Bridges, not barriers

One of the things that really struck me on my trip to the States was the segregation between customer service staff and security staff at large American museums. In some cases, the customer services staff are museum employees, while the security guards are from an external firm. The customer services staff at the front desk are friendly, engaging, empowered to talk to visitors: the security guards are silent forms, doing their best to be invisible whilst also being watchful.

As this article about The Broad makes clear, the divisions between the two sets of staff can be very strong, and there's vested interest in keeping the roles separate:

But 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. To him, it's a way for museums to cut costs by folding separate security and visitor service functions into one. "I'm opposed to doing that," Layne said. "It can be a distraction from the primary mission" of protecting the art.

What bullshit.

Anyway. I started thinking about that again this week when I read this article in the Dallas Morning News about Nasher Sculpture Center guard Patricia Ann Jackson. Now, Jackson sounds like a really great asset for the museum:

Everyone’s a critic. The phrase is not typically meant as a compliment, but for those of us who do the job professionally, it’s not only a badge of honor, but a goal. Building an engaged public is one of our chief responsibilities, and we need all the help we can get.  

At the Nasher Sculpture Center, that help comes from an unlikely source, Patricia Ann Jackson, a native Dallasite who has worked as a guard at the museum for the last three years, mostly in the lower-level gallery, where she has gained a devoted following for her considerable charm and perspicacious, if idiosyncratic, commentary.  

 “If you come into a room and I’m the guard, I should be able to tell you something about the pieces that are in the room, and not just be a piece in the room,” says Jackson, 46.

But the overall tone of the article - which when I read it made it feel like Jackson was being presented almost like a talking dog, a strange and entertaining anomaly - made me feel really uncomfortable. Maybe it's just because my experience in New Zealand has been so different. In the three museums where I've worked FOH, and here at The Dowse, the expectation has always been that you will be engaged, and in turn be engaging. That this is where the job satisfaction is, in a role that otherwise involves a lot of standing around and telling people (a) not to touch that and (b) the toilets are down that flight of stairs and to the left. That American museums are only just coming around to the idea of the people on the floor with the visitors being there to act as a bridge, and not a barrier, astounds me.

Audio updates

If you're not thoroughly sick of it already (part of the duties of a Winston Churchill Fellowship is sharing the ideas and information you gathered) here are two recent pieces I've done on my American research trip: one for Nine to Noon that focuses on new museums and new architecture, and one for The Dowse's own podcast that focuses on some of my wider observations on funding models, visitor experience, and the beauty of being able to focus on doing only one thing in your museum.

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).

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.