Firstly, I find this topic exciting. There’s a lot to be thought about as this isn’t a fully fleshed out idea.
Have to applaud the way the future is being approached by the AAM. The focus isn’t on predictions but more building towards a future we want, not reacting to a future we don’t know.
There was a lot of comments about this idea of “Happiness” and that games are successful by making people happy. It seems that people took this as a replacement for current museum objectives, not an extra layer to be explored.
I have to say, I’m rather shocked at how resistive a lot of people sounded to these ideas.
“Happiness Engineers” is an odd concept and one that I wouldn’t be willing to give to all game designers. Anyone who has played a poorly designed game experiences frustration and a sense of being ripped off. This is something to watch out for: Not everyone gets happy with games, but the best games do encourage happiness. What is the ratio between good and bad games? Would a museum allow an unsuccessful experiment?
I think World of Warcraft isn’t the best example to use as many started talking about addiction rather than happiness. Not that the addiction to museums would be a bad thing.
I suggest a better model would be Half-Life 2. Some of the best plotlines and story telling in single player but also a very large multiplayer community, as well as hundreds of modifications using the same engine.
Not enough is being said about story and plot yet. Early days. I think this has more to do with Dr McGonigal style of games she’s involved with (ARGs) that seem to have motivation based around puzzles.
Someone asked about curatorial involvment in a game, be it heavily involved or not at all. Depending on the kind of game, I suppose. It could be an open-ended sandbox game or a linear narrative. Both work in the video game world despite vogues for one or the other.
Games are not all about killing people and with no morality so are just escapism. The Nintendo DS and Wii have sold millions of unit and they have about five games involving guns.
Seriously, guys, drop the “scavenger hunt” idea. It seems to dominate these kind of discussions and it is not the be-all-and-end-all of what could be achieved.
Not sure about the idea of “goals” and “achievements” and “leveling up” yet. It seems linked to the idea of gaining badges to show accomplishment and I feel that’s a bit too much like Boy Scouts. Certainly should be involved, but not the sole reason for this.
Calling it “gaming” sounds like it gave the wrong idea to people. Maybe a different title is needed. I put forward Role-Museum-Games, RMGs, that some seemed to like. It gives it genre and definition different that current video games and maybe put forward the idea that the whole thing needs to be created before being dismissed.
“People running around the museum disturbing others” is a worry, it seems. Well… Don’t design your game like that.
Design it to be played in a group or on your own. Design it to involve stealth. Design it for an age range. Design it with a difficulty curve. Design it to be linear or not. The point is that the design will serve the function.
Some more structed posts will follow on this topic in the future.
“That is why we supported this project and why, at every stage, we have worked with our partners and carefully weighed the level of risk involved against the potential public benefit.
“But the fact is that, although the building is open, the interactive art gallery at the centre of the vision for The Public is not. We have done everything we can but there comes a point where we have to make a difficult judgement – and regretfully, that moment is now.”
I defended The Public in a post a couple of weeks ago and had hoped for a brighter future for what will become a very interesting art gallery and cultural centre. But I guess it’s crunch time and The Arts Council isn’t going to be an endless supply of cash for a project that doesn’t seem to be working.
The word to use is “shame”. Not towards the Arts Council who have stumped up the cash many times before, or to the workers and artists involved, or the management of the place because I don’t fully know what they have done or what caused the budget problems. The Shame of The Public is towards the public themselves. It will be the public at large that will miss out on such an ambitious institution.
I fully expect the smugness and the righteousness of the detractors to be in full effect now. Proving naysayers wrong has always an empty victory. When something fails, watch the I-told-you-so and always-knew-it be bounded around like some badge of honour.
I say to The Public this: All Is Not Lost. There are a million setbacks happening to museums across the globe right now. Financial problems are commonplace and yours is no different. What will separate success and failure will be the most creative solutions to the problems. Now is a time to Re-Think, Re-Focus and Re-New. You have strengths in a large workable space, an iconic piece of architecture and a staff willing to work hard. A lot of museums don’t have that.
Vladimir Putin’s painting that he did for an alphabet project (He got U, for Uzor, meaning pattern) has sold for 37 million roubles ($1.14million, about £765,000).
Putin’s CV now includes artist on top of being a former KGB head, President and Prime Minister of Russia and 6th dan in Judo.
No news about what format this will take, but with the deadline being 2012 I suppose that it is early days in development. Also, newcurator.com’s hero Neil MacGregor will be doing a 100 part radio series on Radio 4 called “The History of the World in 100 Objects”. There also seems to be lots of new cultural activity going on at the BBC.
There appears to be a vogue at the moment of large museum databases. Like the Europeana project, which will plans to be a searchable database of all of Europe’s cultural objects… When it’s fully working.
This is a really neat idea. From the looks of it, about 560 followed the twitter and there were about 580 updates. From the latest posts, it’s hard to tell how many were paid for exactly and how much was usual twitter noise.
It seems @ayrshirebard, or I should say @craigmcgill, went for following those who make up the twitterati. I follow ever single twitter with “museum” in their name. Probably wouldn’t have hurt to generate interest amongst them. If @GettyMuseum, @MuseumModernArt or @ninaksimon got hold of it, I think they could have got a lot more followers/donations.
There’s been a lot of financial problems in museums lately. In the UK, many smaller local authority museums have been threatened with becoming a budget cut. In the US, there’s a lot of talk of job layoffs.
The university board of trustees voted unanimously to close the museum. Jonathan Lee, Chair of the Rose Art Museum board said:
“So they’re saying, ‘Oops, we’ve had some bad reversals in our endowment investments, and we’re going to make it up by selling our art.’ What a second-class institution we’ve decided to be.”
Now, The Art Law Blog has a list of most of the reactions from the usual suspects in the great deaccessioning blog debates, and I have to agree that this isn’t exactly the same as selling art for funding. This is selling to get completely out of the art game. All the punishments brought against institutions for selling are meaningless when brought against a museum that has disappeared. A university can probably shrug off any ostracising from most museum professionals organisations.
What is more damaging is that this university with such a focus on art courses now has no art. Its a cold, hard lesson this university is teaching their students: Money comes second to art.
Now would be time for something special. To avoid the art disappearing from public view, get a consortium of as many museums as possible to raise the $350 million required then either a) divide the art between them or b) create a “trust” collection that goes on tour around as many museums as possible. Then the museum organisations prove that the tenet of art in public ownership is something worth fighting for and worth upholding with actions of merit, not just actions of blackballing.
Unless this would create a “slippery slope” of everyone expecting to be bought out.
“I am looking forward to the prospect of finding undiscovered British talent. Anyone with a fresh creative approach should enter, because nobody knows where the next art star will emerge from.”
I thought the X-Factor for Artists was the Turner Prize.
(For our international readers: X-Factor is another TV show just like Pop Idol/American Idol; The Turner Prize is a yearly art award that makes British people angry )
TITANIC MURAL by Andy Welsh. used under Creative Commons
Despite describing it as the world’s most recognisable brand, one would think that naming something after the Titantic wouldn’t inspire much confidence.
Culture is often used as a regeneration catalyst. This is nothing new. More often than not, they are bolted on the side of large housing estates like a hospital or school. The difference with the Titanic Quarter is that the flats, hotels and banking centres are being placed around what will become the Titanic Museum, the cultural centre for all this branding. This feels less like a housing estate with an artificial addition and more like people will be living on a heritage site. The blurring between hotel and museum continues.
To put this in context: what would the feelings be if hotels and luxury apartments turned up in Northern France, renovated the local museum and heritage sites and called it “The Somme Battlefield Quarter”?
If it is not clear by now, Neil MacGregor is considered a hero here at New Curator. It must be the time that his particular brand of globalisation, international diplomacy, “international museums” and repatriation policy be recognised with its own name and definition as a museum theory.
How about MacGregorism? Or maybe MacGregorisation, the process of directing a museum globally?
Would “MacGregor’d” work? As in, “That new museum has been MacGregor’d and now they have a international reputation and partnerships all over the world“?
What kind of museum residencies are there? What do they do?
There does not appear to be strict rules or guidelines to what one may expect a residency to achieve or how a residency is structured. They appear to take the form of consultants, short term or long term, temporary or permanent contracts, leader on a project or a position within the hierarchy. The common factor is the resident takes the role of the creative outsider, the person who can respond to stimulus with talent and can take a zen-like approach of not being molded into a museum shape.
The idea has a history going back to the days of the Royal Court, where people were expected to perform for the monarch’s amusement. James I had Shakespeare as his personal favourite playwright and Ben Jonson as Poet Laureate, effectively Artists in Residence for the King. There is also a diplomatic aspect in a residency. They act as the visitor from another world who is representing more than just themselves. As was the case, the position of Resident was once a title just below Ambassador in an embassy.
What other residencies could there be? A Dancer-in-Residence? I’m surprised not to find more museums with poets and playwrights involved. Resident musicians/sound engineers seem to be the biggest growth industry. Resident DJ? Resident filmmaker? How about a resident martial artist for those with appropriate collections? A resident magician?
The Museum Resident forms an important function regardless of their discipline: To make the museum a hub or lynch pin of cultural activity, to have more of the actual living-breathing culture alive within the museum walls. Not enough is being said about the museum resident and future of museums, as residencies can open up numerous options for the museum to explore.
Yesterday, I said the third thing for museums to do during a recession is to DO SOMETHING. I wish I could have expanded on this and given some more insight/suggestions. Words failed me in trying to describe that economic changes meant “everything else” changes and that the creative and innovative will shine, or something like like.
“But everything now points to a profound shift in the economic, demographic, political, social and technological environment in which we operate. I think we need to encourage museums to be more opportunistic—try lots of new things with relatively small investment of resources, knowing that most of them will fail and learning from those that succeed. Maybe we need to encourage experimental start-up museums to try entirely new ways of operating, accepting that many of them might close if their approaches don’t work out.”
I strongly suggest reading the whole post. It may be one of the most important blog posts of the year so far.
A little while ago, I spoke about the concept of “museum teknomagi“, the idea of technology made invisible to improve a museum’s curatorial mise-en-scene.
“Infra-red audio guides have been prominent in museum exhibitions since the 1970′s. That aspect is certainly not new. Is it the combination of “point and click” choice with the ambient infra-red that could be considered innovative, then?”
Looking at his photos and description of how the technology works, the “teknomagi” is lacking because you can see all the workings. Big ugly infra-red sensors or large glowing red lights. If this was hidden and maybe made smaller, more numerous, then this simple technology could have made a bigger impact. Say, a hundreds low-range sensors that activatle within inches. You then had to really get next to them, in particular angles. You look very close at a sword point and a voice whispers in you ear to “Be careful, that’s sharp. I, Dick Turpin, killed 30 people with that sword” or something to that effect.
I don’t think you can do that with a great big sticker and flashing light telling you what to do.
There are not enough people talking about the positives of a global recession. There is almost a daily report of a museum facing closure or how nobody is buying art anymore. Things are being shaken up and this may be a time where the situations have changed so people need to be a bit more creative and a bit more innovative.
Can I think of three reasons why the recession is good for museums?
People will always want entertaining. Not to cheapen the eucational value of museums, but going to a museum is a great day out. A great day out to somewhere that’s free to enter is more attractive nowadays.
Culture is a great economic catalyst. At some point, we’ll have to dig ourselves out of this hole. Culture, museums and art galleries have often been used to stimulate economic growth in the past, no reason why it wouldn’t work now. (Hearing about museums financially suffering makes no sense to me. They’re too important right now to go under)
This is a chance for museums to DO SOMETHING. It may be a time to try experimental approaches to things, and some people can really shine when they are told they have very little budget. Instead of massive single projects and events, now may be the time to try out several smaller projects to see what happens.
Cloth making machinery from the turn of the century by :: Wendy ::. Used Under Creative Commons
Trowbridge is a town in Wiltshire, which boasts a heritage in the wool and furniture industries. Yet they have only had a museum since the seventies that started out as room in a civic building for illustrations. In 1990, The Shires shopping centre opened and they gave a large room to the museum, rent free for 25 years, where large industrial machinery and historical artefacts can properly represent Trowbridge’s past. The building now occupied by The Shires was once a working mill. The developers saw benefits in keeping some elements of cultural heritage alive.
The museum is located “above” the commercial shop units. Walking past booksellers, opticians and the inevitable franchise coffee shop, the entrance to the museum is set in between them. A concrete stairwell and an industrial lift within a small alcove reminding everyone they are a museum and they are indeed open. A different architect or a different plan could have turned the museum into three or four storage units for businesses to have their stock rooms.
Shopping centres are part of this strange phenomenon that is forming a significant part of our lives as people become more transient. They are neither places to stay in nor spaces to travel through but “places to travel through”. Trowbridge Museum is located within one of these places, when normally museums are places in themselves. This is a perfect example of Museum Expansionism. A museum in an unusual position. “I went to the shopping centre and tripped over a museum”. When put in such context, such a location could be a risk. People go to shopping centres to shop, or to browse commercial items they mentally add to lists of Wants. How often do people go to a place for one thing and end up doing something completely different? This is a tricky statistic to fully comprehend. Trowbridge Museum puts itself in the way of that marketing term “Passing Trade”.
I’ve met Jane Wildgoose and she’s as fascinating and intriguing as she is in this show. She mixes the artist’s ability to tell stories and create emotional levels into the curatorial process, making her so much more than a dualistic “artist-curator” but a true combination of the two. I highly recommend listening (if you can).
THEpUBLIC by hartlandmartin. Used under Creative Common
The British Press is good at “controversy”. It can manufacture indignation against something with biased reporting, misleading quotes and terrible editing. Like a noisy bore in a pub, the sensible reaction is to give a wide berth to these stories.
The “controversy” stems from its increased budget and a list of setbacks. Every extra pound and every technical problem is inflated a million times by ThePublic’sdetractors, as if the correct response is to feel that this art gallery is personally stealing your money. This sentiment from various media outlets is often aimed at “the taxpayer”, i.e. “wasting taxpayers money”, “The Public is entirely funded by the taxpayer”.
Are there many major cultural activities that aren’t funded, at least in part, by the taxpayer?
Inside 'The Public' building, West Bromwich by tomski. Used under Creative Commons.
Part of the current “controversy” is that The Public has “failed to attract hordes of visitors”, so staff are knitting.
The sarcastic tone used against the staff and knitting obviously ignores the massiveboom in knitting, especially ontheInternet. It doesn’t surprise me that people in an art gallery are keeping up with trends. People would be fawning over the project regardless if it was based in London instead of being located just south of Birmingham.
There is one reason why I will defend The Public: if it works, it could change art in the UK.
I made the ninety minute journey. I walked in to find the upper levels (where all the installation art will be) were closed and the only thing open is the bottom floor and café. I was disappointed that I read an old newspaper article which had a long revised opening date. I spoke at length with one of the staff on the front desk.
Through that conversation, I was convinced that when this place opens properly it will be one of the most important cultural centres in the UK. It will be at the forefront of Individualism in museums/art galleries: the art will react, respond and re-evaluate according to YOUR personal preferences saved to an RFID tag. This is not a simple bit of video and computer art here. This is some of the most advanced technology to be used in an art gallery.
I got excited standing on the bottom floor and looking up at various installations going through debug mode. The snide press can only attack The Public but will ultimately – hopefully – the criticsm will serve no purpose.
When it is fixed, when it is running, when it is working, there will be nothing like The Public. And the staff will be experts in all kinds of crafts.
The painting in Stockholm is called “Blumengarten (Utenwarf),” meaning flower garden, painted in Utenwarf, Germany. It is estimated to be worth $4 million to $6 million.
Ricardo Lorca-Deutsch, a Frankfurt man and one of four heirs behind the “Blumengarten” claim, denies it’s about making big money.
“We have lost the family members, our household and so on. What we are looking for is to receive a little thing of all this back — nothing more,” he said.
Ugly business, big money for lawyers, museums seemingly at the receiving end of “attacks” all over a piece of legislation that had its heart in the right place but not its head. I throw this one open for thoughts and discussion.
EDIT: This story has been made known to me: “Militant druids” want 4,000 year old skeleton to be reburied. (Apologies for linking to this article, it is written by typical ranting Daily Mail journalists so the report is rather skewed). On this issue I have a bit more of a firm standing: There are lots of museums who have a huge amount of archaeological material, a lot of them bones. I struggle to see the need of store room after store room filled with human remains that don’t ever get used and don’t get put on display. If they are used/displayed, then I believe they stay in the museum. If not, then why are they being held?
There was a time in the late 80s that every boy wanted a giant floor piano, only for parents to ruin those dreams with piano lessons. That piano is now going to the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, where children will play chopsticks with their feet, or adults in their mid-twenties to thirties can pretend to be Tom Hanks.
Latest Comments