the equivalencies drawn by The Art Genome Project are problematised thusly:
Another problem Art.sy faces is its classification system, which rubs some artists the wrong way. “I don’t think what I am doing has anything to do with Cindy Sherman,” says British artist Jonathan Smith after being told the site links his work to hers via a staged-photography gene. “That sounds like something a programmer would think of.”
Given that classification has played such a major role in the history of art, do you think drawing new equivalencies between historical works of art, or between historical and contemporary works, could have a disruptive effect? As an art historian, how do you feel about this?
[M] Honestly, while the term “disrupt” is often used with new websites to describe how they deal with a particular historical space, I don’t think about The Art Genome Project as disruptive. In truth, the job of art historians, and furthermore, art critics, curators, etc. is to draw new equivalences anyways and we are just doing the same thing in a different way. Yes, here there is the term “gene” or as you say “genetically related” but it’s not really all that different from an historian exploring new relationships between artworks. I also should say that our genoming is based on historical information so it would by no means contradict historical connections. I should also say that we have gotten some of our best feedback from art historians, which we have used to improve the site.
[S] Of course, the Art Genome Project isn’t being done with strictly educational outcomes in mind; it also has commercial ones. Do you think the overlapping interests of the Project could compromise its educational value?
[M] It’s funny, I don’t often get asked that. To be completely honest, there are really very few (if any) commercial constraints on The Art Genome Project. As I am sure you realize, this situation is extremely important as we have many non-profits involved (museums, foundations, estates). Art.sy’s goal is to make all the world’s art accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and that’s really been the focus of our efforts over these past few years.
[S] Finally, I am curious about the maintenance and scaling of such a labour-intensive approach to classification. Is the Project, and therefore Art.sy, limited in how big it can get? Do you have curators in the same way a museum does; making decisions about what is included in the Project?
[M] We’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. We do have a review process, of which I have already spoken, but we are definitely looking at how much we can scale without losing any of the quality we demand out of our genoming. What’s amazing about being here is that Art.sy is half engineers and half art professionals so we are not tackling this question alone (with the tools of art historians), but with significant input from our engineers. I’m honestly consistently amazed at how helpful those involved in tech (which again, is half of Art.sy) are in helping us deal with our problems, particularly regarding more efficient processes and workflow. One thing we are looking at is how much of the process we can automate so that an input we are needing to make is processed in the optimal manner. We also accomplished a lot this summer in a collaboration between members of the genome team and an engineer on our appearance genes. The eventual goal was to use our data to train a program to understand more specific recognition of the visual characteristics of artworks and we’re currently in the process of evaluating some of our conclusions. You can read more about this on our most recent blog post.
[S] Ok, now it’s your turn. What haven’t I asked about that excites you with the Project? What else should the museum community know about it?
[M] Great way to end. Hmmm. What excites me? I hope you don’t mind that I made a list…
Creating a classification system that retains the nuances and mysteries within art and allows anyone with an Internet connection the opportunity to learn about art and art history.
Open sourcing our research on our tumblr.
Working on a truly collaborative project, with those from the arts but also with computer scientists, engineers and mathematicians.
Research we have undertaken on The Art Genome’s roots, specifically the history of art classification systems.
Giving people (who have wanted to learn about art but didn’t know where to start) a place to start.
Trying to capture “happy accidents” in the classroom, i.e. mapping the serendipitous connections that happen when you teach, to help educate.
Trying to create an educational experience that is active, exploratory, and self-motivated.
The possibility of educators using Art.sy as a teaching tool, to explore the history of a movement or to see how a term’s interpretation has changed over time, such as Collage or Documentary Photography.
Getting other people (like you) excited and involved in what we are doing!
[S] Thanks so much, Matthew! There is much to think about here.
Matthew Israel is an art historian (PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University) and is currently the Director of The Art Genome Project at Art.sy. His book on American artists’ political engagement during the Vietnam War, Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War, is forthcoming in Spring 2013 from University of Texas Press. Matthew has taught modern and contemporary art history as well as critical reading and writing at New York University; Parsons, The New School for Design; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He has also written articles for Art in America, Artforum, Frieze and ARTnews and contributed to books and catalogues for The College Art Association, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, Gagosian Gallery, Cheim & Read Gallery, and Marianne Boesky Gallery. Additionally, Matthew has worked as the Administrator at the Peter Hujar Archive, the Director of Operations at The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation and as a research or press consultant for the New Museum, the Art Spaces Archives Project, Matthew Marks Gallery and Gagosian Gallery.
What do YOU think? Does this kind of tech-enabled and public-focussed classification have implications for museums? Could you imagine a similar idea working in a non-art context?
There must have been a collective intake of breathe from museum professionals around the world last month when Matthew Inman from The Oatmeal put the call out to build a Goddamn Tesla Museum, inviting donations and support via Indiegogo. The crowdfunding project has now raised more than $1.2million, with the city of New York promising to match $850,000 of that money. Imagine that. More than 30,000 people have pledged money towards an as-yet-nonexistent museum/science centre. Science! Nerds! Money for a museum! How totally rock and roll.
Despite the attention that has come to it since Inman’s involvement, the project isn’t a new one. The Tesla Science Center (formerly known as the Friends of Science East, Inc.) has been formally active since February 14, 1996, so although the Tesla Science Center has now come to the fore with the crowdfunding project, it has not simply appeared out of thin air. This has been a long-burning campaign that has just undergone a radical shift in prominence. From being a pet-project and passion for the TSC, something that must at times have seemed no more than a pipe dream, the Tesla Science Center now holds potential to be real. What a colossal shift in the course of a month.
The shift in attention, prominence, and possibility brings with it all kinds of interesting questions. First, let’s assume that the FSE does acquire the property (there are other bidders, like Milka Kresoja). What then? Are the Board of Directors for the TSC in a position to capitalise upon their sudden rush of funds and support? Is the museum actually feasible? And how will those thousands of people who have contributed to the project feel when it starts to move from months into years before the Tesla Museum becomes real?
This is one of the as-yet-untested aspects of such a big crowd-funding project; can a project built on hype and excitement, which invites emotional and economic investment (some of it significant) from people all over the world, continue to hold attention, to live up to its own build up? Or is there an inevitable backlash when projects change, adapt, or even fail?
Back before I dedicated myself to solving the many mysteries of museums, I worked in the music industry, so hype is something I have a fairly keen interest in. I have watched indie bands pick up buzz as early adopters gathered around and invested in them; knowing that they were in on something secret and special; a band with the compelling allure of potential. Once that buzz starts, capitalising upon it relies on timing and maintaining momentum. A band full of potential that waits too long to impress and live up to their early promise may all too soon be written off as a casualty on the hunt for the next big thing. Hype, buzz, potential – whatever word you want to use for it – can be all too fleeting, particularly if the return on investment is a long time coming.
Marketing company Gartner uses hype cycles to help characterise what happens following the introduction of new technologies. The hype cycle follows five phases, being a trigger in which “Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven”; a peak of inflated expectations; a trough of disillusionment, when “interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver… Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters”; a slope of enlightenment; and finally a plateau of productivity, in which “Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.” Although the methodology is intended for technology adoption, such a cycle can likely also apply to this situation.
Gartner Hype Cycle
It is in this space that the Goddamn Tesla Project will prove to be an interesting test case. Mark Walhimer estimates that it takes between 5 and 10 years to start a museum, but if comments on The Oatmeal’s post like this one – “Good luck Matthew! This Goddamned Tesla Museum needs to happen. RIGHT MEOW!!!!” – give any indication, then the slow-burn from now to then might indeed cause supporters of the project to fall into the trough of disillusionment.
On the Indiegogo fundraising site, it is acknowledged that:
Even if we raise the full amount and end up with $1.7 million, this isn’t enough to build an actual museum / science center. But it will effectively put the property into the right hands so it can eventually be renovated into something fitting for one of the greatest inventors of our time.
Similarly, on The Oatmeal’s FAQs about the project, Matthew Inman has written:
If this is a success, can you build a museum right away? What happens next?
The property the laboratory is on is a bit of mess. It needs to be cleaned up, restored, and there’s a ton of work to be done to actually turn this into something worthy of Tesla’s legacy. The money we’re raising is simply to secure the property so no one can ever mess with it and guarantee that it’s a historic site. It opens up years and years of time to figure out how to build a proper Nikola Tesla museum. However, I would love to have some kind of Nikola Tesla festival on the property on July 10th of 2013 (Nikola Tesla Day), and have some kind of zany Tesla-coil-BBQ-cookout.
The short-term goal of a Tesla Festival may be enough to satisfy those who have invested in the project to see it as being worthwhile. Such an event would give a sense of culmination and momentum; both important for capitalising upon early hype and potential. But we aren’t likely to get real perspective on whether crowdfunding a museum from scratch can prove to be a rewarding model for either the museum or its funders for many years. In this way, the Goddamn Tesla Museum is likely to prove an interesting test case. It might be here that some real questions around museum innovation can be answered.
What do you think? Can interest in a project like this one be sustained over time, or is it inevitable that those enthusiastic geeks the world over will become disillusioned as the Museum takes years to move from idea to actuality?
What better way to spend Ask A Curator day than by drinking about museums? Not only can those on Twitter join in the worldwide Q&A with curators by following the #askacurator hashtag, those in Sydney can hold their own discussions about all things museums. This will give us ample opportunity to dissect the curatorial chatter, and add a little of our own. And this #drinkingaboutmuseums is also nicely timed to whet the appetites of those going to Museums Australia 2012 the following week.
We are changing things up a little for this edition of the event, and going to our first bar. What makes this extra cool is that Mojo Records Bar came into existence in response to digital downloading, when the owner of Mojo Music decided to face the music (oh, terrible pun) and look for a new revenue source. So now Sydney has its first record bar. Is there a better location for a discussion about museums adapting to the digital age than in a bar that has done exactly that?!
#drinkingaboutmuseums – Sydney When: 5.30pm Wednesday 19 September 2012 Where: Mojo Records Bar (73 York Street, Sydney NSW 2000) Who: You! And me too.
If you haven’t been before, and want to get in touch, comment here or follow the #drinkingaboutmuseums hashtag on Twitter. Looking forward to seeing you all there.
Given the ostensible parameters and protocols of the call for contributions to this volume, I am given to imagine myself as one of a group of contributors situated “outside” a (museum) “profession” and “looking in,” as a “scholar who has written books about museums but who [is] trained and work[s] in other disciplinary areas.” In accepting the generous invitation to contribute to the collection, I am nonetheless placed, however provisionally, and according to the self-admittedly tentative nature of the editorial formatting of the volume, in a curiously dichotomous relationship to those “looking from within the profession.”
So says art historian Donald Preziosi, by way of locating his contribution to the 2006 book Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (pp74). His statement raises interesting questions about the positioning of those who write and speak about the museum and its profession, and their space within or external to it. This is particularly the case, given that only pages before, Preziosi issued a provocation that:
There seems to have been, at least among “insiders” or museum professionals, an endemic, across-the-board abandonment of critically engaged and historically responsible attention to the fundamental questions about the functions and social and political roles of museums. The disjunction between the “external” critical and philosophical literature relating to museums, museology, and collecting and that emanating from “within” the profession is very great and growing. (pp70)
He critiques the sector as an outsider, a position he has been “placed” into, simultaneously arguing that those on the “inside” have abandoned “critically engaged and historically responsible attention to the fundamental questions about the functions and social and political roles of museums.” It seems he slays “insiders” for their lack of engagement, whilst distancing himself from such a position.
Is his criticism of museum professionals valid? Honestly, I don’t know. The conversations I have within the sector are often highly engaged and highly critical; in recent years there has seemingly been a noticeable turn towards theoretical and critical discourse. Yet most of the time business as usual continues (as it must). Critical reflection is a great luxury, but one often far removed from the practicalities of actual work.
Still, his ideas leave their stain on me because I can’t identify exactly where I am positioned within the sector. Before my first conference, my PhD supervisor cautioned me that as soon as I mentioned that I was an academic, I might be dismissed summarily as unable to speak to the ‘real concerns’ of the profession. And I know from discussions with now-close friends that this indeed happened (although fortunately not to such a great extent as to prevent later connection). As such, I now go out of my way to prove my credentials as a legitimate member of the museum community. I work in museums, I volunteer. My friends and colleagues, those whose ideas I respect, are museum professionals far more frequently than academics. I spend as much time working in the sector as possible, and hope that it’s enough to clean me of the taint of “outsider”.
But paradoxically, perhaps it is this very mark of difference that gives me the most freedom to criticise and speak to the philosophical concerns of the sector. Were I welded to a single institution, any criticism that I might make could be seen implicitly as a criticism of my home museum. Being outspoken under those circumstances could cut too close; creating internal tension that would make the business of getting work done much harder. Speaking out from the outside comes with a freedom rarely afforded to true insiders, because the possible costs are only personal and not institutional. (Incidentally, I also wonder if this isn’t at least part of the reason that the MuseTrain authors have chosen to stay anonymous thus far.)
This issue is on my mind now for two reasons. The first is because of a conversation I had with an old friend yesterday. He is an artist whose early work highly controversially questioned some unspoken and seemingly unquestionable ideas here in Australia. This work, which he was not “allowed” to make but did anyway (his then youthful naivety giving him a sense of bulletproofness) raised and continues to raise very significant critical questions. It also left him out in the wilderness as an artist, unshowable for a significant period of time afterwards. Now, with hindsight, he questions his own right to make the work that he did, to critique the situation in the way he did; doubts raised in part because of his outsider status from that community. His right and ability to ask questions are diminished because he is on the outside, but they are questions not being raised elsewhere or from the inside. Preziosi’s criticism of the museum profession equally rings true of my friend’s experiences as an artist.
In addition, I am starting to think more carefully on my position in this sector as the end of the PhD looms more forcefully on the horizon. Although I still have more than a year until completion, there has of late been a small chorus of people asking what I intend to do after it’s finished. Will I go into academia, or work in a museum? Where do I want to work? What do I want to do?
They are difficult questions to answer with any certainty or clarity of vision. Once I make a choice, particularly between working in a museum (insider) or as an academic (outsider), then I am effectively choosing to align myself in a particular direction. I am either in; or I’m out. I can speak as one of you, or I can choose a different voice altogether. It will become harder and harder to straddle the divide between the two, which is what seems to make the current space I inhabit so interesting.
My own experience with museum practice and with theorizing about museums has been gained through internships in museums and more than two decades of academic investigation. By following both of these avenues I hope to have found common ground between those who reflect upon museums from a cultural perspective and those who know them by working inside.
She intentionally positions herself as someone who can speak from within, and without. Is this a necessary requirement for those who do wish to consider and critique the institution as theorist? Are her reflections upon museums more or less critical as a result of this urge to bridge the divide between professional and theorist? Are they more palatable than if she did not spend time in institutions? Is it, in fact, the place of museum professionals to critique the institution, or to work towards its effective functioning?
Obviously this post comes by way of my own existential crisis career concerns, but I wonder if it doesn’t scratch at a larger and more pervasive itch. Do museums need “outsiders” to critique and provoke discussion about fundamental issues? Or can those working within the sector, or within particular institutions, ask unanswerable (and sometimes un-askable) questions and continue to function effectively on the inside? Are there people who do manage to successfully straddle the divide between insider/outsider, or is it inevitable that in a relatively short time I will have to choose?
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