Label, label, on the wall

This - from LACMA - was one of my favourite wall labels from my trip. Something about the proportion of real estate given to institutional wrangling compared to the art work really caught my fancy.

Did you know wall labels as we know them were introduced in the 1830s by Gustav Friedrich Waagen, the first director of the Royal Museum in Berlin? Or that titles for artworks became common only with the advent of the art market and public museum in the 18th century?

Me neither. Probably should've, really. But now you can read all about it in this piece by Jill Sterrett, Director of Collections at SFMOMA. The article also contains a handy visual breakdown of the properties of a wall label (which is in itself a direct argument for telling the stories, not just providing the tombstone data).

Thing one; thing two

I clicked this link expecting to find another daft article about that daft 'Renoir Sucks' meme (I so can't keep up with that one).

And then I was completely surprised by an elegant and engrossing discussion of the idea of a good painting having 'plot' and 'an 'emotional situation': the thing depicted, and  what is behind the thing depicted. (Obviously, pre-mid-20th century Western art lends itself best to this analysis). And the idea of the way a thing is painted as the way that emotion is conveyed.

You see Lucian Freud’s 1995 painting “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping,” for instance, and your mind reads the light coming into your eyes as naked woman on a couch. But you’re also clearly, undeniably, looking at a nest of brushstrokes, which your mind works at untangling. You think, look at how this painter arranged oily rock and plant material on cotton canvas to mimic flesh. You relish the trickery of it, the duality of it being so evidently heavy paint but so much like a roll of skin. The phenomenon of two things happening at once collapses time. I think this is what makes people addicted to good painting.

On the radio

Today on the radio I talked about my recent trip to the States, with a particular focus on some of the amazing museum architecture I saw, from the Kimball in Fort Worth to the Broad in LA. Some images are available on the RNZ website.

Nice

Not only is this a fascinating article about why something that seems totally un-revolutionary (removing tipping and raising food prices so hospo workers can be properly compensated) is actually really difficult, but I also really love the page design: a large lede that summarises and offers quicklinks to each section of the the article. It's a fantastically controlled piece of writing and while I don't know what I'd use it for, I like it.

Collections Online

On Friday we launched our project to put The Dowse's collection online, with a kick-off meeting with our development partner Sons & Co. It's really exciting, after years of working on interfaces for large, diverse online collections, to have a chance to work on something that's as tightly scoped (about 3,500 objects, nearly all post WWII, nearly all New Zealand) and as warm and human as our collection.

The timing was perfect, coming off the back of Museums and the Web Asia in Melbourne and National Digital Forum in Wellington.  At the conference in Melbourne I was able to catch up with Mitchell Whitelaw and his work on generous interfaces; as he writes in the abstract of a recent paper

Decades of digitisation have made a wealth of digital cultural material available online. Yet search — the dominant interface to these collections — is incapable of representing this abundance. Search is ungenerous: it withholds information, and demands a query.

At NDF several of us from The Dowse were able to listen to George Oates of Good, Form & Spectacle keynote 'Assumptions, Attention, Articulation' on the changes (and not-changes) between the late 2000s and today when it comes to the web, and the way we do - and could - present our collections online. George's keynote was GREAT and you should definitely take the time to watch it.



At the kick-off meeting we bounced around a lot of ideas, from hot-or-not (don't worry, it won't happen) to browse by colour, material, acquisition date, donor/lender, and emotion. We talked about other sources of information we could wrap around the objects in our collections to tell the fuller story of the artists who made them, including Wikipedia and Te Ara, and a couple of other ideas we'll keep up our sleeves for now :)

I think of what George and Mitchell do as 'alt interfaces', and although that undersells the intellectual rigour, it captures some of the sense of personality and opinion I think they bring to this work (more so than the vast majority of institutions are capable of.  I talked at the meeting about various projects by both Mitchell and George.

Mitchell's work has been about how digitised collections can be presented without the demand of the search box - the requirement that you have a research question before you can enter ...

Australian Prints and Printmaking - browse by decade

Experimental interface to the Macaulay Collection of biodiversity audio and video recording

The Nolan Explorer (commissioned by Canberra Museum and Gallery)

The Queenslander (State Library of Victoria)

George's work at Good, Form & Spectacle grows out of her work from the past seven or eight years, with Flickr, Stamen, and the Internet Archive. It has a bit more humour perhaps than Mitchell's work, and she is following a strong process of prototyping near (or close to) museums and collections.

Have a good sift around in the experiments GFNS undertook for the Wellcome Collection. This project introduced George's use of the term 'fat head' to balance the 'long tail' - the fat head is the place where adding editorial can add a lot of interest and value.

The V&A Spelunker is a guerilla interface to this massive collection. I'm crazy about the Date Graph section, which starts to give you a feel for the way the collection has grown over time.

Twoway.St, an alt interface for the British Museum collections, also makes me really happy.  Again, it gives you the beginning of an understanding of the texture of the collection, a way of browsing by travelling along the lines on which it has been assembled.

George also popped up this image in her presentation of something they're playing with - using the dimensions of objects from the collection to create sketches that indicate size, and providing a tennis ball as scale.

Finally, the delightful Small Museum project, all about 'using dumb tools bluntly', and exploring the research question What would a 21st Century cultural institution be like if it was designed today, from scratch? While not directly about online collections, you should check out the idea behind the project here and have an explore. George talks about this project extensively near the end of her NDF talk - that's the best intro.

Not your grandparents' museum

I went on a bit of a Twitter rant yesterday, spurred by two articles that turned up in my timeline in the morning:

A Look at the Museum of the Future - Wall Street Journal

Te Papa of the future - national museum or edu-tainment theme park? - DomPost

Some extracts:

The forces rocking the technology world—cheaper screens, miniaturized mechanics and increased computing power—are prompting a rich period of experimentation in exhibit design. For museums, such advancements could attract diverse visitors, lure young people and change the way audiences learn about art, science and nature. (WSJ)

[Rick] Ellis has just returned from China, where he visited the sparkly new Shanghai Natural History Museum, which opened in April. He's still fizzing with excitement at the museum's marriage of the digital and physical worlds, the way they use technology to bring historical objects to life. (DomPost)

While aimed at boosting crowds, the new technology could blur the lines between education and entertainment. As institutions focus on the thrill of new displays, some observers caution that the art and artifacts could get lost in the commotion. “It’s important that museums be responsive to audiences, but it can tip easily into making it all about the audience and maybe not pushing the audience into something outside their own experiences,” said Elizabeth Rodini, director of the museums and society program at Johns Hopkins University. (WSJ) (My emphasis)

When Ellis was appointed, Te Papa chairman Evan Williams hailed his extensive experience in digital media. It's no surprise, then, that Ellis's vision for the museum's future comes with a virtual reality filter.

The tech-centric plans will reignite the debate that has simmered since Te Papa's opening in 1998, about what a national museum should be and the fraught line between education and entertainment. (DomPost) (My emphasis)

“When we talk to museum guys, they’re very serious, they say, ‘We don’t want that goofy theme-park stuff,’” said Adam Bezark, creative director at the Bezark Company, a Los Angeles design firm. “And so we say, ‘OK, we’ll bring in our serious people.’ And it’s all the same people. A great designer is a great designer.” (WSJ)

But statements such as "Te Papa will be making learning an entertaining and playful experience" alarm museum traditionalists who argue Te Papa is already a dumbed-down, Disney-fication that obscures the magic of the objects themselves.

The Smithsonian magazine neatly summed up the competing values when it called the new Shanghai Natural History Museum "not your grandparents' museum". (DomPost)

The slant of each article suggests a tension between experts and existing visitors, who have influenced and enjoyed the "traditional" museum, and non-experts and potential visitors, who - as Rick Ellis puts it talking about the (disputed) "digital native generation" -  "see museums as boring and old".

And they made me ask a bunch of pissed-off questions. Like - do teachers angst about becoming "too entertaining"? Whose grandparents are we talking about here - a 2 year-old's? A 70 year-old's? Do we want to preserve or return to the museum of the 1960s, 1940s, 1880s? What about the huge chunk of visitors I see in the museum every day, grandparents & retired caregivers with pre-school children? How do they fit into your "digital native" generation?

In her talk at MuseumNext in Indianapolis (notes here, video here) Nina Simon of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History talked about coming to the museum three years ago, when it was financially broken and had an annual visitation of 17,000 people (in a city of ~63,000 and a county of ~270,000). Nina talked about completely overhauling programming at the museum, to achieve their goals of reaching an audience that mirrors the demographics of the city, and creating opportunities for social bridging.

In her time at the museum, Nina has been accused of dumbing down standards and shows (see this WSJ article for example, probably not coincidentally by the same writer as the article above). Her response is to frame what she is doing as 'opening up', not 'watering down'.  And she also said something I found really interesting.

The existing supporters of the museum were "karmically distressed" by the new events and exhibitions happening at the museum that weren't for them. Previously, everything was for them. Now, there are elements of the programme that aren't for them. In comparison, new visitors (62,000 last year) don't complain about or feel excluded by events taking place that they are not interested in. (Or, as either Nina said or I wrote down in response, they don't feel confident saying this, or aren't able to articulate this.)

All of this made me write this

I know very few evil museum professionals. Most people aren't setting out to make museums stupid, shallow, or sell-outs. As a public service, we need to innovate, to change, to lead, to respond, to adapt and to hold true. If we are punished for changing, we will become "your grandparents' museum", if by that you mean places that don't hold meaning today and tomorrow.

A reading list, for #MWA2015 and #NDFNZ

And ... it's done. My research trip round the States, Museums and the Web Asia, and the annual National Digital Forum. Nine cities, close to 40 museums and galleries, and three conference presentations.

I've also been doing a ton of reading that circulates around the things that I was seeing and talking about while I travelled. (Between now and the end of the weekend I hope to throw my conference notes up here to start sharing some of this info.) Here's a list of links, mostly as an aide-mémoire to myself ...

Nina Simon - Fighting for Inclusion

Nina's notes from her keynote at the MuseumNext conference in Indianapolis, which I managed to fit into my trip. Nina ad-libbed or extended around these published notes a lot in her talk (which you can watch here), and one of the simplest and most powerful things she said was that their philosophy at Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for their history work is that "People make history": that when people leave the museum, they should have the feeling inside themselves that they are an active participant in making history, and have the ability to bring about social change.

"People make history". Such a simple expression of this idea, but a great way for us to think about our work on refreshing Petone Settlers Museum.

If You Can't See It, Don't Say It

This guide to exhibition label writing was referenced in a internal report on exhibition didactics sent to me by an American colleague which unfortunately I can't share. I read *a lot* of labels on my trip and recorded some of the best and worst. The main point I've taken away from my early skim of this guide is that the wall label should always give you cause to look back at the art work again. Such a basic point, but so important to keep in mind.

One of the ideas that popped into my head yesterday at NDF is that we should try doing all of our writing and editing of wall text standing up, so we really remember what it's like to be reading them as a visitor.

Museums as 21st Century Databases

From David Newbury at the Innovation Studio at Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. I need to learn more about their work, but this line from this post really resonated with me when I read it during the NDF conference.

We treat our collections not as objects stored on a shelf, but rather as the physical embodiment of a vast repository of data describing our cultures and our histories. 

Data thinking and practices are seeping out through the whole of museum practice. In the States I saw art museums in particular placing an enormous emphasis on collecting data on visitors and using that for all sorts of decision-making and activities. At the same time data metaphors and visualisations are permeating how we think about collections (the quote above kind of smushes metadata into the actual object, which is a sentence that makes much more sense when I say it to myself with hand gestures than when I type it out here).

See also George Oates' & Good, Form & Spectacle's work on twoway.st, an independent exploration of the British Museum's catalogue that is focused less on discovering collection items and more on trying to get a feeling for how the collection has been formed over time.

MOMA R&D Salon

The salon is back. At MOMA, curator Paola Antonelli holds a regular invitation-only salon which is an opportunity to assemble a group of speakers and a 'curated' audience to discuss a topic she is interested in learning more about. I was lucky enough to score an invite to the most recent, which was on gender fluidity and diversity as represented (or not) in the museum. That one is not online yet, but the back-catalogue is, at the link above. An amazing resource of ideas, speakers, and readings.

JW Anderson: ‘The minute your brand can be predicted, you’ve got a problem’

An interview with the designer who's recently taken over the fashion brand Loewe. This was the quote that caught my eye

The off-white colour he chose for [Loewe's] redesigned packaging was based on Portland stone, the material used for the British Museum and the UN HQ in New York, a reference he chose because he “wants to make Loewe about culture. I want the stores to be public landmarks, where you see things you might see in a museum, I want that credibility.” 

And my god, do I envy him having the bravery to do this

“When I started at Loewe, I took a year out before we did a collection, because I felt we needed to work out all the fundamentals. The pencils, the door handles, the style of the press release, the stone of the buildings, the choice of photographer. All of these questions had to be asked, because ultimately, you need to make people forget what the brand looked like before, and get them to believe that the brand was always like this.”

One of my most impactful (yeah, words are hard right now) stops in the States was the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Apart from one bum note from a snappish gallery attendant, it was the most consistent and cohesive visit I had, where everything - from the art to the shop, the exhibition design to the mosaics and sunflowers outside the buildings, the new restaurant to the way they present their philosophy on the entrance to their main gallery - told and retold the story of the art they are there to represent and the stance they take on it.

Simon Wardley on pioneers, settlers and town planners

Seb Chan brought this up during his excellent panel discussion with Janet Carding and Tim Hart at Museums and the Web Asia in Melbourne last week (tweet-length take-out from Seb: 'What you needed a developer for five years ago, today you can do with a credit card' - online tools are a commodity now).

In particular, Seb flashed up this graphic (click to see it properly)

Inside my head there's a connection with Gartner's hype cycle for new technologies, but my brain is too tired right now to fashion those links into words.

The problem with The Broad is the collection itself

Dear lord, the number of articles I read about The Broad while I was in America. Philip Kennicott's prose is a tad purple for my taste but this observation strongly shaped my visit to the new Whitney and to The Broad

But even more striking than the contrast with the Gehry building is the Broad’s subtle argument with much of recent museum design. The prevailing theology of many public buildings today, including too many museums, is about erasing the line between the city and the structure, so that one feels the excitement of urban energy ever present, even while looking at art. The most salient example is the new Whitney Museum in New York, which makes love to Manhattan so eagerly that one can’t help but gape at the city’s promiscuous ubiquity.

The Broad is more inward-looking and allows for a more contemplative experience. Perhaps without intending to do so, it recaptures some of the spiritual drama of the much-maligned monumental museums of yesteryear ...

The Broad was surprisingly dainty (it was the last museum on my US trip, the end of many hours trying to do fast-yet-focused trips around ginormous encyclopaedic museums). The 'veil' in which it is wrapped is stunningly beautiful, and the effect is to very much transport you off the LA streetscape and into a clean, sharp, elevated aesthetic zone. The Whitney is a more subtle place to look at art *once you're inside it* - at The Broad the architecture is not so much distracting as compelling - it exerts more pulling power than most of the art. The Whitney looks like a battleship made of sliced-up shoeboxes with climbing apparatus festooned around its frontage, but from inside the building its a wonderful place to explore art.

The Broad doesn't want museum guards between you and the art

I was gobsmacked by this article and the assertions, opinions, and vested interests illustrated within in it. The American museum culture of front of house and security staff was the most foreign aspect of my trip, and I have all the thoughts about it.

The VSAs will wear their own clothes rather than museum-issue garb — the thinking being that self-expression, within certain professional parameters for garment lengths and contours, should be valued in an art museum. ...

The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., may be the only other art museum that has attempted to train staffers to fully fulfill the seemingly contradictory functions of keeping the art safe while making viewers feel comfortably at home with it. ... 

Stevan Layne, a veteran security consultant to museums and other cultural sites, is not persuaded that pleasant conversation and detailed knowledge about art should be in gallery attendants' job descriptions. ... "I'm opposed to doing that," Layne said. "It can be a distraction from the primary mission" of protecting the art.

Indianapolis and Dallas

I've been watching and listening to Maxwell Anderson's work at the IMA and then the DMA for years, and visited both institutions on my trip. Just before I came home, Anderson's resignation from the DMA was announced. The ideology and practice of entry charges vs philanthropic support of free entry, with an added layer of the benefits of memberships for museums (not just revenue, but access to people with a commitment to your organisation and data about their behaviour) was something I spent a lot of time talking about and thinking about in the states.

To immerse yourself a little:

IMA CEO's quest: artistic flourishes, but on a budget (1 Nov 2014, on the IMA's current director's plans)

IMA defends admission charge as complaints pile up (16 Dec 2014)

Max Anderson Out as Director of the Dallas Museum Art (28 Set 2015)

Maxwell Anderson Departs Dallas Museum, Returns to NYC in New Role (28 Sept 2015)

This might sound like I'm snitching on Anderson. I'm really not (and I don't know him at all). If you look back to even early in his career he has a pattern of expansion, fundraising, and increasing visitor number. The guy's  one of Simon Wardley's pioneers (as above).

On the topic of entry charges, Colleen Dilenschneider's research is salutary

How free admission really affects museum visitation (data)

Haunted by data

I bought some shoes in the weekend, and they offered me a discount programme which asked for my name, phone number, email address, physical address, and date of birth. So, short of a DNA swab or my passport data, pretty much all my vital stats.

Maciej Cegłowski's recent talk (recommended to me by Seb Chan, as above) is a purposefully un-rosy look at rapidly growing data collection practices. The link above will also take you to the video recording of Maciej's talk. We need to be bringing the points he raises into our discussion about data-driven museums.

Every nook and cranny

As I was planning for my trip around museums in the States, I found myself doing a lot of schedule-shimmying, trying to account for museums closed days (which usually fall on Mondays, Tuesdays and/or Wednesdays). Given I went for an ambitious 7 cities in 24 days (I know, woe is me, right?) the scheduling got quite demanding at times, and there are places I had to drop (Boston and Chicago in particular) because I couldn't get to the all the cities when the museums I want to see are open.

As I've travelled around, I've asked people why their museums are closed. Answers range from habit, to cost (for gallery attendants, though people who gave this answer were often of the quiet opinion that this was just an excuse) to the usefulness of having a day or two where it was just staff in the museum.

While I've been travelling, this post appeared on the Guggenheim's blog, about the cleaning that goes into keeping the building looking immaculate. The Guggenheim is a relatively human-scaled museum for New York (once again, I hit it when the iconic spiral was closed for installation) and all those visitors apparently take a real toll.

"It requires a good dose of effort from a team of two to four twice a week,” Boucourt says. After the weekend crowds have departed, the galleries are repainted before the museum opens again on Monday mornings. Thursdays, when the museum is closed to visitors, the paint team does a more thorough pass."

They can't possibly mean that the *whole* galleries are repainted, but there's clearly a lot of work being done on the areas that visitors brush against, bump into and sit on.

Meanwhile, just when you think that everyone angle on the Broad has been covered and there couldn't possibly be another story: an interview with Hector Garcia, owner of the window-washing company contracted to keep the museum invisibly clean.

On the radio

Today on the radio I'm going to talk about Cloud Gate-gate and Fiona Pardington's new survey show,  A Beautiful Hesitation. 

On the radio

Today on the radio I'm going to talk about Old Master artist statements and the outcry that has delayed the opening of a new Jack the Ripper museum in London.

On the radio

Belated, but - my whole segment last week was devoted to the new collection of Linda Nochlin essays, Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, edited by Maura Reilly (NYT review here, text of the "seminal" 1971 essay 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' here).

Combined with currently reading Nicholas Mirzoeff's How to See the World (Guardian article by the author here), it's really brought home to me the fact that the visual and social world we (or at least I) has transformed in the past 50 years. Hardly a mindblowing insight, but a little explosive when it's happening inside your head.

On the radio

Yesterday on the radio I talked about Shannon Te Ao at City Gallery, Jannis Kounellis in New York, and Seraphine Pick at The Dowse.