Mega and micro philanthropy

Two stories on supporting arts institutions - at either end of the spectrum - got me thinking today.

A New York Times profile of Eli Broad characterises his support of LA arts and educational institutions as "aggressive philanthropy" conducted with a "business-focused method". It contains this interesting quote:

“Eli is not the problem,” said Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, who sparred with Mr. Broad when he sat on and eventually resigned from that museum’s board. “The problem is that we don’t have enough Elis in Los Angeles to balance out his generosity and the power of his influence.”

Meanwhile a post on Jen Bekman's 20x200 website describes the collaboration with artist Valerie Hegarty to sell prints to benefit the Brooklyn Museum. In a nice quid pro quo, all members of the Museum's entry-level 1stFans membership programme who renewed their membership before a certain date get a copy of the print; and everyone that buys a copy of the print (the largest edition is already gone) get a free membership. In his own post about the collaboration, Brooklyn Museum's membership manager Will Cary notes

I grow more convinced every day that unique partnerships and creative incentives are the key to acquiring and retaining members.

A lot of effort goes into both of the above - the wooing and management of single, mega donors and multiple micro donors. I think that, in the American context especially, both are needed. Both pose their own set of challenges around rewarding and retaining givers. What I think Americans do particularly well is innovate and adapt to make this happen.

New Zealand fundraising/membership programmes seem to have remained pretty static for at least the last decade. At the end of last year I saw an ad (perhaps in an Art+Object catalogue?) announcing a new kind of supporters group for the Auckland Triennial, which seemed like a small new move, at least in targeting a specific demographic. If I remember correctly you got an invite to a cocktail function and a Karen Walker t-shirt. I can't for the life of me find any trace of this online, including the Triennial site - anyone got anything?

Love that list

Last year Umberto Eco put out 'The Infinity of Lists', a book that accompanied the exhibition he put together after a two-year residency at the Louvre. From The Art Newspaper

“The subject of lists has been a theme of many writers from Homer onwards. My great challenge was to transfer it to painting and music and to see whether I could find equivalents in the Louvre, because frankly when I suggested the subject I had no idea how I would write about visual lists,” says Eco.

I was reminded of this yesterday when I spent some time on the International Astronomical Union website. A book I'm currently reading about the astronomers William Herschel and Caroline Herschel quoted from the IAG's naming conventions:

• Trojan asteroids (those that librate in 1:1 resonance with Jupiter) are named for heroes of the Trojan War (Greeks at L4 and Trojans at L5).
• Trans-Jovian Planets crossing or approaching the orbit of a giant Planet but not in a stabilizing resonance (so called Centaurs) are named for centaurs.
• Objects crossing or approaching the orbit of Neptune and in stabilizing resonances other than 1:1 (notably the Plutinos at the 2:3 resonance) are given mythological names associated with the underworld
• Objects sufficiently outside Neptune's orbit that orbital stability is reasonably assured for a substantial fraction of the lifetime of the solar system (so called Cubewanos or "classical" TNOs) are given mythological names associated with creation.
• Objects that approach or cross Earth's orbit (so called Near Earth Asteroids) are generally given mythological names.

I was in love. Classical references, technical jargon, extreme specificity, and a dollop of crazy? They had me at "names of pet animals are discouraged".

If you share my delight in such things, you should definitely check out the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature: here's a snippet from the page about the naming of planetary features



And another: craters on the moon are named after:

Deceased scientists, scholars, artists and explorers who have made outstanding or fundamental contributions to their field. Deceased Russian cosmonauts are commemorated by craters in and around Mare Moscoviense. Deceased American astronauts are commemorated by craters in and around the crater Apollo. Appropriate locations will be provided in the future for other space-faring nations should they also suffer fatalities.

Crowd forces

Crowdsourcing is a short-hand term used to describe putting out a task that would have usually been performed in-house to a large group of people. Sites like Threadless, and tools like the Brooklyn Museum's 'Tag!' game epitomise how crowdsourcing can work beautifully on the web.

Today I noticed two new crowdsourcing projects.



First I saw a tweet from Christchurch Art Gallery, talking about the way their Friends group is geo-tagging their collection. As far as I know this is not being done online, but the ethos holds - a group of people donate their time & knowledge to perform a task that would usually have been done by a staff member (but which might never have been a high enough priority to get on to their work plan).

Of course, volunteer projects inside galleries and museums are nothing new. But it's unusual to hear about them, and for me at least, unusual to see the benefit. I'm guessing the combination of a regionally-focused collection and a supporters group who lives in the region is going to help make this tagging very accurate. You can see the tagged collection items here - each full record has a link to a Google Map at the bottom.

Also today - the V&A launched a beta crowdsourcing site, this one designed to get the public to help identify the most pleasing crops of photos of collection items to use in their online browse.



Obviously this is a lot more complicated than what Christchurch is doing. It's also a little buggy around the edges (my tally fell off part way through my session, so I couldn't see how many images I've completed) and take a few goes to get the hang of - you have to make several choices related to each item before it's 'completed', but the signals that tell you this are hard to pick up.

Unlike the Christchurch example, I wonder how accurate this will be. When I started making choices, I realised I didn't really know what criteria I was meant to be using. Did they want the colour scale in, or out? Did they want as much of the item as possible, or a great detail? In the case of the item below, what *is* better - side on or bird's-eye? What if I thought a crop looked great, but it was better photo than it was a representation of the item? And did anyone agree with the choices I was making?

Hopefully the V&A is following the release early, release often mantra, and will keep tweaking the in response to the feedback they're getting. It's a great concept, and deserves that.

Web muster

I read really fast. Too fast. I think the reason I enjoy re-reading books is that I often don't remember half of what happened (even the endings are occasionally surprises, embarrassing as that is to admit). This year I'm trying to slow down and keep track of my reading, and a friend suggested Goodreads. If you're interested in social bookreading sites (stay turned for further explication of my 'Being Alone Together' thesis once I've fully though it through) check out this Wired article.

The IMA is previewing their new website, the result of several years' hard work: a detailed post with loads of pictures & access details for the live preview is on the IMA blog.

I'm tracking stuff like the Newspaper Club and MagCloud with interest; here's an article on on-demand publishing featuring the awesome Derek Powazek.

Thomas P Campbell interviewed on his first year running the Met.

What people will pay for

When I scrolled through my overnight tweets this morning (yes, this is another Twitter-related post) I saw this, from Will Cary, the membership manager at Brooklyn Museum:


And just now I spotted this, re-tweeted from the Brooklyn Museum account:


The show they're talking about is 'Who Shot Rock and Roll', which closes today in the US (yesterday for us New Zealanders). It's been very popular, and it sounds like lines to get into the show for its final weekend are significant.

One of the benefits of a Brooklyn Museum membership is that you get to bypass the lines. A normal individual membership costs $55. Suggested admission at the Museum is $10 for adults. This weekend, more than six times the normal number of people bought a membership, presumably so they could bypass the lines. I can't see any special promotion of the queue-skipping powers of membership attached to the exhibition promotion on the Museum website, but it's strongly featured on their Twitter feed; lots of people are talking about the show on Twitter as well.

It's tempting to see this as a little parable about what will tip people over from thinking about buying a membership to actually doing it. They're not buying a discount on entry (a normal Friends benefit in New Zealand) - they'e buying something that gives them the advantage of easier access.

Contrast this with City Gallery Wellington's current Yayoi Kusama show. Friends of the Gallery get a 20% discount on the entry charge ($8 instead of $10) but no queue-skipping privileges. There don't appear to be any members-only days or extended hours for Friends - based on the above, I predict that this would have attracted a bunch of new sign-ups, especially if implemented after people had seen the crazy free Wednesday queues. It might be something for galleries hosting blockbusters to look into - after all, sometimes there's nothing nicer than flashing a card and getting waved through ....

#followamuseum

Jim Richardson 0f Sumo has dubbed February 1 follow a museum day, in an attempt to draw Twitter users' attention to museums.

The follow a museum site has a useful country-by-country directory of museum Twitter accounts.

Here's what I look for when I'm thinking about following an organisation on Twitter:

• Is there a named person/people in charge of the Twitter account?
• Is the activity on the account regular, or are there random blips of tweeting?
• Is the activity all around promoting exhibitions and events (which are only really interesting to me if they're in my home town) or is there more behind-the-scenes information?
• Is the stream just made up of announcements and retweets of positive comments, or does it look like people at the museum are actually talking to the people following them (about things other than the museum itself)?

A note on hashtags

A hashtag- a # placed in front of a word or acronym in a tweet, such a #followamuseum - is a way of associating messages with a particular theme.

The power of the hashtag is seen particularly in search; following this link will take you to a Twitter search page that dynamically updates as new Twitter messages carrying the #followamuseum tag are posted.

Engage your community conference, Christchurch

Engage Your Community
Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology
16 April 2010
Registration between $40 and $85

Last year I attended and gave a workshop at the Wellington version of this event. It was awesome.

The Christchurch version looks equally interesting and useful (not to mention cheap as chips). The programme is structured as a series of short workshops, bookended with a presentation and a panel discussion. It looks like a good chance to survey a range of free or cheap web-based services that could help you with internal and external comms, from how to save money on long-distance calls by using Skype, to how to make beautiful word images using Wordle, to how to run a fund-raising campaign on Facebook.

In a little shout-out to my peeps, I'd highly recommend the sessions being run by Christchurch City Libraries staff, and Emma McCleary's Facebook workshop.

Good sports

The Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art are wagering artworks on the outcome of the 44th Super Bowl, where the New Orleans Saints will take on the Indianapolis Colts for the title.

Tyler Green has been shuttling between the two directors (Maxwell Anderson and E. John Bullard). The bet now stands at a three-month loan from the home-town of the losing team to that of the winning team; the IMA has put up a Turner, NOMA a Lorrain.

There are three things that I love about this. Firstly, it's fun - it's unusual to see museums being playful in a way that's not a bit saccharine. Secondly, it's been conducted in the real voices of the directors concerned, and doesn't feel like a PR stunt - this is helped in particular by Anderson being a steady Twitterer. And thirdly, it breaks with that weird culture-sport dichotomy, and says actually, people can be interested and passionate about both.

Magic

I watched this astounding video at my desk yesterday, and it brought me to tears

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

The EyeWriter is a combination of lost-cost hardware to create an eye-tracking device and FOSS software that enables graffiti writers and artists with paralysis to draw with their eyes. It is amazing.

Thanks to Matt G at the IMA for bringing this project to my attention in his awesome blog post about graffiti, technology, and the web.

Ronnie van Hout talk

Ronnie van Hout
11am-12pm
Friday 29 January (thanks DC)
Soundings Theatre, Te Papa
Free entry

More information

You win some, you lose some; one man's meat is another man's poison; and other cliches ...

One US news outlet lists 'curator' as one of the Top 50 Jobs for 2010

Another puts 'curator' in the list of Stressful Jobs that Pay Badly


via 'Ten tips for Aspiring Curators', Hyperallergic

Web muster

Adrian Searle reviews Christian Boltanki's Monumenta installation

Brooklyn Museum announces new copyright functionality on its online catalogue

Hoefler & Frere-Jones launch a new font with their usual literary verve

The visual identities of the 2000's