Brought to Light

I've really been enjoying Christchurch Art Gallery's new 'Brought to Light' blog about the redevelopment of their collection galleries.

I've always felt that collection galleries play second fiddle to temporary exhibitions. It's nice to see them getting a little bit of love here, not just in terms of the revamp but an increased level coverage.

It's also a smart move by CAG. Rather than starting up "The Christchurch Art Gallery blog" they've picked a time-bound project so they can test out blogging and see how staff and readers react. Come the end of the installation, they can turn the blog off and, if it's a miserable failure, move on. If it works (and I'd define "works" as attracts a steady readership + staff finding it a fun thing to do) then they can decide what to do next.

I for one hopes it works.

Four interesting things I have read today

Jen Graves: 'In Art News' Jen Graves of The Stranger (Seattle) takes apart an article bemoaning the departure of the Seattle Times' art critic Sheila Farr. The original article, by Emily White, is one of the now-becoming-familiar condemnations of the lack of respect amongst newspapers for experienced art reviewers. Graves argues:

To proclaim a national day of mourning for the loss of a notably disengaged critic at a deeply disengaged newspaper—the Times checked out of the cultural conversation of Seattle and the nation long ago, if it was ever part of it in this young city (when is the last time you saw a Times culture writer in the midst of a national dialogue?)—is to miss a far more important problem than whether this city has three full-time critics or two.

Penguin Blog: Fav '08 cover designs Members of the Penguin Art Department discuss their favourite book cover designs of the past year in this beautifully illustrated blog post.




The Book Cover Archive Not just a beautiful site to explore, but obviously a well-kept and well-mannered one; a list of proposed and achieved enhancements is listed at the bottom of all the pages, along with links to similar sites.

Nina Simon's message to museums re:Twitter I've been meaning to talk about this here, but have decided to work blog it instead. Many people say that there's no right or wrong way to use Twitter - heck out the lengthy comments thread for some opposing views. My free piece of advice for museums and galleries: if you're (still) thinking about starting a blog, you should now also be thinking about how that blog interlinks with (or could be replaced by) Twitter.

And one thing I've only scanned, because it's (a) depressing and (b) seemingly the same article that I've being reading everywhere for the last two months - where's a nice big diamond skull meme when you need it?

Take a load off

Two very different items about gallery seating appeared in my feedreader today (obviously a hot topic in the States at the moment).

The Brooklyn Museum blog posted about the importance of providing seating for weary and contemplative visitors, and notes that they have different styles of seating for different parts of the Museum:

In our American Identities galleries, we created four seating islands, which consist of a carpeted area with chairs and reading tables. In our new contemporary galleries, we have incorporated commercial furniture: Kartell’s “Plastics” line of modular seating. And at other times we have created custom seating, such as the benches in our Egypt Reborn galleries, which have Egyptian revival stylings.

At the Art Institute of Chicago, it's a very different story. Blair Kamin blogs on the Chicago Tribune site:

For a fleeting moment Thursday, a hint of tension crept into the voice of James Rondeau, the Art Institute of Chicago’s contemporary art curator. An out-of-town journalist had asked whether the museum would set up benches inside the galleries of its unfinished Modern Wing so people could sit and stare at the knockout view of the Pritzker Pavilion’s metallic shells and the painterly swath of the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park.

No, Rondeau replied, although there will be benches for looking at art. The view to Millennium Park is "quite strong," he said, even describing it as "relentless."

Overall, the latter is an interesting article about the battle between environment, architecture and art display, whilst the former is the kind of quirky post that the Brooklyn Museum excels at.

Sweet

The Field Museum creates Chocolate: the Exhibition -- the IMA blog notes the absence of chocolate art, name checks Jean Zaun, Sid Chidiac, forgets Paul McCarthy ....

Image
Paul McCarthy's chocolate Santas, photo by C-Monster

Friday muster

1.

Australian auction house Deutscher and Hackett get offered a "contentious nude" by Bill Henson, decide to give it a miss - The Australian and Art Market Monitor suggest the decision is based more on a failing art market than the chance of a resurgence of this year's earlier outcry.

2.

As Cheryl Bernstein observes, Pundit's Keith Ovenden is no fan of Fiona Hall. I have no love of the heavy-breathing show myself, but found Ovenden's repeated use of "Ms" Hall condescending. I'm a bit of a bone-picker here - I also loathe it when people write of Rita and Frances, not Angus and Hodgkins - and think a simple surname will suffice. It's Ovenden's first review on Pundit, so time will tell - maybe the next will be of Mr Van Hout's two openings next week?

3.

LACMA are blogging, and in the most recent post, a curator goes that extra mile for the sake of her collection items.

4.

Finally - does your gallery or museum site have RSS feeds? If you do, think about adding them to Ideum's latest project, the RSS feed mixer.

Pass it on

Things are a bit quiet in Best of 3 land this week. Why don't you try out Damian Skinner's newish blog for some contemporary jewellery art* talk?

Or this great post on Watch This Scape, where a Scape volunteer finally speaks for all students out there who have fallen for the "it'll look great on your CV" line.


* or whatever it is you call it to distinguish Kobi Bosshard from Michael Hill

Image: Paua Art, by googly

Now reading

If, like me, you're fascinated by tales of art collectors and semi-fascinated by the machinations of dealers and auction houses, Art Market Monitor is must-add to your feedreader.

I'd put it up there with Arts Journal and Tim Paul's Museum Hours as one of my favourite clearing-house sites.

Power to the people

I've written a couple of times before about how I think web-enabled conversations might change the way art institutions/authorities work with (deal with?) their constituencies: see the blog-enabled outcry over proposals to drill for oil near Spiral Jetty, and Tyler Green challenging Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune over a conflict of interest.

Another interesting case is currently unfolding in San Francisco. Well-known SF photographer and blogger Thomas Hawk was recently ejected from SFMOMA by Simon Blint, director of visitor services, not because he was taking photos in the building (SFMOMA has recently relaxed its photo restrictions) but in order to "ensure the safety of the museum’s admissions staff" (from the SFMOMA press release on the incident).

Ten years ago, a person disgruntled about their experience at an art gallery would have complained to their friends, and might have written to the director, or to the local newspaper.

Now the web is a forum where people can share their experiences and air their concerns quickly and freely. Hawk himself is all over the net - Blogger, Facebook, Pownce, Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Feed Friend - and therefore his account of the incident is spreading fast (just like it is here). A copy of the photo on Flickr has (as of the time of writing) been favourited 85 times, viewed more than 11,200 times, and attracted dozens of comments.

As Jack Schofield has pointed out in the Guardian, Blint's online profile is now shattered. And Jeremiah Owyang notes:

Businesses should assume every customer (and employee) is capable of impacting an individual or company’s online reputation

Companies should already have a crises plan ready to deal with online criticisms

The new influencers?

The "bloggers are replacing paid critics" meme is getting another workout in the Observer - is it curtains for critics? asks Jay Rayner, a food critic who had to ask his dining mate (and food blogger) to pull down a review of the restaurant they'd just dined in until his own, dead-tree, review appeared.

The Observer follows up with snippets of comment from print critics, (who, on average, have been reviewing for 39.5 years) musing on the rise of online reviewing.

So, inspired by Cheryl Bernstein's recent findings, this week I'm asking: Where are you reading reviews of art exhibitions these days? What source do you consider to be the best? And who's your favourite reviewer?

Take the survey here - it closes next Monday.

Three views

I love exhibition installation time. I think it's the intimacy with the work; art feels different in a packing case or leant against a wall to when it's fully installed.

That's why I'm really glad to see galleries writing about and posting pictures of exhibition installations, and sharing this feeling around. Three things that popped up in my feedreader today:


Kara Walker at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

A post about temporary walls and crate details (no, really, you do want to read this) and a link to more construction pics on Flickr


Click! at Brooklyn Museum

The photos in this exhibition were contributed in response to an open call and judged by the community. The exhibition designer has decided to print the photos in the show at sizes that reflect their popularity with the community, an interesting physical reponse to the tag cloud aesthetic. More about the exhibition here.



The opening of the Public Gallery, West Bromwich, England

The Public Gallery is "part town planning, part regeneration, part visitor attraction, part contemporary art gallery and part media collection". A "notoriously cantankerous and rigorous" gallery designer invents a "tree structure" to cope with the architect's "interior landscape".

Henry & Hank

Many moons ago, I did a stint on the front desk at the Adam Art Gallery. I always felt the Gallery was in a bit of a quandary - it sat smack dab in the middle of the student audience, but struggled to get the students through the doors (except for openings, and then they flooded in).

As a result, I'm a real admirer of the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle. I met two Henry staffers a few months ago, when they presented a demo called "Reaching the Internet Generation using Interactive Web Technologies and NO MONEY". Realising that students are (in-phrase alert) digital natives, Henry staff understood that the web offered a number of ways for them to communicate with their primary audience.

Today, the Henry has a Facebook group and a MySpace page, and share podcasts via Henry Artcasts and iTunes. All these things take time, but only a small amount of financial input.

The Henry also has the very active HankBlog, which includes students who are doing internships at the Henry as writers. I really like the informal tone of writers like Jamey and Kira who report on events and exhibitions inside and outside and unrelated to the Henry. And although the effect is a little lost on a NZ reader, I also love the localness of the blog - I imagine if you were a kinda-interested-in-art-or-film-or-stuff-like-that student, you'd read the blog as a great way of finding out what's going on.

So, my learning from this? Make use of those students on your front desk. Start up a blog, make a digital camera available, lay down some super-simple guidelines, make sure YouTube isn't blocked by the institution's IT department, and set them free.

Dear Artbash

You are like the wobbly tooth I knew I shouldn't play with but missed when it fell out.

Where have you gone?

Three links for Tuesday

Busy busy day, so it's a link round-up, I'm afraid ....

The Otago University Art History and Theory blog is written largely by (post-grad?) students. Posting is a little erratic, but definitely worth subscribing to the feed so you catch the occasional gem, like this assessment of Hamish Keith's 'The Big Picture'.

For type-freaks - The Ampersand, a blog devoted to the elegant &.

And Jerry Saltz's latest column on Louise Lawler, who photographs artworks in collectors homes, in galleries, in auction houses and in museum storage. The review contain's this week's best sentence:

To see a Delaunay crowded behind a TV, a Warhol “Green Stamps” painting on a hideous red wall, or an extraordinary Mondrian behind an armchair is like seeing how meat is processed.

Can you get a curator to blog?

A few weeks ago, Tyler Green pointed out in a two part post that he felt that he was the ideal audience for most museum blogs: a "web-aware, art-loving, institution-approving, hetero-WASP-atheist".

The problem with this, Green noted, is that museums "tend to think my ilk is their audience when their audience ought to merely start with me, and grow outward from there". In the second part of his post he suggested that getting curators to blog (rather than marketing or web team staff, who often bear the brunt of these initiatives) was crucial to widening the audience.

I've talked recently to a number of people (mostly in museums/galleries, mostly in the web/'interpretation' areas) about this idea. By and large, curators are the 'most wanted' of writers, yet they also seem to be the hardest to get on board. [As an example - and I'm not picking on the AAG here, because good on them for doing what no-one else is doing - Outpost has 24 posts, 2 of them by curatorial staff].

Part of this, as Seb Chan of the Powerhouse Museum has noted, is to do with the exhibition development process. Curators' involvement in an exhibition usually starts to tail off soon after it opens, as they move on to the next project. But for an exhibition blog to work, it has to build up to the opening, and then really kick in once the public starts coming through the doors.

Seb has an interesting interview today with Mal Booth of the Australian War Memorial about curator-blogging. The AWM started out with exhibition-specific blogs, like Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse: the road to Damascus, but have since decided to consolidate efforts into a single blog, using the categories function to help readers zero in on content that's of interest to them.

Seb's interview covers the creation of the blogs, the staff time spent on them, how success is measured/thought about, and whether the AWM has had to change the way it works to accommodate blogging. He also points to this useful post by Nina Simon, How much time does Web 2.0 take?, which gives some ideas for what you can accomplish online in 30 minutes or 3 hours or a day a week.

But for a quick primer, I think Tyler's pointers (summarised below) are a good place to start if you're thinking of getting your museum/gallery blogging:

-- Get curators, conservators, etc. to contribute

-- Follow the well-established blog 'rules'

-- Write with verve

-- Recognize that it takes a while to build audience

-- Try things that might fail

-- Write about art

To which I'd add

-- Don't write blogs if you don't read blogs

-- Trust your staff to be sensible

-- Forget about the 'institutional voice'.

Nerds, words, and novel uses for blogs.

In this post about 'nerdfotainment', Michael Lopp writes about a genre of entertainment that's sprung up over the past 10 years for the generation of nerds in their 30s, who love complexity, Apple, and exercising their 'systematic comprehension muscles. Lopp takes in a variety of nerd-oriented story-telling, moving from 'Lost' to 'Pride and Prejudice', via WoW. Don't worry if this takes you out of your art comfort zone: it's a brilliant and entertaining piece of writing, and you should check it out.

From the brilliant to the torturous: Tyler Green on the Whitney Biennial language (cp. Peter Peryer on a GBAG wall label).

Also from Green, a list of his favourite art museum blogs. His comment about the Amon Carter blog was particularly interesting to me: the staff use the blog to talk about works from the collection that are either out in travelling shows, or on loan to other institutions. A really simple way of showing that while only 5% of your collection might be on display at any one time, other parts of it are in public circulation.

Another novel blog use I've seen recently is Library Answer Person, from Duke University Libraries. The tag line is "Answering your questions about life and the library since 1982", and it includes gems like this page on 'Sex in the stacks'.

Once a physical book in the library, where visitors could write their questions and return later to see the answers, it's been moved online, with people leaving questions using the Comments function, which are later answered as blog posts. The Library has a separate function for research queries - this blog seems to act like a search engine alternative, with questions like 'Does the President shop for his own groceries' and 'Why are phone calls to Europe so expensive'.

I think there's a interesting opportunity to transfer this idea. A blog like this (and here I'd use Wordpress rather than Blogger, because you can build site navigation more easily) could reproduce a lot of the info that gets tucked into the About Us section of a gallery's site in a more interactive way. What's the cheapest way to get to the gallery from the airport? How do I get a job at the Gallery? What shows will you have on in December? I'm a student - can I use your library? Will you be open on Good Friday?

All those questions that the person on your reception desk get asked (and trust me - these questions are both myriad and repeated) could be transcribed over, along with the answer. The blog becomes a resource for internal information sharing (especially if you have a number of staff working the reception desk, or volunteers), is likely to be easier to update with corrections and new info than your website, and can also be opened up to the public to ask questions. Of course, you might end up having to answer some tricky or uncomfortable questions. But with humour, and some lee-way afforded to your staff, it could be great.

Best of 300

Interesting things in my feedreader this morning:

From the Guardian: 'edgy' is the new pre-eminent / innovative / significant / insert-your-favourite art adjective here

Also from the Guardian: a great article about artist's assistants, including Damien Hirst's taxidermist and Mark Wallinger's fabricator.

From Fresh+New at the Powerhouse Museum: a post by Seb Chan about social media in museums and galleries, including some interesting observations on how using social media - blogs, Facebook etc - might affect the way institutions have to approach resourcing projects, particularly in terms of staff time investment.

This was meant to be the 300th post to the Best of 3 blog - only I can't add. Thanks for reading anyway.

Maybe ..... you're gonna be the one who saves me

Lonely? Insecure in your social situation? New research says you should start a blog.

Susan Moore and James Baker, from Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, ran two consecutive studies. Their findings, as reported in this ABC Science Online article:

"We found potential bloggers were less satisfied with their friendships and they felt less socially integrated, they didn't feel as much part of a community as the people who weren't interested in blogging," Ms Moore said.

..."It was as if they were saying 'I'm going to do this blogging and it's going to help me'."

[In a follow up study] Bloggers reported a greater sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people and feeling more confident they could rely on others for help.

The effect happens even if you're not blogging, and just hanging on out on BeMyFacebook:

All respondents, whether or not they blogged, reported feeling less anxious, depressed and stressed after two months of online social networking.

Of course, this is all based on the kind of teeny-tiny sample size (134 self-selected respondents on the first survey; 59 on the second).

p.s. thank you for being my friend.

Welcome to the blogosphere

Auckland Art Gallery has opened up its blog

http://aucklandartgallery.blogspot.com/

Blogs in action

I think it's likely that soon RSS feeds will replace group emails and list-servs. Here's why.


Yesterday (American-time) at 11.57am Tyler Green reported on an email he'd received from Nancy Holt, the widow of Robert Smithson:

Yesterday I received an urgent email from Lynn DeFreitas, Director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, telling me of plans for drilling oil in the Salt Lake near Spiral Jetty. See Attachments. The deadline for protest is [today] Wednesday, at 5PM. Of course, DIA has been informed and are meeting about it today.

I have been told by Lynn that the oil wells will not be above the water, but that means some kind of industrial complex of pipes and pumps beneath the water and on the shore. The operation would require roads for oil tank trucks, cranes, pumps etc. which produce noise and will severely alter the wild, natural place.

If you want to send a letter of protest to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling, the emails or calls of protest go to Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Please refer to Application # 8853.

The ripple effect (sorry, not punny) is almost immediate: here's Bad at Sports Hank Blog Grammar Police Richard Lacayo The New Modernist the Walker Art Center and PORT- and that's only a selection.

"Ordinary" people beating the journalists to the story is nothing new, but I think this might be the first time I've seen this kind of rapid-fire community action over an art event.


Images
Above- Spiral Jetty, photo by Wibbet 64
Below - Drilling proposal, posted by aur2899

Upside downside

Along with Ed Winkleman, and with a nod back to my AiA blog roundtable rant, I'd recommend Sarah Boxer's article on blogs in the latest NY Review of Books.

Boxer summarises the creation and rise of the blog, the nature of the 'blogosphere' and some of the characteristics of the bloging medium and mentality. Upside - a great overview, and some of the best writing I've read on what makes blogging distinct from other forms of communication.

Downside - a stronger emphasis than I'd put on the fame-seeking side of blogging (as opposed to community-building) and, inevitably, being adapted from the print original, no links to the many blogs and blogging moments she mentions. Which underlines the whole point, really.