Smart, pretty

I do admire American art museum's signage. It often seems lighter - in tone and in heart - than New Zealand's. And I'm quite taken with this piece of work by the IMA's Matt Kelm for their recent Warhol show:




In this interview Kelm describes how the signage references Warhol's work, while also creating an interactive experience that encourages visitors to take the show's poster away with them.

Search and serendipity

The sting in the tail of all the work art institutions have been doing to digitise their collections is that the more stuff you have, the harder it is to find any single thing.

To my mind, collection sites have two core needs:

1. Search

This is for the people who know what they want, and want to get to it fast. Academic and professional image researchers may benefit from advanced search options. Experienced searchers might use filters, or other tools that allow them to expand and limit their searches easily (say by date, region, maker, materials, subject matter). It's also good to cater for people who get their search terms nearly-but-not-quite right (collin mcahon) with fuzzy search or suggested search options.

One of my favourite solutions to the search-right-now demand is the IMA's mega-menus: from absolutely any page on the site you can start a new collection search, but because the tool is tucked away in the site navigation, it doesn't have to be visually present on every page.



This blog post by the IMA's Charlie Moad explains the tools that have been put in place for collection searchers

2. Serendipity

This is for the people who want to know what you have, but don't know where to start. A search box is scary if your question is "what is there?".

Yesterday LACMA's Tom Drury blogged about findings from a survey of website visitors. People said they LACMA should let images rule the website (rather than the more proasaic info, like opening hours, that LACMA expected).

As a result, LACMA have introduced two new collection display techniques.

First up, collection splash pages - like this one for photography - provide entry points to works, blog posts, exhibitions and events related to different collection areas.



Second, a new collection homepage (in Flash) based on the idea of remixing. Clicking on an item in a tag cloud opens up three works grouped according to a word or short phrase.




The initial sets are been curated by staff, although visitors have been invited to email suggested sets in. Although the first thought I had was that this should work more like Flickr's galleries - with people being able to sign up and create their own groups for sharing or personal reference - on reflection I actually like the very lightweight implementation.

Who are you?

Is provenance a big deal in the New Zealand art world?

In terms of the market, I can't think of many examples where the name of the previous owner might increase the perceived value of an artwork to a private buyer. Charles Brasch, Ron O'Reilly, Jim Barr and Mary Barr?

I do think provenance becomes more interesting in terms of public collections. In this context information is captured about the way artworks have circulated in New Zealand - through gift, sale, bequest and wheeler-dealing - and then is presented publicly that as part of a work's history & importance. It becomes art history.

I started thinking about this this morning because of this post about provenance research on the IMA blog. It looks at the provenance of one of the IMA's key works, van Gogh's
Landscape at Saint-Rémy (Enclosed Field with Peasant) . The early history of the work is well documented, but the record gets scanty in the mid 20th century, putting the work under the cloud of Nazi-era looting,

All is well with the IMA's van Gogh; curator Annette Schlagenhauff found papers in the New York Public Library showing the work came to America in the private owner's hands. However, the blog post brought my attention to a part of the IMA site that I haven't seen before: the World War II-Era Provenance research project. The section lists European paintings "created before 1946 and acquired after 1932", and also contains info on how to read provenance texts.

Like their deaccessioning database, putting this provenance research onto their website brings transparency to the inner workings of the institution, but also makes them interesting. It's things like this that make me an IMA fangirl.

Two bits of awesome

Bit One

The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) has thrown open the doors to ArtBabble, a delectable site that hosts art-related video from a range of organisations, including the IMA, MoMA, LACMA and SFMOMA.

Not only is the content awesome, the design is really very lovely (although I have some minor quibbles about the navigation). Read more about the project on the IMA blog, or in this NYT article.

Bit Two

The Powerhouse Museum mark 1 year on The Commons on Flickr today, and to celebrate they've released a gorgeous little print-on-demand book that presents a selection of the photos they posted to Flickr along with the commentary left by Flickr members.

This book is a lovely example of the increasing blurring of online and offline behaviour and existence: physical objects were digitised to allow virtual viewing; real people left information & responses to them online; and now these digital objects and online commentary are repackaged as a physical item (that - bless - saves cost & waste by only being physically created when someone ponys up for it).