Weekend reading

The New York Times yearly museum special section is a special treat (especially when it appears in the same day that the NYT reveals its paywall plans - woe, woe, woe). Here's what I'll be reading this weekend

The Spirit of Sharing, by Carol Vogel: about the ways museums are reaching out, and starting off with a profile of long-time hero, Shelley Bernstein

A Growing Use of Private Art in Public Spaces, by Judith Dobrynski: about the tensions of staging exhibitions of private collector's work.

Supplementing a Physical Collection, Online, by John Hanc: about hybrid museums that are more event and online-focused than centred on their buildings

Scent of a Museum, by Carol King: Chandler Burr curates a perfume exhibit (I bet you'd break out of the 'women, 45 plus' bracket if visitors to the show really did experience it by sniffing cute women)

Speaking digitally about museums, by Jennifer Preston: I'm hoping this isn't just a standard how-museums-use-social-media story

And the one I'm most excited about - An Interactive Exhibit for about $30, by Nick Bilton - using Arduino to make cheap in-gallery interpretative materials.

Curious

For the first time in my life, I'm feeling the itch to visit Tasmania. Why? I want to check out MONA, the just-opened private museum of professional gambler and art collector David Walsh.

There's been a shit-load of coverage of the museum leading up to the opening; someone's done a marvelous marketing job. One piece that really caught my eye was from this December article in The Observer:

Moving through the windowless voids is deliberately bewildering. A personal audio device is both the only guide to the art and a way for Mona to track you – it can tell how long you stand in front of each work. Walsh thinks he will swap around the 10 most popular and least popular pieces each week.

What Walsh is suggesting here is effectively exhibition A/B testing. I find it fascinating, and hope to god MONA publishes stats based on this data.