WCMT Draft Acquittal: Visitor Experience

The final large chapter for my acquittal for the funding I received from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for my research trip around American museums last year! It struck me that rather than release it all as one big fat PDF I might try posting drafts of sections here, for any feedback that might be forthcoming. The first post looked at visible storage, the second at membership programmes, third focused on digital innovation.

I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.

1.1 Introduction

I was fortunate on this research trip to spend time at some of the best encyclopedic art museums in the world. The quality and scope of American art collections is startling, and this applies not only in the major tourist destinations (New York, Washington, Los Angeles) but also to many cities whose arts institutions may not be internationally known brand names. In all the centres I visited the scale and quality of the encyclopedic museums was at times overwhelming: I spent an entire day, for example, working my way through the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and still felt like I was rushing through numerous galleries.

The flip side of this largesse was that many of the museums were somewhat repetitive. Galleries are devoted to ancient cultures, to American art history, to major moments in European art history. Art from Asian and indigenous cultures is largely presented as artefact: precious objects from the past, somewhat deadened in the museum context. Decorative art is weighted towards silversmithing and furniture. Intermixing of collections in long-term displays is still relatively rare. 'Blue chip' artists take up a lot of wall space, and after a few cities I found myself ticking off each museum's Ellsworth Kelly room, its Richard Serra sculpture, its Alexander Calder mobile.

I came to appreciate smaller, more tightly focused museums (I acknowledge that my itinerary consciously focused on larger art museums and, had I sought out experimental, contemporary or niche organisations instead, my experience would have been very different) and distinctive displays that spoke to the location I was in. In Baltimore, it was a small room at the BMA with a display of seven elaborate 19th century crazy quilts - an intimate, tactile experience unlike any other I had on my trip. At Mia in Minneapolis it was a room that brought together artworks from across continents and decades, united by an link to textiles, from a Robert Rauschenberg assemblage to a Yinka Shonibare sculpture to a beaded suitcase depicting a courtship story by a Lakota artist, tentatively identified as Ida Claymore.

At the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis I was struck by how closely the museum tracks with the needs and interests of its urban community. In Baltimore again, I was entranced by the store at the American Visionary Art Museum - a cornucopia of gifts, crafts, tchotkes and publications that in its diversity and generosity mirrored the ambitions of the museum. At Brooklyn Museum I was taken by their recently refurbished entrance gallery, which seeks to give the visitor an introduction to the whole museum in one space; at the BMA in Baltimore I saw a similar room under construction, and heard about their plans to open up an adjoining space to create a platform for community discussion.

As I travelled around the States, I read articles almost daily about the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The Broad is a privately funded museum that eschews many of the trappings of the conventional art museum, including charged entry, reception desks, venue hire spaces and restaurants. Much was made of their Apple store-inspired approach to visitor hosting.

This section of my report details some of my standout moments of visitor experiences, and draws some conclusions on how museum's framing and retail spaces offer important opportunities to connect visitors to the museum's brand and objectives.

1.2 American Visionary Art Museum and Mia: Inspiring retail experiences

The Dowse's entrance is the hub of the museum: it leads through to the cafe, galleries, venue hire spaces, and hosts the store and the reception desk. Over the past 18 months we have been rethinking our approach to the store space in particular, from seeing it as a retail offer to seeing it as a prime location to connect with visitors and introduce them to The Dowse's brand values: a shift from consumer culture to participatory culture reflecting the wider shift in museum practice.

On my trip around the States I made a point of spending time in as many museum stores as possible. I observed not only stock and display methods, but how the staff interacted with customers.

I took a lot away from how stores like that at the BMA communicate the iconic nature of certain collection objects or areas through their merchandising: a single quilt or painting might be presented as magnets, pencils, notepads, embroidery kits, cards and more. I realised as I visited these stores that not only do they impress upon visitors the importance of certain works through the plethora of product based on them: they also give the visitor a subtle preview/reminder of the museum's displays. By exploring the exhibition and collection-related merchandise, you have an opportunity to recall the things you have seen in the museum, and consider (through making decisions on potential purchases) what you were really attracted to.

The stores also offer an opportunity for visitors to connect with a museum employee. In general, American museum gallery attendants are not encouraged to engage with visitors (see below). In contrast to the often silent (and bored) attendants in the galleries, and ticketing staff who were focused on processing visitors, store staff were chatty and inquisitive, commenting on accents, asking where you were from, asking about your visit, what you'd liked, helping you find something in the store you'd be interested in.

On my trip, two stores really stood out for the way they embodied the museum's brand statements and served as a visitor experience unto themselves: the store Mia in Minneapolis, and the Sideshow Shop, American Visionary Art Museum.

Independently owned, the Sideshow Shop effortlessly embodies the AVAM focus on "an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself." The museum overall demonstrates the same respect towards artists and professional standards of any other museum, but all aspects of its design and presentation speak of visual abundance, pleasure in the act of creating, spontaneity and individuality.

When you purchase an entrance ticket at AVAM you automatically receive a $5 discount chit for the store, which whets your appetite. The store itself is divided into two halves. The first room consists of a overflowing and extremely stimulating array of giftware, tchotkes, jewellery, curiosity pieces and crafts, mingled with AVAM publications and merchandise.. It is a space to explore like a packed archaeological dig, and truly a place where you could find 'something for anyone'. The second half of the store is equally densely stocked, but more restrained, and offers an astounding array of books on outsider, visionary and folk artists, from monographs to exhibition catalogues. The quality of the selection underlines the seriousness with which the museum approaches promoting visionary artists.

I am not a person easily seduced by gewgaws and baubles, but even I found the joyfulness of the Sideshow Store infectious, and spent more there than I did in any other museum. It has become the first thing I tell people about in terms of the museum - not because it undercut the actual art, but because it complemented the art visit so well.

The store at Mia sits at the other end of the taste spectrum. The stock underlines the museum's brand as sophisticated, urbane and high quality. Brand-alignment is obvious and startegic. Part of a recently-renovated entrance way, the store spills out into the foyer space and sits opposite a large wall with pictograms that orient the visitor to the museum's numerous floors.

As stated on the museum's website, the store has very clear messaging and purpose:

Explore The Store at Mia offers a curated assortment of unique products from around the globe that celebrate the quality of the collection, while connecting life and art through the hands of the artist to support the Minneapolis Institute of Art. All proceeds benefit Mia. 

Connect
Enjoy an engaging experience where the art comes to life through artisan-crafted products in a range of styles and materials. Learn the stories behind the products while being inspired by the stunning displays.

That second paragraph in particular could easily be adapted to express the goals of any contemporary art installation.

I was particularly struck by Mia's product line relating to its 100th anniversary activities. Some were standard: a line of text-based t-shirts commissioned from American artists, a celebratory book. Others were far less predictable, like a collaboration with Minneapolis business Handsome Cycles to custom-paint a cycle range in designs inspired by iconic works from the collection.

The store also makes prominent use of collaborations and pop-ups. An exhibition about chef Ferran Adria and his restaurant El Bulli was complemented by a partnership with Etsy to promote artisanal linens, tableware, kitchen tools and food products, along with an extensive cookbook pop-up, all promoted under the 100th anniversary banner.

The shopping experience at both these museums was more than just retail. It was an opportunity to learn more about what the museum valued, what they aimed to provide for visitors, and how they perceived themselves.

1.3 American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis: A philosophy of hospitality

At the ASI I spent a day with the director of exhibitions, collections and programmes Scott Pollock, learning about how the organisation fits both into its geographic and cultural communities.

The ASI, comprising the historic Turnblad Mansion and the contemporary Nelson Cultural Center, acts as a gathering place for people to share experiences around themes of culture, migration, the environment and the arts, informed by enduring links to Sweden. Communities of Swedish and Nordic origin remain a core focus - for example, the ASI runs language programmes, offers traditional art workshops, and shows the work of Scandinavian artists.

At the same time the museum services a specific urban setting; an area largely populated by young professionals who have not yet started families and older professionals whose children have left home, and an immediate precinct populated with pre-school providers and elder-care and health-care facilities. Therefore the museum has a focus on programming with intergenerational appeal: their audience for their late night programmes, for example, starts with older adults in the first two hours, and then in the later hours attracts young people who are at the beginning of a night out.

What particularly struck me about my experience of the ASI however was their emphasis upon hospitality, which has a specifically Nordic emphasis (which resonated with New Zealand museum's adoption of the concept of manaakitanga). Hospitality is one of the museum's values, and it extends across their work. The museum cafe, FIKA, has a national reputation: it is named for the Swedish daily break, a social tradition involving coffee and treats that brings people together. The building has leased spaces for local universities and other organisations, bringing different public services into the complex. Regular workshops are run separate from the museum programming, offering another community gathering point.

The emphasis on food and coming together threads through the museum's offer, from its Christmas season displays of decorated tables to its Nordic Table Workshops. Children's language programmes include time for fika. Late night programming is built around music, food and drink.

This emphasis on hospitality unities beautiful buildings and a quirky collections with various community and interest groups. As I spent time in Minneapolis, a highly diverse city that is proud of its waves of immigration, I saw how culture is valued and shared in the city, largely through food and performance.

1.5 Brooklyn Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art: Orienting the new visitor

As noted, encyclopaedic American museums can be huge and draining to visit if you are trying to do it all in one day. Gallery rolls out after gallery, and you move at speed, worrying that you're going to miss something. There is also a bewildering array of time periods, media and cultures. It is little wonder that museums are seen as intimidating or off putting for those who do not feel they have the requisite special knowledge.

The Brooklyn Museum has addressed this possible issue with its Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn exhibition. From their website:

This innovative, cross-cultural installation was developed to create new ways of looking at art by making connections between cultures as well as objects. Located in our first-floor Great Hall, it provides for the first time a dynamic and welcoming introduction to our extensive collections, featuring pieces that represent peoples throughout time and around the world.

Located adjacent to the entry foyer, the exhibition cuts across time, place and culture to offer an overview of the museum's collection, the exhibition spaces and collection areas visitors will encounter, and introduces the museum's focus on encouraging visitors to consider issues of identity. The installation is richly designed, offers text and digital interpretation, and presents an intriguing range of collection objects. It offers both a strong short-visit option, and an ideal opportunity for new visitors to 'practice' visiting the museum. The quality of the installation also prefigures the museum's desire to renovate galleries on other floors.

While still under development at the time I visited, the Imagining Home display in the BMA's new Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center operates in a similar manner to Brooklyn Museum's Connecting Cultures gallery. Curated on the universal theme of 'home' from the BMA's collection, the exhibition features objects from across the globe and throughout time. Interactive features include soundscapes that immerse visitors in the place objects were made, and videos depicting the stories of individuals and families who lived with a reproduction of one of the exhibition items for a month during the development of the show.

The new center is located in a recently added second entrance to the museum, which includes its store and cafe. Attendants are posted in the gallery during weekends and events, and a reading nook is also located in the space. The room next door to Imagining Home is a modestly-sized venue space, which hosts the monthly 'Open Hours' programme, launched alongside Imagining Home. The programme invites the public to propose and contribute to events in the room, ranging from a recipe swap-meet to a conversation about vacant housing in Baltimore.

The exhibition and venue space are complemented by Outpost, a facilitated 'mobile museum' which moves through the city and works in partnership with other organisations. It contains replicas of works from the BMA's collection and runs activities that lead participants through the same themes of home and identity that the Imagining Home exhibition is built on.

The effort by these two museums to provide a welcoming, accessible and high quality introductory experience for visitors was an inspiring part of my visit. A hidden benefit was the high level of cross-team collaboration that was evident in developing these exhibitions and accompanying offerings.

1.6 The Broad, Los Angeles: A 'new' model of visitor hosting

I consciously timed my visit to the States to take advantage of the newly opened Broad Museum in Los Angeles, which differed strongly from many of the other museums I visited.

The museum showcases the personal collection of Eli and Edthye Broad, and is funded by the couple: therefore, it has no public body stakeholders or governance board to satisfy. The museum is constructed without revenue-generating options such as venue hire or a cafe, has no central reception desk, and has only a small shop operation. It has only two floors of displays and can easily be visited within an hour; it shows American and international art from the past 50 years.

The museum was attracting swathes of media coverage in the lead-up to my visit, with news articles on everything from the building to the collection to the maintenance required to keep the glass facade clean. The museum's digital ticketing and audio guide systems received considerable attention, as did the approach to training gallery attendants. The service at The Broad is modelled on Apple stores, with visitors being served on the spot by roving attendants (to swipe entry tickets or to take payments for purchases) and with the idea of the Genius Bar being followed - that any visitor services staff should be able to answer questions about the museum and the art on display. All staff are equipped with a small iPad to help them answer visitor queries and tell them more about works on displays; they are fully trained on the works on display and receive incentives to demonstrate their knowledge of the collections.

In general, American museums maintain a separation between gallery attendants, whose chief role is to act as a layer of security for the works on display, and visitor services staff, who manage ticketing and take visitor questions. The Broad's approach to visitor staff was seen as singular; a representative media article reported:

it's the VSAs that may particularly grab museum professionals' attention. 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. "This is leading-edge, and it's a very positive thing for the Broad," said Kathleen Brown, principal consultant for Lord Cultural Resources. (Boehm, 2015)

That same article sought out a dissenting view:

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. (Boehm, 2015)

There is an element of labour relations at play here that I do not pretend to fully understand. I also suspect that this division of labour is not seen at smaller museums, galleries or historic houses, where staff have a tendency around the world to pitch in and guard their individual positions less tightly.

I was deeply struck, nonetheless, that this was seen as such a novelty. Not long after I returned from my trip, a similar article appeared in The Dallas Morning News, about a visitor host at the NAsher Sculpture Center, Patricia Ann Jackson. The reporter wrote:

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. (Lamster 2015)

Lamster noted that this change had been led by guards, not the museum administration. He then reported on changes that have been taking place at the nearby DMA since Maxwell Anderson (now departed) had taken over in 2013:

“When we went free to the public, we changed our philosophy from being a security model to a visitor-focused model,” says Barbee Barber, the museum’s director of staff and visitor experience. 

Barber’s very title, with the telling inclusion of the phrase “visitor experience,” suggests just how ingrained this shift has become. It is a change modeled not just in the guards’ behavior at the DMA, but in their uniforms, which were changed from traditional blue blazers with red ties to a more casual look of khaki pants and polo shirts. “It’s much less intimidating,” says Barber. (Lamster, 2015)

Nearly every staff member at the DMA I spoke to on my visit noted this change in policy, and clearly saw it as one of the most important recent developments at the museum.

As a New Zealand museum director though, I remain surprised and discomfited this division of labour - and the glaring fact that the silent figures in American museum galleries tend to be black, as made painfully obvious in American artist Fred Wilson's 1991 sculpture Guarded View, which consists of four headless black mannequins dressed in the uniforms of leading New York art museums.

Few New Zealand art museums can afford to have visitor attendants stationed in every gallery, and fewer still employ security guards in tandem with their own staff. Visitor staff in New Zealand tend to be encouraged to think of themselves as customer service representatives, art communicators and ambassadors for the institution. Te Papa has set the trend here in recent decades, with their strong focus on training their visitor hosts, and employing a diverse staff in terms of age, ethnicity, language skills and backgrounds, to reflect the diversity of the museum's offerings and its visitors. This was certainly an area where I was proud - and somewhat relieved - to come from Aotearoa New Zealand.

1.7 Conclusion

The ideas and information I took from this aspect of my trip have been the ones that I have most quickly introduced into our daily work at The Dowse.

My observations of museum stores reinforced work we were already doing, and has given us an even stronger framework for our experiments with using our store as a site of engagement with visitors beyond just the retail experience. ASI's emphasis on hospitality fits well with New Zealand culture, especially when thinking about Māori and Pacific communities. While The Dowse is not of a size that warrants an 'introductory' gallery, the spaces at the BMA and Brooklyn Museum were extremely relevant in thinking about how a permanent collection feature could be built into The Dowse's offer.

The larger learning I took from this aspect of my visit was about the need for a museum to communicate its personality through all channels available to it - and to create personable and idiosyncratic experiences that don't necessary require huge budget, but do require a strong sense of what makes your museum stand apart from others.

1.8 Further information

American Crazy Quilts, Baltimore Museum of Art https://artbma.org/exhibitions/crazy-quilts

Room G374, Mia http://collections.artsmia.org/search/room:%22G374%22

Mia store http://new.artsmia.org/shop/

Sideshow Shop, American Visionary Art Museum http://www.sideshowbaltimore.com/new/index.html

American Swedish Institute - Vision, Mission and Values http://www.asimn.org/about-us/mission

Connecting Cultures: A world in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/connecting_cultures

Imagining Home, Baltimore Museum of Art https://artbma.org/exhibitions/imagining-home

Open Hours, Baltimore Museum of Art https://artbma.org/events/series/open.hours.html

Outpost, Baltimore Museum of Art https://artbma.org/events/series/outpost.html

Rebekah Kirkman, 'Radical Feeling: Katie Bachler talks about how art and activism intersect at the BMA Outpost', City Paper, 3 February 2016 http://www.citypaper.com/arts/visualart/bcp-020316-ae-bma-outpost-20160203-story.html

Robin Pogrebin, 'At the Helm of a Philanthropist’s New Los Angeles Museum', New York Times, 12 April 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/arts/design/at-the-helm-of-a-philanthropists-new-los-angeles-museum.html

Gideon Brower, 'How The Broad trains its staff may change your experience of the art', The Frame, 17 September 2015 http://www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/2015/09/16/44498/how-the-broad-trains-its-staff-may-change-your-exp/

Mike Boehm, 'The Broad doesn't want museum guards between you and the art', Los Angeles Times, 17 September 2015 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-broad-museum-logistics-20150912-story.html

Mark Lamster, 'At the Nasher, guard perfects the art of friendliness', The Dallas Morning News, 13 November 2015, http://www.dallasnews.com/lifestyles/arts/columnists/mark-lamster/20151113-at-the-nasher-guard-perfects-the-art-of-friendliness.ece

Fred Wilson, Guarded View, 1991. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. http://collection.whitney.org/object/11433

Reading list, 7 May 2016

This week's must-read, courtesy of @klimtypefoundry - 'How designer Willem Sandberg championed the rebellious type' on the late graphic designer & Stedelijk director's first UK retrospective.

Double-dose: What does a female artist have to do to get a major solo show? from The Art Newspaper and Women in the visual arts: “Leadership is not a gender neutral space” from a-n.

The National Endowment for the Humanities in America is launching a new grant programme aimed at intensive projects that foster public debate and discussion through museums.

Brooklyn Museum gets some extensive coverage in the New York Times as their Ask app project comes to fruition and starts changing things at the museum.

SFMOMA gets two write-ups in Wired, one a quite lush interactive about their new building and the other on its new audio tour ("art" and "not so art" options enabled).

Maria Sol Escobar - known as Marisol - died on April 30th: here's a fascinating 2014 article by Sebastian Smee on this artist who I shamefully knew nothing about.

Louis Kahn's Kimball Art Museum is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Now his massive concrete cylinder at the Yale Center for British Art has entered my bucket list.

WCMT Acquittal Draft: Digital Innovation

The campaign to complete my acquittal for the funding I received from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for my research trip around American museums last year continues. It struck me that rather than release it all as one big fat PDF I might try posting drafts of sections here, for any feedback that might be forthcoming. The first post looked at visible storage, the second at membership programmes. This third is focused on digital innovation.

I should emphasise that this really is a *draft* and changes to the final document are inevitable.

1.1 Introduction

In 2016 the Museums and the Web conference - the major annual international event for museum professionals, academics, consultants and vendors working in the digital facet of museum operations - celebrated its 20th anniversary. While coverage of digital innovation in museums often still has a breathless tone (It's not your grandfather's museum) for practitioners, this is now a well established field with a distinct whakapapa of milestone projects and leading thinkers.

Every interaction with a museum I had on my trip was mediated in some way by digital technology, whether that was reserving my online entrance ticket for The Broad, downloading the National Gallery of Art's app in advance of my visit, using Mia's exploratory touchscreen interface in their galleries, or simply searching online to figure out transport options prior to my visit.

One of the frequently expressed concerns regarding the introduction of digital technology into gallery displays is that touchscreens or interactives will distract the visitor from the unique selling point of museums: the actual object. Equally, current thinking in digital teams is around how technology can be used to enhance social experiences at museums, rather than isolate the user. The phrase 'heads-up experiences' has emerged to described the use of technology to promote close looking and social visiting, as opposed to 'heads-down', implying a visit spent looking at screens and not objects.

Another theme in conversations about the layering of digital experiences into the museum is discussion of the 'visitor journey', divided at a high level into pre-visit (researching the museum, its collections and exhibitions, identifying programmes and items of interest) on site (experiencing the museum, from ticketing all the way through to the gift shop) and post-visit (follow-up research or visiting an web-enabled record of your visit).

The O, the digital visitor guide to MONA (the Museum of Old and New Art) in Hobart, launched in 2011, has become an exemplar of heads-up technology and innovative post-visit experience that promotes unusually high levels of follow-up engagement by visitors. As part of the ticketing process, every visitor is given an iPod Touch on entry to the museum, which is loaded with the O software (an iOS app developed by Art Processors). The O takes the place of interpretation at the museum (which, famously, does not have labels for the artworks on display). As the visitor moves around the museum they can see images and details for works 'near them' on the O and choose which to access more information around. Following MONA's pointedly irreverent tone, visitors are offered choices of 'Art Wank' (curatorial descriptions), 'Ideas' (talking points, quotes, provocative statements), 'Media' (short interviews with artists) and 'Gonzo' (the voice of the museum's founder, collector David Walsh).

Using the O, visitors can 'Love' or 'Hate' artworks on display, and see how other visitors ranked the same objects. In addition, by entering their email address the visitor can retrieve the details of their visit after leaving the museum by logging into MONA's website, at which time they can see a visualisation of the paths they took through the museum and retrieve the information about artworks. It is notable that MONA has not put its collection online for general web visitors: only by logging in, following a physical visit, can a person explore the collection and the information and interviews aggregated in the O. As Seb Chan has noted, this is the prerogative of a museum that is privately owned and operated, but does not fit with the public mandate of most art museums. (Chan, 2011) On the other hand, this does make the post-visit experience an exclusive one, which is of a piece with MONA's branding of itself as an art pilgrimage experience.

In this report, I am focusing on two flagship projects, the Cooper Hewitt's 'Pen' (the signature development of their recent three-year overhaul of the museum's building, visitor experience and technology platform) and the Brooklyn Museum's 'Ask app', an in-gallery app that enables real-time conversations between visitors and staff. Both museums are in New York, both projects were funded through the philanthropic programme Bloomberg Connects, and both were lead by practitioners who have strong track records of digital innovation, and whose profuse analysis and publishing on their work over the past ten or more years has formed a significant portion of the shared body of knowledge built by digital museum professionals. At the same time, the Pen and the Ask app also emerge from very specific museum missions and philosophies around visitor experience.

In this section I also reflect on ideas about brand-building through digital activities, and my experience of a dissonance between an online and physical visit as expressed through my long-term online relationship with the Walker Art Center.

1.2 Ask app - Brooklyn Museum 

Background and objectives

The goal of the Ask app and associated work programme is to 'create a dynamic and responsive museum that fosters dialogue and sparks conversation between staff and all Museum visitors'. (Bernstein 2014)

The Ask app is designed to encourage visitors to ask questions about what they're looking at. Available on both iOS and Android platforms, people download the app, which is locked until they are on the museum premises.

On entering the museum the app 'wakes up'. Visitors can then submit questions using an interface that is familiar for people who text or use chat or messaging services, including uploading images. Specially trained staff receive and answer the questions: enquiries and answers are added to a database which complements existing documentation of the collections, and shared regularly with curators, to build a staff-wide understanding of what is piquing visitors' curiosity, or what they may not be getting from existing signage and interpretation.

The team working on the Ask app have three goals:

• Fostering a personal connection with visitors and creating opportunities to talk about art 
• Encouraging visitors to look more closely at art, and explore more art as a result 
• Use data gained through the app to inform decisions about how art is displayed, thus using visitor data to drive institutional change. 

The Ask app is part of a larger project reviewing the visitor experience of the Brooklyn Museum, including a redesign of their entry lobby and visitor reception to improve visitor flow and quickly orient visitors to the museum.

My experience of the Ask App

Unlike the Cooper Hewitt, where every visitor is given one of the pens as part of their museum entry, and the Dallas Museum of Art Friends programme, where roving ground floor visitor staff promote the programme to people as they enter the museum, the Ask app is built into the entry or ticketing process at Brooklyn Museum. Visitors must either already be aware of the app (through word of mouth or the website) or notice small signage placed around the museum. Staff are aware of this limitation, and see it significantly influencing the current low uptake (about 2% of visitors were using the app at the time of my visit).

To begin with on my visit, using the Ask app did not come naturally. Your first use requires you to think up a question that is not already answered by your pre-existing knowledge, or by the very good interpretation already provided in the galleries.

My first question was a slightly frustrating experience. I had a very specific question about a particular Gerrit Rietveld chair that was part of a design display. I wanted to know who would have access to buy it. What I was trying to understand was ‘Was this chair sold on the general market or did you have to know the designer to get one?’. The answer the Ask team sent me though, in a series of small chunks, gave me context about the chair, the fact that the general public wasn’t interested in avant garde design, and only in the fourth message told me that actually no, only the artist’s acquaintances acquired the chairs.

However, I was intrigued by how quickly the app grew on me. I found that I was generating more questions in response to the answers I was receiving, and this questioning behaviour persisted as I moved from gallery to gallery. I also felt like I struck up a rapport with the Ask responder, who expressed their own enjoyment of artworks I was sending through, and mentioned works by the same artist in other museums. At one point I found myself sending through observations rather than questions: I almost felt like I was visiting with a friend and having discussions in the galleries, rather than having a solitary experience.

On some occasions the time lag between my question and a response meant that the answer came through after I was finished with the part of the museum I had asked the question in. This was particularly the case when I asked a questions about whether a sculpture in a lobby space was allowed to be touched: the reply arrived ten minutes after I had moved on from the lobby, and therefore well after the use case was closed. As there is very little seating in the museum's galleries, it was difficult to find a place to pause my visit and wait for an answer.

The Ask app-branded question prompts placed on objects throughout the museum were a weak point in the experience. These are designed to prompt curiosity about the app amongst those who have not downloaded it, and use amongst those who have. The signage is large and more flamboyantly designed than the regular object labels used throughout the museum, but unfortunately the level and tone of the questions used feels babyish in comparison to the traditional object labels they were juxtaposed with. The analogy I would draw is to the interpretation technique of placing information panels targeted adults and children in the same exhibition: the traditional labels felt like the adult version, whereas the Ask labels felt like the kiddie prompt - in strong opposition to the target market of repeat visitors who are becoming more and more engaged with the museum's offerings.

Another distinctive feature of the Ask app is that when you leave the museum, the content of your conversation disappears from the app, which is effectively wiped clean and rendered inactive until your next visit. This is a feature that divides opinion amongst practitioners I have spoken to. On my visit I did not notice that this happened, and when it was brought to my attention, it felt natural to me: like any conversation had in a museum, you couldn't take it with you. Others who I talked about the app with wanted to be able to refer back to their conversations, or share them with other people, and were frustrated that (a) they could not do so and (b) they weren't aware of this until it was too late. While I was unconcerned with losing my conversation, I do think that having it disappear without warning violates an unwritten rule of internet good faith, that the content you create on a site should remain available to you unless you are explicitly told otherwise.

From an initially stiff beginning, by the end of my visit I found that my engagement with the museum had been deepened by the experience of using the Ask app. It was not so much that I learned new information I may not have been able to search out for myself, had I been sufficiently curious: it was because the inquiring part of my brain was lit up by using the app, and I found myself generating an unusual number of questions.

1.3 The Pen - Cooper Hewitt Design Museum

Background and objectives

The Cooper Hewitt reopened in late 2014 after a major renovation of its heritage building, and a rebranding exercise. Alongside the physical redevelopment, the museum rebuilt its technology and digital offers to support its new take on its role as a design museum, rapidly digitising their collection, integrating new ticketing and customer relationship management software, building a new digital interface for their collection, and launching new digital experiences for on-site visitors, specifically a series of interactive tables, the Immersion Room, and the 'Pen'.

After initially investigating using a version of MONA's O platform, the Cooper Hewitt decided to create their own experience. The museum's key concepts for integrating media and technology into the visitor experience were:

• Give visitors explicit permission to play 
• Make interactive experiences social and multi-player and allow people to learn by watching 
• Ensure a ‘look up’ experience 
• Be ubiquitous, a ‘default’ operating mode for the institution 
• Work in conjunction with the web and offer a “persistence of visit”

Working with a number of hardware, software and design companies, the Cooper Hewitt created a range of experiences, from the Immersion Room (where visitors digitally explore the museum's large wallpaper collection then design their own wallpapers, which are digitally projected into the room they are standing in) to a Process Lab (a hands-on exploratory space) to interactive tables that allow for collection browsing and simple design exercises.

Uniting all these experiences is the Pen, a piece of custom-made hardware shaped somewhat like a stylus that allows the visitor to interact with the different digital experiences of the museum, and 'collect' information about the items that are on display. All the visitor's interactions are available to them after their visit via a personalised URL; the museum is concurrently collecting and analysing data from the Pen to better understand visitor behaviour (e.g. length of stay, under-visited galleries, items that are frequently or infrequently 'collected').

My experience of the Pen

Unlike the DMA Friends, where the programme is promoted but not a requirement for free entry, and the Ask app, which depends on visitors self-initiating a download, the Pen is given to every visitor at the Cooper Hewitt as part of the ticketing project. Every visitor receives a well-honed patter that takes the staff member about 40 seconds to deliver, explaining how they can use the pen during and after their visit. You can see in this piece of visitor experience design the observations Chan made in 2011 of MONA:

"I was very impressed by the ‘technology concierge’ skills of the ticketing staff – they run you through the basics of the App and the hardware as they sell you your ticket and set you off on your way. Sitting beside the cash register is a graphic clearly explaining each of the main interface screens of the O as well. I’ve never seen this level of ‘scaffolding’ happen in other museums and the deftness with which visitors are set off on their way quickly is a testament to their staff training (and acceptance amongst these staff of the value of the O itself)." (Chan, 2011; emphasis the author's)

I loved the Pen as an object. It is like an oversized, enjoyably rubbery crayon in the hand, with sufficient weight to feel useful, not flimsy. The act of pressing the pen to labels brought an pleasant tactile and physical element to my visit which is usually lacking in galleries. I also enjoyed using a device that was unique to the building I was in, rather than borrowing an iPod or using my own phone. It brought a level of specialness to the experience, and subtly emphasised the museum's entire ethos: the history of human innovation and adaption as expressed through design.

The pen became pesky when I was trying juggle using it, using my phone to take photos, and using my notebook and pen to make notes about my visit - especially as the museum is very small, and has little seating or break-out space.

As I moved through the Making Design exhibitions on the second floor, the fundamental underlying changes to the way the museum approaches objects became clear to me. Making Design is a rotating collection exhibition, using groupings of collection items to explore five key elements of design: line, form, texture, pattern, and color. Some of these are straightforward (such as a grouping of blue objects) but others were more complex. I was particularly struck by a pairing in one case of an early 20th century bracelet and a early 21st century piece of medical technology used in shoulder reconstruction surgery. The two objects seem very unrelated, but when I read the label, another layer was revealed to me. The labels includes the tags assigned into the collection database to each item. In the case of the implant, the first two words as aesthetic descriptors: ‘lace-like’, ‘snowflake’. Suddenly, a piece of medical technology was being presented simultaneously for its use value, and for its aesthetic qualities. This was eloquently but subtly suggested by the display, by the interpretation, and by the Cooper Hewitt's emphasis on actively making sense of objects as part of our visit.

During my visit I came to perceive the Pen as the most recent point on a design continuum that stretched from the beautiful historic home the museum is housed in, out through its collections, and right up into the contemporary visitor experience. This moment crystallised for me in the first floor collection galleries. I was standing in the mansion's original library, handcarved from teak in the 19th century: through the door of the gallery I could see an Issey Miyake dress from around the turn of the century on display. Between me and the dress were two young women, using the Pen on one of the interactive tables. In that moment I experienced design across the centuries: design history in action.

The topmost floor of the Cooper Hewitt was given over to a touring exhibition showcasing the work of Heatherwick Studios. The integration of the Pen into an exhibition sourced from outside the museum, not made up of objects existing in its collection database, is still an issue being worked through by the Cooper Hewitt. The show is displayed as a series of modules or pods devoted to individual projects: the integration of the pen is limited to panels attached to the walls around the galleries where you could ‘collect’ the various displays. This breaks the user experience pattern set by the rest of the museum, and given that the panels are modest to the point of invisibility, in these spaces I didn’t see anyone else except me - dutiful expert visitor - using their Pen.

I was also disappointed by the design interactives on the ground floor tables. On the tables you can design certain objects (lamps, chairs, etc) by selecting the form and materials and then sketching lines. I chose a lamp and concrete and with two intersecting lines made an elegant form. Compared to the intelligence and empathy with which the work of designers is displayed throughout the museum, I felt this particular interactive undersold the true complexity of the design process.

The very last place I visited was the hands-on design exploration studio on the ground floor of the museum, tucked through a doorway after the tables that I used above. On walking into the room I realised my haptic needs had already been met on my visit. I didn't want to twist cellophane and hessian around wire armatures to make lightshades because I'd already done things like that. I assume however that the room is extremely well-suited to group use and education visits: the exhibition galleries themselves would quickly feel crowded if visitors were sharing the space with school groups.

I also have to admit to being one of those people who never visited their URL after their visit. I flirted with the idea of doing it for the sake of completeness, but I decided to to stay true to my visitor inclinations. Instead, my online relationship with the Cooper Hewitt continues not through a formal 'post-visit' experience, but by what I think of as the 'micro-touches' I have established with the museum. I follow the Labs blog and Twitter account, and several staff and ex-staff on social media. Physically visiting the museum has given greater depth to this sustained digital interaction.

1.4 Innovation and sustainability

Traditionally, a museum’s brand has been built on buildings, collections, 'rockstar' staff, and exhibition programmes.

Today, digital is definitely the newest way of branding an institution. This can be seen in increasing amounts of media coverage for digital strategies and philanthropic support for digital initiatives. And unlike buildings, exhibitions programmes, and collections, a new digital brand can be forged relatively rapidly.

I felt that each of the museums whose technology efforts I focused on made a strong brand statement through the values and objectives that drove their projects. The DMA’s digital brand is about a commitment to inclusion – widening their audience beyond the country club that previously felt at home in the museum. Cooper Hewitt's brand says that design is an integral part of being human, and each of us has a designer inside us. The Brooklyn Museum’s brand says that people are intelligent and curious about art and warrant personal responses to their curiosity. All these brand statements are being communicated out through messages to members, funders, stakeholders, residents, and the general public.

I have come to feel however that there is a distinct danger though of your digital brand being, or becoming, disassociated from your physical experience.

My clearest experience of this was visiting the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 2012 then Walker Senior New Media Developer Nate Solas was invited to keynote at the annual National Digital Forum conference on the museum's recently redeveloped website, which was being held up as an international exemplar at the time. The Walker’s website redevelopment was carried out with a philosophy of unusual generosity and external focus, and with the aim of supporting the local art community as well as positioning the museum internationally. This was exemplified by the homepage of the website becoming a newshub for art stories from all over the world, connecting their audience in with the global and local arts world. This reinforced the brand of the Walker, as a node in the international art media environment. I found their way of thinking inspirational, and have tried to follow it in the way we behave online at The Dowse.

Alongside the web redevelopment ran the Open Field programme, where a large undeveloped grass area in front of the museum, intended for a building extension that hadn’t been realised, was turned into a community-focused performance and activity space, hosting everything from yoga classes to internet cat video festivals.

The conjunction of the newsy, outward-looking website and the innovative, welcoming Open Field programme (which attracted significant internet attention) created a really strong brand awareness for the Walker with me. I felt very connected to the museum, despite never having visited. This left me with very high expectations when I finally visited the museum.

The Walker has famously innovative architecture and a blue-chip art collection. The wayfinding and graphic design throughout the museum was slick and sharp. But as a visitor to the physical museum, I experienced none of the generosity and freshness I felt online. And the biggest surprise was that Open Field programme had been stopped, most of the staff involved had moved on, and the physical space was literally being dug up, to be turned into a sculpture garden. Many of the staff who led both the Open Field programming and the digital development have moved on to other museums, or to the private sector.

One of the greatest attractions of the web is the speed of change and the emphasis on experimentation. Museums are known for 'being in it for the long haul' and thus having a sometimes glacial pace of change, a persona that can be in conflict with the joyous nature of change in web development. My visit to the Walker left me thinking about how we need to think about how we make enduring digital change, where the values of our work can be sustained, even if the forms it takes are constantly evolving.

1.5 Conclusion

Shelley Bernstein and Seb Chan have both been inspirations to me in my museum career, and I count myself fortunate to have known and learned from them both for nearly ten years now. The museum sector is extremely lucky to have two such innovative, proactive and dedicated professionals, who are committed not only to creating the very best experiences within and for their own institutions, but sharing their knowledge freely with the whole community.

The digital projects at Brooklyn Museum and the Cooper Hewitt, though very different in their outcomes, are the same in their intent: encouraging visitors to actively make sense of what they are looking at, by asking questions and organising objects.

What unites the Ask app and the Pen is a focus on the on-site, 'eyes-up' experience. Moving past the bogeyman of digital technology being a distraction from the museum object, the focus is now on giving the visitor reason to look more closely, for longer.

My overall assessment is that the focus of digital technology in American museums at the current time is 'on-site' over 'online': this can also be detected and new and recently renovated museums like The Broad in Los Angeles and SFMOMA in San Francisco, where audio tours and location-aware 'eyes-up' digital experiences have been heavily promoted as part of the opening media push.

In terms of post-visit experience, I have yet to follow any of the prompts given to me, be that the Cooper Hewitt's URL or the regular promotional emails from the DMA. Instead, I continue to follow the museums through 'micro-touches': Twitter and Instagram accounts, blog posts, conference presentations. My personal situation is so niche - a museum professional located in a country physically distant from the large centres of museum discourse and thus heavily internet-aware of international museum activity - that I do not view this as useful data. My extrapolation though is a reinforced awareness of the need for museums to be consistent in all the messaging they put out into the public realm - from apps to bus shelter posters, magazine ads to Facebook posts.

While there is steady innovation in this space, and it is exciting to see such an emphasis on enhancing the visitor's experience and their ability to connect to the works on display, there also seems to have been a shift in focus from 'global' to 'local', and a reduction in sector-wide, collaborative endeavours. It may be that as a sector we have figured out collaborative platforms, APIs, metadata sharing and so on, but I also wonder if increasingly walled garden nature of the contemporary internet (the design especially of social media sites to keep you within the application, rather than roaming the open web) and the bedding-in of digital practice as business as usual rather than experimental is seeing art museums displaying a less collaborative, more internally-focused approach to digital development than in the past decade.

1.6 Further information

Ask App

For more information on the Brooklyn Museum's Ask App project see their online documentation at BKM TECH https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/ and especially entries tagged "BloombergConnects" https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/tag/bloombergconnects/

Shelley Bernstein, 'Visitor Powered Technology to Create a Responsive Museum' BKM Tech, 9 September 2014,  https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/2014/09/09/responsive_museum/

See also:

Nina Simon, 'ASKing about art at Brooklyn Museum: Interview with Shelley Bernstein and Sara Devine'. Museums 2.0, 24 June 2015 http://museumtwo.blogspot.co.nz/2015/06/asking-about-art-at-brooklyn-museum.html

Shelley Bernstein, 'Visitor Experience as a Catalyst for Institutional Change', presentation at Webstock, Wellington, February 2015 http://www.webstock.org.nz/talks/visitor-experience-as-a-catalyst-for-institutional-change/

Shelley Bernstein, 'Exploring Ask at Brooklyn Museum', presentation at MuseumsNext, Indianapolis, September 2015 https://vimeo.com/141390210 

Daniel McDermon, 'Who’s in Charge at the Brooklyn Museum? It Could Be You', New York Times, 29 April 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/arts/design/at-the-brooklyn-museum-with-a-chatty-curator-in-your-pocket.html

Cooper Hewitt Pen

For an overview of the Cooper Hewitt's in-gallery digital experiences see their The New Cooper Hewitt Experience page http://www.cooperhewitt.org/new-experience/

For more information on the Cooper Hewitt's Pen and digital transformation see their online documentation on the Cooper Hewitt Labs site http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/ , and especially entries tagged "CH3.0" http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/category/ch-3-0/

See also

Jessica Lustig, 'Mr Moggridge has mad ambition', Fast Company, 14 September 2011 http://www.fastcompany.com/1777623/masters-of-design-2011/mister-moggridge-has-mad-ambition

Allan Chochinov, 'Caroline Baumann on Renovation and Innovation at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Set to Reopen in Ten Days', Core 77, 3 December 2014 http://www.core77.com/posts/27870/caroline-baumann-on-renovation-and-innovation-at-the-cooper-hewitt-smithsonian-design-museum-set-to-reopen-in-ten-days-27870

Robinson Meyer, 'The Museum of the Future Is Here', The Atlantic, 20 January 2015 http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/how-to-build-the-museum-of-the-future/384646/

Sean O'Kane, 'The Smithsonian's design museum just got some high-tech upgrades', The Verge, 11 March 2015 http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/11/8182051/smithsonian-cooper-hewitt-design-museum-reopening-pen-4k

Seb Chan and Aaron Cope, Strategies against architecture: interactive media and transformative technology at Cooper Hewitt, paper given at Museums and the Web conference, Chicago, April 2015 http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/strategies-against-architecture-interactive-media-and-transformative-technology-at-cooper-hewitt/

Seb Chan, 'Farewell Cooper Hewitt, Next Stop Melbourne', Fresh + New(er), 21 August 2015, http://www.freshandnew.org/2015/08/farewell-cooper-hewitt-stop-melbourne/

On MONA's 'O' and the post-visit experience

MONA website http://www.mona.net.au/

Seb Chan, 'Experiencing The O at MONA', Fresh and New, 27 October 2011 http://www.freshandnew.org/2011/10/experiencing-the-o-at-mona-a-review/

Nancy Proctor, 'Love, Hate or Punt? Opinions and prevarications about MONA and its O', Curator Journal, 23 December 2011 http://www.curatorjournal.org/love-hate-or-punt-opinions-and-prevarications-about-mona-and-its-o/

Ed Rodley, 'Australia: MONA’s “The O” post-visit website', Thinking About Museums, 31 August 2012 https://exhibitdev.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/australia-monas-the-o-post-visit-website/

Lynda Kelly, 'Visitors, apps, post-visit experiences and a re-think of digital engagement, part 1', #musdigi, 8 October 2015 https://musdigi.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/visitors-apps-post-visit-experiences-and-a-re-think-of-digital-engagement-part-1/

Lynda Kelly, 'Visitors, apps, post-visit experiences and a re-think of digital engagement, part 2', #musdigi, 8 October 2015 https://musdigi.wordpress.com/2015/10/08/visitors-apps-post-visit-experiences-and-a-re-think-of-digital-engagement-part-2/

Sam Brenner, 'Iterating the post-visit experience', Cooper Hewitt Labs, 3 November 2015 http://labs.cooperhewitt.org/2015/iterating-the-post-visit-experience/

On the Walker Art Center

Website http://www.walkerart.org/

Robin Dowden and Nate Solas keynote at MuseumNext, 2012: video https://vimeo.com/44162636 and slides http://www.slideshare.net/MuseumNext/walker-13384889

Seb Chan, 'The museum website as newspaper', Fresh+New(er), 3 December 2011 http://www.freshandnew.org/2011/12/museum-website-newspaper-interview-walker-art-center/

Open Field programme http://www.walkerart.org/openfield/

Reading list, 30 April 2016

I read Sarah Jaffe's New Republic review of Andi Zeisler’s We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, which introduced me to the term 'marketplace feminism', just before I read Robert McCrum's article on Germaine Greer's The Feminist Eunuch for the Guardian's '100 Best Non-fiction Books' series.  They make an interesting and illuminating pairing:

In a way, [Zeisler's] book is most useful as a work of media criticism, when it turns the lens onto feminist media itself, and particularly onto the burgeoning “thinkpiece” industry, which she calls “one of marketplace feminism’s biggest triumphs: women who act on the illusion of free choice offered by the market and then offer it up to corporate media to capitalize on.” The endless personal essays wondering if this or that or the other act is feminist, excoriating it for being unfeminist, or confessing to liking said unfeminist thing wind up circling back around to the writer’s personal choices and feelings. Those writers, it should be noted, are paid a pittance to feed the content mill: the personal essay industry itself could be the site of collective struggle for labor rights. - Sarah Jaffe 

Greer’s explicit liberation struggle focuses on the self, not the collective. She wants a new society in which women write their own script, set their own agenda, and make their own deep personal choices. The “women” Greer addresses are not the majority of womenkind – she concedes that she does not “know” poor people – but people like herself, university graduates, the comparatively privileged members of the western democracies. - McCrum

This also motivated me to google the designer of the iconic cover of The Female Eunuch, John Holmes, who died in 2011.

Speaking of pairings: Ed Rodley's short piece on the dominant binary analogies for describing the purpose of museums (temple and forum; cathedral and bazaar) could have interesting things to say in light of George Monbiot's recent and influential analysis of neo-liberalism as the invisible framework of the Western world - when I have time to properly think about it.

The Canada Council, in contrast to our own Creative New Zealand, has been assured of increasing funding for the next five years. A new five-year plan has been released,  prioritising "reconciliation through the arts, ... helping Canadian artists thrive in a digital environment, raising their profile internationally and giving them more money."

Saved up for my own weekend reading: Jerry Saltz and Rachel Corbett have created an illustrated timeline of how identity politics conquered the art world.

(For the record: this is the 1525 entry posted on this blog. I like big square numbers.)

An experiment with Tiny Letter

I've decided to have a play with Tiny Letter over the rest of this year. I'll be sending a version of my weekend reading lists to all subscribers - one email per week, half a dozen or so pieces of writing that I've found useful or thought-provoking.

If you don't follow this blog religiously (gasp) but would like to give the newsletter a whirl, sign up here.

The counting game / women, the art market, and visibility

I'm already saving up for my next trip to the States, and visiting the newly (massively) extended SFMOMA is high on my to-do list. Paul Laity's article in the Guardian gives great background on the museum as it was, the major long-term loan from the Donald and Doris Fisher collection and subsequent drive to get SF-based collectors to contribute works, and the new building and displays.

Given that SFMOMA is asserting its cultural might against the benchmarks of its East Coast 'rivals' - it has been previously 'lost out' for having a weaker modern art collection compared to the holy grail held by MOMA - director Neal Benezra is focusing on contemporary (1960s-onwards) art:

The director talks of the reopening being a “game changer for San Francisco”, but is careful to emphasise that the museum is now world-class in “contemporary” art – work, that is, from the last four decades of the 20th century and since – rather than “modern”. “I define modern art as going up through abstract expressionism,” he explains, “then with Warhol and Lichtenstein and the pop artists, Johns and Rauschenberg, there is a return to the visible world in one way or another. And to me that’s … contemporary art.” 

... Benezra offers no apology for where SFMOMA’s strength lies, and as we tour the galleries his excitement at the remarkable bounty of the new museum is obvious. “You’ll be hard pressed to see a better room of Warhols,” he says, pointing out celebrated new acquisitions including Silver Marlon, with Brando on his Triumph motorbike from The Wild One, and the Triple Elvis, as well as the museum’s own famous study of Elizabeth Taylor on horseback, National Velvet. There is also a “museum within a museum” of 26 works by Kelly, who became a good friend of Doris Fisher. These include the jazzy arrangement of rectangles Cité from 1951, and the vivid stripes of Spectrum I, as well as the sliced shapes of Red Curves (1996) and Blue Panel (1985). The Kelly rooms, Benezra says, are “strikingly beautiful”: “We expect our colleagues in other museums to be green with envy.”

Now, I adore Ellsworth Kelly. When I first saw a whole room of Kellys, I cried. But as I was reading the article I couldn't help noticing the paucity of women artists being name-checked compared to men, to the point where I had to get up and grab some paper and a pencil so I could do a count. It worked out as 32 named male artists to 7 named female artists (not all the male artists are necessarily represented in the new displays - Picasso, for example, is noted for not being well represented at the museum).

This might well be unconscious bias on the part of the author, or a quirk of the way the tour of the building was organised, or perhaps there were far more works by women artists on display that just didn't make the cut for the final article (no works by women artists are represented in the images either). But even when we get to the top floor and the most recent art - the self-consciously contemporary zone - it's all men:

The top floor of the museum leaves the Fisher collection behind and brings the museum’s holdings up to date, by showing media arts and works made since 1980. “We wanted it to be the most contemporary space,” Benezra says: instead of a ceiling, the ductwork has been left exposed for a rather predictable touch of industrial chic. We walk past a Jeff Wall light box not yet switched on, and pieces by Ai Weiwei, Matthew Barney and Richard Prince.

The article makes an interesting contrast to this recent interview with Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern, which is also about to reopen a major extension. Morris has taken a feminist approach to curating (though it makes me a bit sad, still, that showing women artists should be a considered a feminist act and not simply a curatorial standard) and the re-opened Tate Modern will position the museum in our current cultural focus on diversity:

For the past decade, she has been devoted to building up the Tate’s international collections of modern and contemporary art, and has also been the curator of, during the past decade, a trio of important exhibitions of women artists: Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama and Agnes Martin. This rebalancing towards work by women has become an increasing priority for Morris, along with shifting the gaze of the institution away from just Europe and the US, towards Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Her feminist drive “began to grow significantly when I started working with the collection a decade ago; I realised what a deficit [of work by women] there was. And then I was in a position to do something about it. I encourage colleagues to dig a little more when they see interesting work by a woman artist they haven’t heard of before, or to be aware of where women have been overlooked. Sonia Delaunay [the subject of a show at Tate Modern last year] is a case in point. For years people had been saying, ‘Let’s do a Sonia Delaunay show,’ but the feeling would be, ‘Oh no, the work isn’t strong enough.’ Well, what on earth did that mean? The work was unbelievably strong and diverse – but nobody actually knew its full extent.’”

I don't want to shit all over SFMOMA from a great distance, based on no more information than this single article. In fact, I'm more calling the article out as part of thinking through a current trend in art dialogue. There has been a great deal of attention paid to Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's opening show in their new L.A. mega-gallery, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016, and a reasonable amount (somewhat less favourable) to the touring exhibition of women artists represented in the Rubell collection, No Man's Land: Women Artists from the Rubell Family Collection.* It has been suggested - I forget by whom, and where - that part of the reason for this rising emphasis on women artists, especially in the context of dealer galleries, is that this is a place where the market has headroom. If only a handful of living women artists (e.g. Cindy Sherman) are commanding the astronomically high prices at auction that their male counterparts achieve, that suggests that there is a place to grow the market by asserting the importance of women artists, both contemporary practitioners and the back-catalogue of older or deceased artists who can be brought under the spotlight.

It feels like a slightly grubby way of achieving equality: capitalism driving diversity. But the article about SFMOMA also feels to me as if it's framed by the market: these are blue-chip artists being name-checked, and their prices are not far distant from their works ("Richter, the world’s most revered (and expensive) living painter."). As part of their expansion drive, the museum went out and made specific asks to local collectors for particular artists' works, or works from a certain period in an artist's career. I can't help but detect as I read the market-driven effects of private patronage on American art museums. The only way to test this against reality, of course, is to visit as soon as possible.

*Coincidentally, but perhaps not surprisingly, the name of a show of women artist's work at The Dowse in either the early 80s or early 90s - I'm not at my desk to check.

Reading list, 23 April 2016

A 29-year-old New York journalist reports on an American Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the demographics of 29-year-olds in the U.S., which disrupts some of the Millennial mythologies.

An interview with new Tate Modern director Frances Morris in the Guardian.

Following the way Lita Barrie's name was constantly raised at our Four Waves of Feminism event, it's quite fascinating to read her recent review of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel's opening exhibition Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016 and think about how the American and European artists' names could be replaced by New Zealanders (Pauline Rhodes, Jacqueline Fraser, Christine Hellyar, Maureen Lander, Vivien Lynn, Mary Louise Browne, Kate Newby, Fiona Connor ...)

Immi Paterson-Harkness interviews Phil Dadson for The Pantograph Punch.

Via Putting Women on the Map: Women’s Museums and Gendering the Public Space, a link to Nancy Fraser's 1990 article Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, which I plan to read over this long weekend.

Gina Fairley questions the numbers on art gallery attendance from The Arts Newspaper's latest report, with a particular eye to Australian galleries.

Falling revenue and lower payments of the 'suggested' entry price at the Met contribute to announcement of delays to building plans, reduced programming, and reduction of staff numbers.

Reading List, 16 April 2016

I feel a strange conflict about Christine Coulson's 'Behind the Scenes at the Met' in the NYT Magazine. On the one hand, it's an intoxicating view of the unseen spaces of a legendary museum ("At first glance, these areas are functional: places to stack boxes of Met shopping bags, store unused shipping crates and transfer vats of chicken salad between the public and staff cafeterias.") On the other, every time I think of it I hear the Family Guy 'No-one at the New Yorker has an anus' joke.

Ta-Nehisi Coates interviewed about writing a new series of Black Panther.

Jessi Hempel for Wired about Medium launching a a new content management system (similar to Wordpress's offer) and two beta experiments in deriving revenue from sites hosted on the platform, with promoted content and paid-access. It makes me sad that the future of the web is all about selling our attention and sealing off access, but I wonder how else we are to sustain it?

Lana Lopesi for the Pantograph Punch on the recent Pacific Art Association symposium in Auckland. Read it for generational themes and 'nothing about us, without us' resonance.

Anna Pickard's talk about writing release notes for Slack at Webstock earlier this year was a highlight of the conference for me, showing how care put into small things captures but also shapes company culture.

I have feelings about our gotcha media culture. Hadley Freeman's advice for elderly celebrities on being interviewed about trans rights is satirical but also speaks to my discomfort with the way people are being treated at the moment.

There's a connection between these two pieces which I'm still working out (about whose contributions are valorised and valued in a culture that prioritises authorial creation and innovation over maintenance): Debbie Chachra 'Why I Am Not A Maker' and Lee Vinsel & Andrew Russell's 'Hail the maintainers'.

On exposing the archive, and being held static in time

(Fair warning: this piece is full of waffly writing and some awkward language. I will refine with time and feedback, but I wanted to get this out more than I wanted to edit it.)

On the 8th of April we hosted 'Four Waves of Feminism' at The Dowse, a one-day conference that re-presented a group of talks given by artists, curators and researchers from the Making Women Visible conference earlier this year at Otago University, and bookended these with two panel discussions, one looking back to earlier moments in New Zealand's feminist art history, and one exploring the current energy around feminism in our art scene.

I said in my opening remarks that we had chosen the title Four Waves of Feminism as a nod to the emergence of a new, internet-fuelled era of feminist consciousness and activity, and also  to the different decades and generations the presentations covered. The metaphor of waves also appeals to me, as I feel like each generation (or more accurately, each hub of thought and action) of feminism has acted like a wave: rolling in, carrying ideas upon it, sometimes joining together, sometimes tussling, depositing traces, and occasionally writing over each other. In employing this metaphor I was very much thinking of how Lita Barrie's 1985/6 paper 'Remissions: Toward a Deconstruction of Phallic Univocality' and other pieces of criticism had argued the case for artists such as Jacqueline Fraser and Christine Hellyar (artists whom I became very familiar with early on in my studies and through visiting exhibitions from the 2000s onwards) and dismissed as essentialist the work of artists like Juliet Batten (far less prominent in the art history I was taught and the art I saw).

The day didn't try to be didactic or to drive towards a statement about what feminism means today. Rather, it was an attempt to surface and share information and perspectives. It was driven by the same desire to better understand where we have been and where we are now that led me to kick off the timeline of the feminist art movement (still not the right title - as Tina Barton raised at one point on the day, are we talking about feminism as a subject, a mode or as a tool?) that I felt earlier this year.

The day was very densely packed with presentations and I've yet to really process it. On reflection, we shoe-horned too many presentations and panels into this one opportunity; as Matariki Williams discusses in an excellent assessment of the day for Tusk, there wasn't time to discuss everything that was quickly raised and moved on from.

Two interlinked strands of thought have evolved from me since Friday, which I want to explore here. One is around history and the archive: why things are saved, why they might submerge or disappear, and how and to whom they are made available in the future. And the other is the way people change over the duration of their lifetimes, and the tension when we want to treat (or use) people as an artefact.

In doing so I've organised my snippets from talks according to how they've fitted into the development of these chains of thought, not how they were presented on the day: some talks do not appear, but that doesn't mean they aren't in my mental mix.

Ahi Rands, speaking about the work and archive of performance artist Linda T, evoked the activist catch-cry: Nothing about us without us. It was a phrase that certainly resonated with people at the event, but one that for me summed up the struggles of not only those being spoken about, but those doing the speaking.

There are pragmatic difficulties inherent in undertaking even relatively recent art history: of tracking down dates, places, titles, names, contact details, of negotiating permissions and access. The women's art movement in New Zealand included a number of networks and collectives, with core and more transient members, some of whom have stayed connected with the art world, some of whom have migrated elsewhere, and some of whom have died. Some participants remain close to that time and their work then; others have distanced themselves from, no longer feel close to, or simply struggle to recall the events and emotions of 30 or 40 years ago. The challenge for the art historian in particular is to what extent they chose to work in collaboration with participants from the time, and to what extent they chose to historicise the period, working with documentation and primary material and the accompanying body of theoretical thought. This is a tension of the archive: the degree of separation you chose to enforce between the object and its original maker and context. While it wasn't voiced directly on the day, I got the feeling from conversations in breaks that an archival/academic or theory-driven approach was definitely not the favoured approach for many of the younger members of the audience, compared to a preference to consult with participants from the time.

Kirsty Baker presented on the Wellington Women's Gallery (1980-1984), based on her MA thesis research. Talking to Kirsty later on in the day, and asking her what triggered her to select this topic (she is a Scottish transplant to New Zealand), she told me about visiting the Wellington Media Collective exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery, seeing the Women's Gallery mentioned there, feeling somewhat shamed that she didn't know what this was - and then realising that many people she spoke to had not heard of it either. (Over the weekend I read Marian Evans' (one of the co-founders of the Women's Gallery) piece 'They Might Have Completely Forgotten Us' on the way the gallery was portrayed - or not - in the exhibition.)

Kirsty made a elegant point about visibility and prominence, using a quote from Juliet Batten. She was kind enough to email it through to me:

In the decades prior to the Gallery's opening, the Western discourse surrounding New Zealand art was concerned predominantly with an effort to characterise a distinctive national identity. The prevalence of landscape painting, along with the painterly portrayal of New Zealand's 'hard, clean light', were observed to be central to this development. The increasing dominance of this type of painting was compounded by Gordon H. Brown and Hamish Keith in their 1969 book An introduction to New Zealand painting, in which they insinuated the weight of their qualitative judgement into the discussion. Writing 20 years after Brown and Keith, Juliet Batten - an artist and educator heavily involved with the Women's Gallery - highlighted the narrowness of their judgement, stating "much has been written about the quest for the 'New Zealand' identity in art: in fact it has been written about as if it were the only identity search going on in the visual arts in this country."* 

 In question time, a point was raised from the floor: perhaps not all those involved in the Women's Gallery wanted to be mainstreamed? This point made me think of a talk I heard by Latoya Peterson at a MOMA panel discussion titled 'United States of Fluidity' when I was in the States last year. You should definitely watch the talk online, where Latoya talks about appropriation of culture, and especially black culture, in areas as diverse as high fashion and Korean rap. At the end of her talk, whilst noting that "everyone wants to be seen, everyone wants to be noticed, ... everyone wants to be appreciated", she quotes bell hooks:

Concurrently, marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation.

In the Q&A following the presentations, Latoya said one of the most powerful things I heard on my trip: Culture always loves to sell your revolution back to you. The impact of hearing this inside the walls of MOMA - the pinnacle of recognition, and also the ultimate site of the smoothing of any narrative for the public digestion of millions - was massive for me. It made me question whether the mainstream museum impulse to "recognise and reconcile" marginalised groups and stories by making them accessible and understandable to a wide audience can avoid either the dulling of edges or (perhaps worse) the removal of the integral nature of difference and resistance from activist and dissident groups in particular. What do you lose when you arrive?

Roma Potiki, a panellist from earlier in the day, also raised the point that for some women, participation in the Women's Gallery was a potentially dangerous activity, and that being outed (for instance, in the case of women who explored a lesbian identity in this safe space) could have resulted in the time (or even now) in personal or professional damage. Again, the tension of the archive: does the act of saving something for the future presuppose the notion that its future involves becoming public?**

Caroline McBride gave a short presentation on the Auckland Art Gallery's early concepts around an exhibition of their feminist art archives, including the Juliet Batten archive and the Feminist Art Network archive.  Given the general tenor of the day, this possibility created a lot of excitement. (One of my hopes, as a co-organiser, is that the day would be one full of sparks, as people connected what they already knew with new information. Given that the history of feminist art and activities in New Zealand is a scattered and partial one, it seemed to me that by drawing together speakers from different generations could help create this situation. I was delighted to see it happening, and experience it myself, and I know from talking to Caroline that the context she has for these archives held by the AAG was enlarged by the day.)

The AAG also holds copies of the Women's Art Archive interviews conducted in the early 1980s by Lita Barrie. The idea of presenting these interviews - and the challenges of tracking down all the interviews and gaining permission - is fascinating in light of some of the above points. In her talk, Caroline noted how struck she was by the way individuals and collectives had committed from their beginnings to documenting and recording themselves. Was it done, she asked rhetorically, from a fear that their voices would disappear as soon as they began to be heard - that visibility was a tenuous thing?

This may have been one driver. Another is that rediscovery and presentation of past female artists was a key activity in feminist art history (see Linda Nochlin's germinal 'Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?' on this) and thus the assembling of evidence was a tactic in increasing women artists' - past and present - profile. Yet another, perhaps, is that self-examination, documentation and analysis had entered artistic practice and some disciplines (such as anthropology or sociology) as a valid undertaking, alongside forms of performance art that also intersected with feminist practice. Take Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document (1973-1979) as perhaps the most famous example from the time. I think there's an intriguing piece of work to be done around this documentation and its drivers in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand.***

Again, I wondered during Caroline's talk whether display in such a public domain as the Auckland Art Gallery was what these original contributors had in mind. To be preserved does not automatically mean 'in order to be made public one day', and even to be published even means something different in the internet age.

I'm particularly alert to this at the moment thanks to a piece written by Canadian librarian (and for a short period, my colleague at the National Library of New Zealand) Tara Robertson, on the digitisation of On Our Backs, a Canadian lesbian porn magazine that ran for 20 years from 1984. The magazine has been digitised by Independent Voices, an incredibly admirable undertaking to digitise special press archives, and especially dissident or radical publications.

As Tara writes, on the one hand her heart leapt to see something she could relate to recognised and made available in this way. And the correct copyright process had been followed. However:

... there are ethical issues with digitizing collections like this. Consenting to a porn shoot that would be in a queer print magazine is a different thing to consenting to have your porn shoot be available online. ... Most of the OOB run was published before the internet existed. Consenting to appear in a limited run print publication is very different than consenting to have one’s sexualized image be freely available on the internet. These two things are completely different. Who in the early 90s could imagine what the internet would look like in 2016?

The art historian in me wants access to everything because detail and context is delicious, and because it's how I can build a full picture and come to a nuanced understanding of what I'm studying.

The museum professional in me has a greater regard, perhaps, for the right for objects, ideas and information to be restricted in their access, because different individuals, groups and cultures place different value upon the importance or correctness of sharing them widely.

Laid over this is the situation when public institutions are the chosen repositories of material, for the long-term safety but also the mana that they hold. At same time, these institutions tend to uphold the values of access and dissemination of knowledge and culture. This of course is the tension we've been banging on about with Tiffany Jenkins' latest book and her arguments against repatriation and for mandated general access to museum holdings.

These values are mutable as well, and change over time: to think that the feelings and expectations that surround an object (a taonga, an oral recording, a portrait photograph) remain preserved at the point when they entered the archive is to misunderstand changing relationships over time, either from the originating individual or from their associates and descendants. Okay then isn't okay now; not okay now might be okay one day. It's vexed and there's no one answer or easily applied logic and that's why its vital we have develop shared understandings of expectations and culture (including the expectation and culture of the museum) so we have a firm basis to honour these agreements throughout time.

Tina Barton gave perhaps my favourite presentation of the day, for its unexpected playfulness. It was an examination of her own archive: of the period when she returned to university, aged 26, and did the new Women in Art paper at Auckland University (taught by Elizabeth Eastmond and Cheryll Sotheran). Tina showed us pages from the diary that all students in the paper were encouraged to keep, and read us sections, simultaneously wondering at and gently ridiculing that special headiness of being a post-grad student who's both fired up by and questioning their topic.

Tina has unearthed this diary for the purpose of Four Waves, having not looked at it in many years. She said she felt distant enough to assess what she had created with some objectivity: she's not that person any more. On the other hand, she was somewhat horrified by the notion that someone might use that diary in an assessment of her current practice. Later in the day, in conversation with Roma again, we talked about how some participants in early feminist activities had moved on in their lives: they may no longer hold those same views, or feel them with the same energy, or even recall them with great clarity after the passage of several decades. There's another tension here, of wanting to treat (or use) people as storehouses of information and memory, to access the power of first-hand knowledge.

I read, just before the event, Michelle Dean's wonderful essay on the poet Adrienne Rich in the New Republic. In it, she quotes a letter from Rich to a friend, about James Baldwin:

James Baldwin is as dead as Medgar Evers. Was he always, or did he die a slow death? I haven’t reread any of the early essays or that first novel that seemed so good to me five years ago. Maybe our perceptions are getting sharper. Maybe he sharpened them, blunting himself in the process.

As with Tara's post, with Latoya's presentation, and the talks called out above, those words got into my head. Maybe art history is written and experienced through a constant process of sharpening and blunting. Hopefully with Four Waves we've contributed to the sharpening, for a while at least.

* The Batten quote is from an essay of hers titled "Art and Identity" in David Novitz and Bill Willmott (eds.) Culture and Identity in New Zealand (1989).

*Of course archives have protocols such as embargoes and permission levels that can determine when and by whom material can be accessed. As noted above though, any decision made at the time of depositing cannot plan for all future eventualities.

**Now that I have said this, I daresay someone will point out to me that it's already been done, in which case, hooray.

Reading list for 9 April 2016

This week, a special focus on profiles:

Political commentator Morgan Godfery in Etangata "The way we make law is through politics. If we accept that, then the natural starting point for Māori struggles is actually to reclaim some political control as opposed to meeting Pākehā on their favoured battlefield, which is the law and the courts."

Writer Maggie Nelson in the Guardian "I like to think that what literature can do that op-ed pieces and other communications don’t do is describe felt experience,” she tells me, “the flickering, bewildered places that people actually inhabit."

Fashion designer Guo Pei in the New Yorker "I’m not a feminist," she said emphatically. "I think women should be like water: it looks soft and tender, but it’s very powerful."

Adrienne Rich in The New Republic (On teaching at Columbia) "[The students] are extraordinarily unhypocritical, candid, impatient of anything that seems abstract or mere ritual. I feel they live in a different time-scale from us. I like them better than most of their elders, I suppose, but I have never felt so concretely that I’m thirty-eight, middle-aged, and drenched in assumptions which they haven’t even heard of."

Zaha Hadid in the L.A. Times Arts critic Carolina A. Miranda argues that Hadid's gender and ethnicity both warrant discussion in the many memorials currently being published.

How to Network, in Five Easy Steps

Update: 5 May 2020

I just reviewed this post as I'm planning to re-share it as part of the mentoring sessions I'm currently offering up.

On reflection:

God, I miss writing. Look at all those words! And four years ago they would've rolled out of me effortlessly. I don't have that brainspace any more and I miss it.

Also: Look At All Those Words. I've highlighted a few passages if you're skim-reading.

I still use "I don't know anyone else here. Can I talk to you?" as an opening line.

The single actionable piece of advice I'd still give? Learn to introduce yourself.

I talk about diversity here. At least I had the insight here to acknowledge that. A work in progress.

These notes were posted in advance of a talk I gave at an emerging museum professionals hui. Still one of the most interesting and useful professional events I've attended. I met some awesome people there who I still value having in my network, and I've had great pleasure watching their paths unfold.

Originally published 3 April 2016

This is possibly the most boring thing I've ever written, but maybe it'll be helpful to someone. The title is a tease, of course. It's more like How to discover, after ten years and with little to no strategy, that you are indeed part of a useful and fulfilling network.

Emerging Museum Professionals hui

The EMP group has kindly asked me to give a presentation at their hui the day before this year's Museums Australasia conference in May. I've been given a wide brief ('feel free to speak about any aspect of your career journey thus far that you feel is of interest, relevance and potential benefit to our EMP members') and my talk, and that of the other Australian keynote, will lead into a panel discussion about 'the myths of museum career progression'.

I have a few issues with the 'journey' brief, and I'm also reluctant to hold my career progression up as an example because - frankly - many of my major decisions to date have been driven by shitty moments in my adult life which have miraculously worked out in my favour.

Having said that, I also realised over summer that looking to someone as a role model doesn't mean mindlessly replicating them. In fact, it's more like having the ability to adopt another perspective by thinking through a situation in a 'What Would My Role Model Do?' kind of way.

Having been asked to speak, and having said yes, I'm determined to be useful to the audience. So I emailed out the brief I received to some newer colleagues whose opinions I respect, and asked them what they would find interesting and helpful if they were in the audience.

Networking

The responses really surprised me, because through the back and forth, the strongest theme to emerge was networking. Networking seems to be held out as the silver bullet for progress in a congested sector with little growth in employment numbers that faces new and recent graduates. A post-grad degree only gets you through the first cull of the applications pile. Get the right placement, get endorsed by the right person, form the right network - and that will be the difference between having that degree, and having a job that relates to that degree.

You need to network. It's the bit of advice given to every young striver. But what does it mean? You go to openings and public programme events, but you can hardly just bowl up to senior figures and bust into their cosy, gossipy conversations (Can you?). Ask them out for coffee. Who wants to cold-contact a gallery director or senior curator? What would you say? Find a mentor. How? What does that even mean?

The thing is, when you're at the start of your career, networks seem to be something other people (older and more established people, usually) have. You look upwards, and you see this thing that you're trying to break into.

Since that email exchange, I've been jotting down notes for my talk, but also talking about this networking thing with some of my friends, especially people who I perceive to have great networks. Interestingly, they also viscerally remembered that helpless early career stage, where you seemed to have your nose pressed up against the glass, watching people who had their shit and their networks sorted out get on with their glittering opportunities. They shared that same embarrassment and fear about approaching senior figures. They still, in many cases, feel it.

Change your mindset

But after talking it through, we all agreed on one thing. We had all - after ten, fifteen, twenty years - got ourselves to the point of having solid networks. Those networks occasionally included senior figures, but the strength was actually in being surrounded by your peers.

A lawyer friend told me that when her firm was bringing on with new grads, they encouraged them to network with their peers at other firms. The reasoning was that established staff already had networks with their own peers - the firm needed the next generation to get networked. Rinse and repeat, and one day you look around and figure out you're the establishment. (Now you get to ask yourself how you found yourself in this invidious and privileged position, and not be the douche you perceive the generations before you to have been.)

A dealer gallery friend, when I was talking this same thing over with her, observed time was key. Not time put in attending events and wangling pick-your-brain coffees, but letting time pass. One day (one day ten years on, mind you) you look around, and the people you used to hang out with are now your network. The ones you went to uni with, the ones you've worked with in various organisations, the ones you've been on committees with: they're now the ones you ping when you need some advice, who you find yourself calling to reference-check a job applicant, who you send interesting opportunities you can't use on to.

Your friends and professional acquaintances, over time, become the network you always imagined you wanted. Basic, but true.

You are actually going to have to be gregarious

Did anyone who's not a certifiable sociopath ever stand on the threshold of a room packed with strangers and think Oh goody, this looks like fun?

Unfortunately, while your network will grow organically over time, just like a slow-to-rise sourdough loaf, you still need to feed the starter. That means turning up at things and being friendly.

Every Myers-Briggs (coughbullshitcough) test I've ever done has me hovering right between introvert and extrovert. Professionally, I've learned to turn my extrovert up through sheer willpower. I ignore the butterflies in my stomach and I walk into the room and if I don't know anyone I just pick someone who looks approachable and I go over and start talking to them.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I have on occasion used  'I don't know anyone here. Can I talk to you for a while?' as my opening line.

I have also convinced myself that at most networking-type events, at least half the people in the room feel the same way I do and will welcome someone else making the first opening.

And sure, over the years I've been frozen out, made a bit of a dick of myself, and felt like I've saddled some poor person with the responsibility of nursemaiding me. But I have survived all these small discomforts and lived to network another day.

Great networkers make connections

The best way of avoiding the hellishness of most networking events is just to stage your own. Talking with my friends, and thinking about those whose seemingly effortless network-enlarging skills I admire, I realised another basic truth. Great networkers make connections, not for themselves, but between others.

I think we start out thinking about networking in a transactional manner. When you've just graduated, all focus is on getting a job. 'Networking' seems crucial to getting a job, and then once you have one, to succeeding in it. You're trying to get into a network so you can milk it for your own ends.

Today, I think about networking more in terms of bringing people together and sharing information, support and opportunities. Maybe I just drank the meet-up kool-aid when I was working on the web, or maybe there's an event organiser inside of me after all, but for the past nearly ten years I've organised or co-organised or publicised or funded all sorts of get-togethers.

The best networkers I know run public or private events that bring people together, not for their own immediate benefit, but for the greater benefit of the group. They build their own networks, they build trust and reciprocity with the members of their networks, and they build communities of interest. Everyone's a winner.

These skilful networkers are also generous with their introductions and recommendations between people, and seem to get a real kick out of introducing people to each other.

Diversity makes great networks

I need to make a pre-emptive statement. My first point above, about networking with your peers, suggests your network could easily become homogenous in terms of age and profession, and potentially gender and culture.

I am particularly fortunate to have been supported throughout my career by more senior professionals. I try to pay this forward now by finding ways of supporting those younger than me. In turn, I'm regularly introduced to new thinking by these younger colleagues, whose education (now that I'm more than a decade out of uni) and generational outlooks are quite different from my own.

I'm also fortunate that by virtue of having worked across libraries, museums and web, and having gotten myself involved in cross-sector activities and topics like Creative Commons and the open data movement, the range of people I know is much wider than it would've been if I had have achieved my dearly held university dream and become a curator. Not getting my dream job actually opened things up for me. (There's a cosmic lesson for you.)

Recently I've started following more Maori and Pacific artists, writers, curators, museum professionals, journalists and media outlets on Twitter, as well as a couple of American collaboratives working on diversity issues in museums. I keep pretty quiet in this world, but I'm learning. Likewise, finally committing to te reo lessons - just through my Council - is widening my network and perspective.

Most of the great networkers I know are part of the web world, and their commitment to accessibility and inclusiveness is fierce. They call out examples of straight-white-ism and they work hard with all they do to not fall into the easy grooves of their own social and cultural backgrounds. They keep themselves honest, and their networks and their outlooks on life are all the richer for it.

Some practical advice

So all of this is great in theory. What can you actually do? Here are four ideas that don't involve having to go on a $3000 leadership course:

Learn to introduce yourself

When people ask me what I do, I say 'Oh, I work in an art gallery'. Which is so dumb, and which I am working on changing to 'I run The Dowse, it's an art gallery in Lower Hutt'. Because the first answer doesn't give the person enquiring any actual information, and puts the onus on them to draw you out. That's lazy and unhelpful.

Read widely

My morning routine is to haul myself through the shower, make us breakfast and coffee, and then spend 45 minutes clearing my feedreader. I subscribe to the Washington Post and NYT culture sections, ArtsJournal's full feed, the tech blogs from Brooklyn Museum, Cooper Hewitt and ACMI, the books section from the Guardian, and about 50 individual blogs. I've done this for about 10 years now, and it helps me not only in my day to day job, but with keeping a finger on the wider arts and tech sectors, so I can think about how they intersect with what I do. It's part of the diversity thing, especially as every interesting person you follow online leads you to another.

Ditto following interesting people using whichever social media network suits you (I'm still totally Twitter and zero Facebook or LinkedIn, YMMV). Twitter has a really lively sub-culture of New Zealand museum people who are sharing and discussing all sorts of interesting topics - I can only imagine that FB has the same. I'm still surprised by how few New Zealand museum people I find on Twitter, compared to, for example, writers and book reviewers.

Find free or cheap things you can attend

I came of age professionally at the beginning of the age of the meet-up, when social media started to support the existing culture of people coming together around special interest topics. Again, the most valuable opportunities for me have always been groups and events that coalesce around interests or topics that cross various industries or sectors. For me, it was things like the Open Data movement, and Creative Commons, along with NDF and Webstock.

I'm a bit out of touch today with regular meet-ups, but try the NDF barcamps around the country, and the Refactor event in Auckland. The forthcoming Women Who Get Shit Done unconference, to be held in May near Wellington, could also be interesting (though less cheap).

Take control of your professional development funding

This is something I never thought of doing before I was in control of my own PD budget, and wish I had. No one gets enough funding in our sector for professional development - the budgets everywhere are pretty miserable, and it's a great shame.

At The Dowse, I've tried to amplify our budget by doing one or two events a year that bring smart people/training opportunities/hui to us so as many of us as possible can attend, rather than sending one or two people away. We've done disaster preparedness training, training with Autism New Zealand, a LEOTC hui, a curatorial hui, and this week's Four Waves of Feminism event, among others: all times where I've used our PD budget to underwrite a training and/or networking opportunity.

There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing. Make the choice, and ask your manager if you can use your allocation this year to organise an event, rather than attend one. Or get together a group and make it happen together. There are all sorts of ways to do this: bring people together for an afternoon to share case studies from their discipline; keep an eye out for visiting speakers (e.g. Museums Aotearoa, NDF, the nearest university) and convince them to add your organisation to their itinerary; approach senior managers or people you look up to and ask them to help you secure speakers and look at something like the Refactor event again as a model. (Remember that if your organisation hosts the event they get to share the glory and count the visitor numbers, so it's all win-win-win.)

Organising events stresses me out. I don't enjoy it at all - in the lead-up or, usually, at the time. But it's been the single best way that I've grown my own network, and when you're running something, you don't have to worry about turning up in a room full of people you don't know, because you've got a job to do. Playing host is also a great way to build your own public speaking confidence.