High rotate

I have taken a #fridayoff and this new Grimes track is my song for the day
 

There are more museums in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonalds – combined

Christopher Ingram of the Washington Post breaks down the American Institute of Museum and Library Services' latest tally of active museums in the U.S. - ~35,000, nearly 50% of which as historical societies / local heritage / historic houses & sites. Art museums account for 4.5% of the count, and when you break the figures down to a per capita view, some strange pictures arise ...

See Hyperallergic for more commentary

On the radio

It's all about Wunderruma: New Zealand Jewellery.

I'm still laughing

At this Onion article - Shitty Museum Doesn't Even Have a Mona Lisa. Kudos to the MFA Boston for handling it well

.@TheOnion readers, we hear your concerns. As a gesture of good will we will install a da Vinci exhibit next year: http://t.co/vJowECvr6R
— Museum of Fine Arts (@mfaboston) June 10, 2014

In more serious reading: Suse Cairns asks 'Do museum professionals need theory?'. As the comments tease out: yes, they do. Plus hands-on experience. Plus local knowledge.

High rotate

Sometimes it's just fine to go with the mainstream

Book-sniffer

A friend of mine refers to me, somewhat disparagingly, as a paper-sniffer, because I haven't switched from print to e-books. This is actually less because I'm fetishistic about the nature of print publications than because e-readers still feel to me like 'work' reading - it's because of the one-page-at-a-time layout, which reminds me irresistibly of photocopies for tutorials, reports for reviewing, or documents for proofreading. Two pages facing each other are leisure reading: one page squarely in front of me maybe be informative, important, interesting, but it is still something that has got to be gotten through, not something to enjoy.

You can't escape the discussion of the ongoing allure of the printed book if you hang about on the web or with publishing types though. If you're interested in perfume as well, this is doubled. I even own L'Artisan's Dzing!, meant to evoke circus tents and excitement. Luca Turin and Tanya Sanchez spot it admirably though: vanilla cardboard

Olivia Giacobetti is here at her imaginative, humorous best, and Dzing! is a masterpiece. Dzing! smells of paper, and you can spend a good while trying to figure out whether it is packing cardboard, kraft wrapping paper, envelopes while you lick the glue, old books, or something else. I have no idea whether this was the objective, but I have few clues as to why it happened. Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good-quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us. 

And if you want to grok that book-to-scent magic even more scientifically, you can check out this guide to contributing compounds to 'old book smell'.

Recommended reading

A lengthy, detailed, passionate and understanding piece about the challenges of maintaining the Smithsonian's collections.

High rotate

New just in time for Friday morning, 'Little Mouth' by Los Campesinos!


And from this week's typing playlist, two bits of Jon Hopkins
 

On the radio

On the radio today I'll be talking about a new conservation method used to refresh a Rothko, a man so enamored by a Rembrandt that he stole it,  and a new British survey about artist fees.
 

Round the web

Some things I read over the weekend:

The gift shop at the 9/11 memorial museum has taken a lot of flack, especially over a USA-shaped cheese platter with three hearts marking where planes went down on September 11. Fast Company looks at this and gift stores in other museums that mark traumatic moments in history.

More Intelligent Life recruits four companies to re-imagine indie bookshops. The results are pretty bland - except the last, which goes 50 years into the future to imagine robot-assisted hand-bound self-publishing and rockstar-author presentations.

Laura Miller on Donna Tartt. I really like Laura Miller.

An insight into how the budget goes for a $4.3M production at New York's Metropolitan Opera.

The economics of book festivals - maybe it's only the ticket-buyers who win.

Frankly icky Instagram encounters with Kara Walker's massive sugar sculpture A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby: it's not what we're taking photos of, it's how we're taking them.

A new British survey says "more than 70% of contemporary visual artists who took part in publicly funded exhibitions in the last three years received no fee."

Museums and social work: a year of changing thinking

Over the past 18 months, since starting at The Dowse, I have given a series of talks on the idea of Museums and Emotion.

At the 2012 NDF conference I gave a talk with that title, that was hard, personal, and transforming. It came out of a very particular set of events in my life, which changed me irrevocably, led me to do things I am proud of and things I deeply regret, and gave me a new way of viewing and being in museums that compelled me to apply for The Dowse position when it became vacant.

You can read the notes and see the slides here. But to summarise:

THE MUSEUM OF EMOTIONS

At the time I applied for the job I read a New Yorker article about changes at the Tate Modern. One of the people interviewed, curator John Elderfield, observed that we’re now seeing a period of radical change in how people use museums.

He was quoted saying: “It's not only about looking closely at works of art; it's moving around within a sort of cultural spectacle. I have friends who think this is the end of civilisation, but a lot more people are going to be in the presence of art, and some of them will look at things that transport them."

This quote gelled with some things I’d been thinking about for a while. One is a thought that goes back years, to a day when I heard a commentator on Radio Sport talk about a rugby game in terms of spectacle. He didn’t mean this in a ‘what a total freaking disaster’ kind of way. He meant it as an event designed for the viewers, built around a physical contest between two opposing sides. It made me realise that ‘spectacle’ does not have to be a dirty word. It can mean an event or experience that is carefully crafted to evoke a reaction. That reaction does not have to be dictated, but the expectation is that the viewer or participant will be aware that they are in a moment. Spectacle in this sense means memorable, meaningful, moving.

The second is a feeling - a question - that I had. I wondered if we have become a little timid. Our visitors are hungry for experience. I wanted to explore what it might mean to have more emotion in our museums.

Taking this idea for a walk, I took inspiration from Charles Simic’s poem William and Cynthia in a talk I gave not long after starting at The Dowse.

Says she'll take him the the Museum
of Dead Ideas and Emotions.
Wonders that he hasn't been there yet.
Says it looks like a Federal courthouse
With its many steps and massive columns.

Apparently not many people go there
On such drizzly gray afternoons.
Says even she she gets afraid
In the large exhibition halls
With monstrous ideas in glass cases,
Naked emotions on stone pedestals
In classically provocative poses.

Says she doesn't understand why he claims
All that reminds him of a country fair.
Admits there's a lot of old dust
And the daylight is the color of sepia,
Just like this picture postcard
With its two lovers chastely embracing
Against a painted cardboard sunset.

I had been thinking about how our language has become impoverished. How we have fewer words for love, for friendship, for our feelings. How words have become watered down over time - words like melancholy or chivalry once had entire schools of thought built around them, rather than meaning ‘a bit depressed’ or ‘holds doors open for women’. And when our language is impoverished, our ability to describe or share or face our feelings is likewise diminished.

The Museum of Emotions is not about collections, civic pride, or community involvement. It is a place you can go to to experience emotions that have fallen into disuse, emotions that are foreign to your workaday life, or emotions that have not been part of your life yet.

It’s not a place to learn about emotions. It’s a place to feel them. I had a conversation with a museum friend about this idea. He talked about a museum where you programmed exhibitions, performances, experiences, all around the idea of evoking emotion in the viewer or participant. I talked about a room that you went into where someone would radiate an emotion towards you, like perfume coming off warm skin.

* * *

Last year at the 2013 NDF conference I picked this idea up again, in a co-presentation with Paula Bray from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Paula and I had both lost people in recent years, and had, through the very specific, strange, and utterly non-normalised experience of grief come to look at our work differently. Here is where I picked up after that 2012 talk ...

THE POWER OF NAIVETY

The metaphor of a museum of emotion struck a chord with a lot of people I spoke to in the following year. At the same time, I try not to look back and berate myself for being terribly naive. I still believe in a lot of what I said last year. But I think I’ve internalised that Museum of Emotion. It informs the way I work and the way I lead, rather than shaping what The Dowse puts out on the floor.

Rather than making emotional experiences at work, I generally find myself having them.

(At this point in the talk I recounted two stories about things that happened to me at The Dowse. They are stories I prefer to share in person, rather than share where I can't see people's faces while I talk. So I will summarise them here.)

One was a conversation with one of my Front of House team about a homeless man who regularly visits one of our museums, and what we should be doing to help him: in particular, whether we should feed him when he visits.

The second was a couple of conversations with a local foster mother and a social worker - let's call them Anne and Josh - who were talking about a group of teens they work with who have lives that are hard and sad, to a point almost beyond my comprehension.

The first conversation was part of a meeting with local stakeholders conducted by my division of Hutt City Council. When we asked Anne and Josh what we could do to help them, and these kids, they basically said - do a good job of what you’re doing. You’re a Council. You can’t love these kids, and that’s what they need. That’s what we do.

These two encounters really shook me. They made me question whether I was doing the best thing I could with my energy and talents. I had a follow up meeting with Anne and Josh to talk more. I said: I keep thinking about what you said about being able to love those kids. I keep thinking, what if a museum could be a caring organisation? What if we could care about people?

And Josh looked at me, and he said "Whoa. That's not normal. That's not what museums talk like."

And I thought Yes. This is it.

THE CARING MUSEUM

I often feel like institutions like mine operate between two modes: the academic and the touristic.

On the one hand, we generate and share new research and insight, and stimulate the creation of new art and understanding.

On the other hand, we have visitor numbers as KPIs and compete with other tourist attractions for attention and visitation, and with other like institutions for staff, funding and product.

What I began thinking, especially after that time with Josh and Anne, was:

What if, instead of seeing ourselves as a meld of academic and tourism impulses, we saw ourselves as part of the health and community sectors? What if we became part of the caring professions? What would the museum of the future look like if it was focused on improving the lives of the people who use it?

I found this to be an incredibly exciting and moving thought. Typically, it sent me scurrying off in all directions. I got quite righteous and started saying things like ‘Why do we employ educators and public programmes people but not social workers?’.

Emotion is great. But it’s got to be tempered in order to be used. Three things have helped me reflect on Anne’s observation that we need to do a good job of what it’s our job to do.

The first was a research report published by the British Museums Association, seeking to capture what ‘regular’ people want and expect from museums. Titled ‘Public perceptions of – and attitudes to – the purposes of museums in society’ the report gathers feedback from a series of workshops held around Britain, with carefully selected pools of museum visitors and non-visitors.

The report found a “strong, positive emotional attachment to museums by both visitors and non-visitors” and that attitudes have warmed as museums “shed their image of stuffiness and sterility and become more entertaining and interactive”.

One of the most notable findings was the trust participants accorded to museums, with museums being perceived as more trustworthy than both the government and the media.

Perhaps given the current British cuts to cultural funding, museums were widely seen as being "under threat" and concern was expressed that museums were "spreading themselves too thinly". Participants wanted museums to focus on what they are good at, in order to preserve the essential purposes for which they are respected and loved.

So what are these essential purposes? The museum sector had proposed a range of purposes for workshop participants to discuss and prioritise.

The core of museums’ existence for these groups is our role as the caretakers of national and local heritage. This was strongly linked to national pride and seen as the key contribution we make to society.

In addition to caring for collections, participants emphasised their display, and the need to keep refreshing exhibitions to attract more visitors. Interactivity was seen as very desirable.

Museums were seen as having an important role in public education: we provide equitable access to education, and we provide opportunities people can make use of, rather than generating elite research.

While they thought museums had a role in promoting wellbeing and happiness, participants did not broaden this definition to encompass mental health and wellbeing. Instead, this purpose was regarded as being about entertainment, and linked to the education goal; this is what differentiates museums from theme parks.

Where it got almost hurtful for me, with my nascent ideas about museums and social work, was when participants got on to low priority purposes. These included ‘fostering a sense of community’ and ‘helping the vulnerable’.

Here’s the summary:

Both these purposes were seen as being aimed at specific individuals or groups in society and were therefore somewhat at odds with the essential purposes that provide accessible benefits for everyone in society. The idea of museums reaching out into communities or sections of societies isn’t one that the public sees them as being the best placed to do.

As one attendee put it: “Social services should look after the vulnerable and museums should look after the history.”

Hardest of all to read were the purposes that were challenged by the workshop attendees.

Two objectives were not seen to sit well with the core purposes of museums, and indeed were seen to undermine “the essential values of trust and integrity that people cherish with regards to museums”. These are:

• Providing a forum for debate, and
• Promoting social justice and human rights

The report observes:

participants consistently agreed that museums were not appropriate environments in which to hold controversial debates.  Rather, museums are regarded as places to go to find out factual and unbiased information and for people to subsequently make up their  own minds about a particular topic.

This is not to say that people felt museums cannot broach controversial subjects, but that they should remain neutral in the displaying of information, rather than act as a leader in telling people what to think.

I was initially deeply thrown by this finding. Museums and galleries are often promoted as ‘safe places for unsafe ideas’ and centres of debate and discussion.

But for participants in this particular exercise, attempts to ‘tell people what they should think’ threaten the perception of privileged, trusted position museums hold. As the report noted, though museums professionals may question the notion of an objective truth that can be expressed through an exhibition, the public – at least as represented by many in this sample – does not.

WE ARE IN A LUXURIOUS POSITION

I found this report deeply deflating. I felt like I had all this energy and all these ideas, and then I felt like no-one wanted them.

Fortunately, around this time I came across a post written by Nina Simon, who is always about five years in front of where I seem to be able to think for myself. Or perhaps, to be less self-deprecating, Nina is about 18 months ahead of me in this process of transitioning from working within and with cultural institutions to running one.

The post is titled ‘Seeking clarity about the complementary nature of social work and the arts’. In it she unpicks what it is we’re speaking of when we talk about “cultural institutions as vehicles of social and civic change”.

The blog post grew out of a conversation Simon had with two of her friends who work in not-for-profits focused on homelessness and criminal justice. While all three worked in organisations that care about making a difference in the community, when you move from the ‘why’ to the ‘what’, museums and social service organisations are emphatically not the same. Simon writes

Their work involves life-or-death situations. Museum work is mostly non-contact. The consequences of risk-taking and experimentation are incredibly different. 

There is infinite demand for their services, whereas we struggle to generate demand for ours. There will never be enough meals for hungry people or mental health facilities for those who need them. Meanwhile, arts industry leaders worry about "oversupply" of organizations in the face of dwindling demand. 

Social service providers often find themselves working in a reactive stance to unexpected incidents. Arts organizations can operate on their own timelines and internal values. Those that want to be more relevant often have to push themselves to work responsively to events outside their domain.

As the participants in the Museums Association’s research and as Anne the foster parent observed: we are not social workers. While we might be moving into the social sphere, we are not doing social work. When I’d been beginning to get a bit depressed, Nina gave me another way of looking at this topic. She wrote:

Instead of asking whether we are focusing too little or too much of our attention on social work, we should be asking HOW we can approach the work of community development in a distinctive way.

We are in a luxurious position. Few people rely on us to provide social services. Few people expect them of us. By drawing on our strengths and thinking about how we direct them, we have tremendous opportunity to create new value in our communities.

NOTHING LESS THAN THE MAKING AND CHANGING OF CULTURE

Finally there came a point when I realised that I’m far from the first person to think about social work and museums. It is always useful to discover that your mad tangle of ideas is someone else’s academic career.

In my case, it’s the work of Lois H. Silverman as collected in her recent book The Social Work of Museums.

What I have taken from this book is a framework of four levels of social interaction, that offer different ways to engage with people, to channel our energy, and to connect in a meaningful way.

Social work operates in its broadest function in the level of culture - the shared way of doing things that allows humans to live together. As Silverman says, at the widest angle, the work cultural institutions do “involves nothing less than the making and changing of culture”. This is where we, through the language we use, the collections we form, the programmes we run, the buildings we build,  the products we make, and the audiences we try to reach, can intentionally aim to create social change at a macro-level.

Come down a level, and social work is focused on relationships between groups. This is where we can play a role by being as accessible as possible to all people in society, and running the kinds of programmes that bring diverse groups together with the aim of increasing understanding and connection.

The level below this is interpersonal relationships. What opportunities can we create for people to form or reinforce relationships? What can we do to strengthen connections within a family, or within an environment like a rest home?

At the narrowest angle, social work is concerned with the individual self. The self is defined as the fundamental building block of all social relationships. Furthermore, the self is defined as already being a relationship: a person to a sense of the divine, a person to another person, and a person to his or her experiences and memories.

BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

What I am trying to do now, as I get stuck into a year of thinking strategically, is to use all this as a new lens that I hold up to each piece of work. I am trying to hold every possible project up to these four levels and ask myself: where do I see this operating?

We can’t be all things to all people, and nor should we try to be. We can’t just walk up to people on the street and start loving them. But we can add value through our strengths: our collections, our buildings, our social capital, and our staff. And we can enhance our strengths by finding new ways to look at our work and our mission.

* * *

In a recent talk for the Govett-Brewster, I recapped the points above. To help clarify them, I gave this illustration:

The Queens Museums in New York is widely respected for its Art Access programme for people with differing physical, emotional, behavioural and cognitive abilities across New York. The programme has been running since 1983 and now serves thousands of children and adults.

They have a special focus on families affected by autism. They are regarded as world leaders in this area, and I believe the reason for this is that the programmes operate on many of the levels I’ve described above.

On the individual level, the programmes are about giving kids on the autism spectrum a safe social environment to enjoy art.

On an interpersonal level, there are programmes targeted at teenagers, aimed at building friendships, and programmes targeted at bringing families together through art projects.

On a group level, activities include visits to other museums and galleries, who are coached on how to support families with autistic children when they visit.

And on a macro level, the Queens Museum team has also published a book to help other arts and community spaces, like libraries, develop programmes for families affected by autism, and provides professional development courses so others can learn these skills.

These are not one-off, opportunistic, or project-based activities. This is a belief in who the museum is here to serve and how its does its work, enacted.

* * *

So, this is where my thinking is these days. Add to that thoughts about creating value and the production chain of the visual arts, and you pretty much have what's inside my head when I try to make decisions - well, mixed in with Council priorities, awareness of what other institutions are doing, lack of awareness about what other institutions are doing, personal taste, and thinking about what will make my team's working lives as rewarding as possible.

I want to thank Suse Cairns, Rob Stein and Ed Rodley, for whom I'm right now meant to be writing an essay for to join the CODE | WORDS project. This post comes entirely out of productive procrastination, fuelled by Michael Edson's exemplary opening essay for the series, Dark Matter.

Creating value and production chains - thinking about the role of the museum

Here are two things I have been pondering lately.

The first is Tim O’Reilly’s well-known maxim ‘Create more value than you capture’. O’Reilly - publisher and philosopher, I think, is the best description - has used this phrase repeatedly to explain how he sees his business, O’Reilly Publishing, functioning within the wider world - beyond business and customers and into social change.

An economy is an ecosystem, O’Reilly says. If you take more out than you put in, the ecosystem fails. If you put more in - if you create more opportunity -  you create growth, and new ideas, and new producers, and new consumers. I'd say 'everyone wins', only his thinking is so much more supple and significant than that.

Create More Value Than You Capture from O'Reilly Media - Learning

Here’s a small example of that thinking in action, from way back when: the 2009 Twitter Boot Camp. O’Reilly is talking about how he uses Twitter, within this framework. He says

The secret about social media is that it’s not about you, your product, or your story. It’s about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you. If you want want to make a positive impact, forget about what you can get out of social media, and start thinking about what you can contribute. Not surprisingly, the more value you create for your community, the more value they will create for you.

He continues: “What I do on twitter is also what I do when I publish books. I pay attention to a community, find interesting people and ideas, and use my platform to amplify them.”

O’Reilly might have started out publishing books, but they’ve branched into conferences, Foo Camp and Maker Faires: ‘In each case, we’ve told a big story by amplifying the voices of a community of early adopters.’ O’Reilly benefits through the association with those early adopters: they are their authors, speakers, and advocates. The rest of us benefit from these (almost) freely shared ideas:

If you’re succeeding at this goal, you may sometimes find that others have made more of your ideas than you have yourself. It’s OK. I’ve had more than one billionaire (and an awful lot of startups who hope to follow in their footsteps) tell me how they got their start with a couple of O’Reilly books. I’ve had entrepreneurs tell me that they got the idea for their company from something I’ve said or written. That’s a good thing! I remember back in the early days of the Internet, when the buyer at Borders told me after one of my talks, “Well, you’ve just given your competitors their publishing program for the year.” If my goal is really “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators,” I’m thrilled when my competitors jump on the bandwagon and help me spread the word! 

Look around you: How many people do you employ in fulfilling jobs? How many customers use your products to make their own living? How many competitors have you enabled? How many people have you touched that gave you nothing back? 

(From Work on stuff that matters)

This idea of creating value is one that I try - not always successfully - to apply to the path I’m forging at The Dowse. It takes a great deal of mindfulness, and mindfulness takes discipline and time to develop, before you can even get to the point of communicating what you're being mindful about clearly and meaningfully. But, you work on it, right?

Last weekend I downloaded the Artspace-commissioned report by Stephanie Post, Staying Alive: Some thoughts on opportunities for private funding for small scale visual arts  organisations in New Zealand. I've read it a few times since then, initially getting little out of it, and then slowly having some things dawn on me.

The report is heavily influenced - of course - by the work that’s coming out of CNZ and MCH and if you’re familiar with that then much of it will not be new to you.

What I did find really useful was the thread that runs through it about the role of the small arts organisation (defined loosely here as having a turnover of up to $1M) in the production chain of the arts, and how this could/should be communicated and measured. As Post writes

... the value of an art exhibition in a major gallery is often measured through the metric of visitor numbers, however, this is not really useful for an exhibition in an experimental artist-run space, where, although only a handful of people may see the exhibition, if one or two of those are influential, ie curators or collectors, the exhibition may lead to re-exhibition of the work in a larger institution or biennial, or new projects for the artist, and as such will be immensely significant.

There’s a small level of defensiveness in the report and the international sources cited within it (a defensiveness I often find myself sharing, the Goldilocks conundrum of explaining why you’re too big for some things and too small for others, desperately trying to articulate the just-right). But there’s a useful move towards an idea of a chain of production (which, I guess, could also be seen from the artist’s point of view as a career path):

Small scale visual arts organisations are fundamentally producers, either through the commissioning of new art, or enabling new research or education projects, or publishing new writing. This is in contrast to larger organisations which generally exhibit works of art already in existence, or sell books or journals published by other organisations.

The report makes the point that this kind of production shouldn’t simply be seen as ‘funding’, but - citing a text in the Circular Facts publication - production thought as ‘...initiatives that are interested in production, but also become spaces for discussion; where projects can be contrasted as they’re being carried out, thus effectively working as co-producers.’

The report continues

Working with less established artists or with artists at critical stages in their careers, and commissioning new works and projects, small organisations not only take risks and experiment in their own programme, but also support artists to take risks and experiment at crucial stages in their careers. 

Projects and commissions initiated in small arts organisations frequently continue to have impact both nationally and internationally, long after their initial exhibition at the commissioning organisation, through inclusion in exhibitions in larger galleries/museums and at biennales around the world, often becoming seminal works in an artist’s career.

Here, of course, we’re talking about creating value. It’s not value through audience numbers, it’s value through impact. Which is, of course, harder to measure. (Tim O’Reilly is on to this one too, of course).

Anyway. Those are the things I’m thinking about, on a wet and windy weekend. Value and our position in the production chain. Or - to frame the issue in another way, as I hope we will when we host the Curatorial Hui later this year - if we remind ourselves that artists are one of the communities we are here to work with, what is the value we’re trying to create together?