Somewhere on this blog, I put out the idea of “venture capitalist” projects in museums. I said something like gathering together a whole bunch of museum collections that are just gathering dust and putting them on medium-term loans to a bunch of “start-up” groups. The thinking being that these small groups of up-and-coming museum workers or fresh out of graduate programs could get a load of experience running short-term mini-museums, and people would throw money at them to make it happen. Admittedly, the details were a little hazy.
Claire Sexton, Communications Coordinator at Art in General (twitter), got in touch and we had a discussion about what they do. I’m glad to say that the system they have in place for artists project could be adapted.
Art in General (so called because it occupies the General Hardware/General Tools building in New York) do all kinds of things too numerous to list them all, but do check out the Fine Art Adoption Network. The project I’m interested in the New Commissions Program. I drop quotes from the site here to explain.
New Commissions Program centers on developing and exhibiting new and challenging projects by artists who are interested in creating new work.
Since the program’s launch, Art in General has invited and commissioned new works from six to eight artists every year. Three to four of these artists each year are chosen through an annual open call competition reviewed by Art in General and an Advisory Panel; the other three to four artists are selected by Art in General’s curator after extensive research, studio visits, and meetings with local artists.
The open call has no thematic or spatial parameters, and artists can choose to present a project proposal based on long-standing or emerging interests.
Now look at the process for the Open Call and the three phases that begin with a 600 word proposal, and you can submit any idea. If there are any artists in NY reading this, you should give it a go.
This is the model on how to do this, just tweak it for museums. A group leader, instead of a single artist, submits a proposal. They get space (probably both office and exhibition), access to the whole group of experts on staff and a sizable production budget. What Claire tells me is that Art in General will also work with you to say where you went wrong with your proposal, which is so important in evaluations. I applaud them for that.
What the museum project would do is either (a) take the group around the storerooms to find objects that are not part of any other plan and able to leave the store of (b) give the group a bunch of museum objects based upon the original proposal, just to make things more interesting.
Now, what makes Art in General work are the supporters and the serious amount of funding. Art in General handles all that so that the project leaders don’t have too and I think that’s important.
Checklist
Submissions from project leaders.
A team of staff to work with each group.
A panel of experts.
A load of money from sponsors
(The only real difference from Art in General) A whole load of museum objects from a collection.
The Art in General organisation has all the methodologies in place and they’re being pretty successful. Their aim is the production of new work for artists. I say this could easily be done the same for museum workers.
I’m thinking this would make an excellent TV programme.
I like this. This museum is clearly niche; a single event in one town. But just as this event had much wider effects, this museum is looking at the wider issues such as international environmentalism. Too think, without this it would just be a series of historical evidence, rather like a book. The museum takes this individual topic is gives much greater context and, therefore, meaning.
I spoke to 8 people about it. 8 people have all rejected/pulled out for a variety of reasons.
So now, I’m going to describe the idea as best I can (remember, I am no programmer) and kick the idea out there to see what happens.
This idea/design/thing (and only this idea) is going under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. This means I want you to share this idea, remix this idea, tell people where you got this idea (preferably a link), not to try to make money from this idea and give whatever you make from this a CC license as well.
The rest of this blog is under All Rights Reserved, Copyright, Voodoo Curses etc.
So I’ll begin.
MUSEUM BAILOUT
Through no previous planning or collaboration, both me and Nina Simon made a call for people to sign up to a Brooklyn Museum membership because of the recent news of them having quite a large budget cut. Turns out we made quite an impact. I saw that it was retweeted a lot. Which got me thinking. So much news about the doom and gloom of the financial state of museums, not much news about how we can fix it (bar wishing for handouts). Not many of us can conjure up several million to plug a hole in a museum budget. But several million of us could conjure up a little bit of cash that could go a long way to improving things.
This requires some activism. It requires a people-sponsored bailout of our museums.
At least this bailout won’t go into an undeserving executives bonus. Even better, you actually get something back! You get to be part of something and they give you stuff in return!
I notice how almost every museum has a membership program. I also notice how these are often tucked away in the corner of a website. I also notice there seems to be nothing anywhere looking like a directory of membership plans.
The Webapp would be a way to promote as many museum’s membership plans as possible in the simplest way. I think its better if I describe the process:
-A Museum Membership Officer (or similar) registers on the site.
-They are validated, probably through making sure the email is the museum’s own domain.
-The Museum then logs in, fills out a form of all their membership details. (name of member, length of time, costs, benefits etc) and links to website where you can sign up. This avoids the potential mess of trying to trying to mash together checkouts/credit cards/billing operations.
-Museum adds its location to a Google map.
-User goes to app, looks up town/city etc…
-User finds locations of nearest museum locations.
-User clicks on museum location, brings up separate database entry (So the “map tag” is a link to something else, not having just text attached to the “map tag”. This is because more clever things may be required later)
-User looks at a Museum’s membership details. Clicks a link to Museum’s own membership website
-For the sake of analytics and maybe learning something from the numbers, the Museums get stats on how many people clicked their map tag, or looked at their membership plans, or clicked on the link to their own Museum’s website.
-User then signs “pledge” to promise to buy membership X from museum Y, using email and CAPTCHA as validation to avoid spam. This looks like a petition. Name, Email (not to be shown), age, location, drop-down menu of museums, then a secondary drop down menu of there different plans.
-This then forms a big list of people promising to buy a membership. “Jeff promises to buy an 1stfans membership from Brooklyn Museum” etc. I know this isn’t exactly accurate, but this way doesn’t require any linking to Museum’s own billing system and also doesn’t require the Museum to report back with confirmations (because they probably wouldn’t anyway). This is why we’re planning on tracking promises, not sales.
-User then gets little badge/widget saying that the are supporting the museum bailout with a membership X to museum Y. They can put this on their blog/myspace etc. This is to spread the word.
-Here’s a TRICKY BIT. There should be a big running totals/stats on the front of the app. A total of every “pledge”, so 10 people promise to buy 10 memberships costing $100 each, there’s a thing on the front saying “Museum Bailout Total Promised $1000″ or something or “10 promises so far”. These number could possibly go onto the widget. Then there’s a big list of people’s promises.
That’s it. Essentially a big directory of museum membership information, a Google map, a widget and a petition. There’s a lot of scope of adding extras, like a delicious.com/digg feed of new reports on museums financial plight (to remind us why we’re doing this), or signing the pledge with a twitter account means (with your permission) you tweet “I will buy this membership” or something, or make the whole thing a facebook app.
Please, by all means spread this idea. Whilst I do want to hear from you if you plan to do something with it, please don’t email me saying “I’m interested in doing this” and then email me a bit later saying “Sorry, can’t do it”. If you’re serious, then I’m serious and will help any way I can and will blog the hell out of it (as will, I imagine, lots of others). In fact, contact me with something approaching a working beta. Put questions into the comments below.
I am, as always, reachable via pete(at)newcurator.com
Near the end of my talk last Wednesday at the University of Iowa (where the art museum, best known for its monumental 1943 Pollock, has been permanently closed by flooding), I advocated that the Brodsky bill, designed to regulate deaccessioning in New York State, become a national model.
The Brodsky Bill is basically government involvement is the decision making of museums.
Proponents of the idea of a cabinet-level Secretary of Culture point out that foreign culture ministers currently have no counterpart in the U.S.
There’s good reason for that.
Many foreign countries have a tradition of substantial government subsidies for cultural institutions. When your government pays the culture bills, you need the oversight of a government agency. But there are big tradeoffs for being largely dependent on government handouts—not only the specter of government interference but also the sleepy complacency that comes from not having to make a strong case to outside funders.
I’ve been keeping an eye out for one of these for a while now. Part of the Museum Expansionism categories is the trend of museum’s moving into non-places as opposed to being in a place (museum buildings) or in space (Public art?).
A non-place is summed up as a place with the transient nature of space. These are “places” that we pass through, often artificially, or have to pause in. Temporary places we stop before moving on. Airports are non-places, as are train stations. To some extent, shopping centres/malls are non-places. Technically, standing in front of a cash machine is standing in a non-place. There’s a lot of waiting and killing time in non-places.
Hotels are also non-places. Temporary residences on our travels.
So now I’ve found a museum in a hotel or vice-versa. Admittedly, I wasn’t looking very hard. 21C Museum Hotel in Louiseville, Kentucky. They are apparently dedicated to solely collection and exhibiting 21st century art. It seems to be legit and not just a gimmick hotel with exhibition space as they talk about the museum aspect having definite non-profit status as well as permanent installations.
I’m just waiting for a museum to build a hotel extension now. HoMA, anyone?
I’ve been pouring over all the stuff that came out of the MW2009 conference. There’s far too much for me to talk about individually, yet I don’t really want to just post a load of links. So I’m going to talk about the one that caught my attention the most.
Shelley Mannion’s blog post about the session spoke about question of what you could transform a museum into something else. I think a liberal use of metaphor was involved, but hey, I’m game.
Shelley group chose Nature, as in.
Engages all the senses
Diversity of environment, terrain, landscape
Place of surprise and discovery
Dynamic and changing
Vast and awe-inspiring
One group chose Fantasy Baseball (which is like Fantasy Football over here, right? Pick a team, players get point over the season, most points win?). The idea seemed to generate a couple of laughs, but when I say it and call it the Death of the Curator, it causes all kinds of reaction. I mean, thousands of people picking their favourites and pretending they are the manager?
Anyway, I’m going to play now, and I don’t have a group.
Make museums like: Magazines
Or, more accurately for my tastes, make museums like Monocle Magazine.
A magazine structure with similar responsibilities. An Editor-in-Chief like Tyler Brûlé, section editors, correspondents, freelancers etc. Every gets their name on what they create.
Lots of different content, structured. Okay, Monocle has five general topics, but there are about fifty different things in each topic of various sizes, from features to small columns. I pick up the copy I have here and under BUSINESS is a report of Arbil in Iraq, a two-page spread on the brands involved in airport security, ten short articles on ten businesses not suffering from economic collapse and three slightly longer columns on three business as examples of the future of retail in Japan. Its amazing.
Top level design and “format”. Monocle magazine looks good. It always does. Their design team has a lot to do and they do it well. I imagine they’re paid handsomely. Every edition looks good and within the desired format. This has got me thinking in a different tangent about the production of an exhibition being the same as publishing. May explore further in another post, but you get the idea of inserting content into a structure like a magazine, right? The better magazines have very strict style-sheets to give a coherence to everything inside, especially with lots of different subjects. Bad magazines don’t have two pages that look the same nor have two editions have anything in common with umpteen different fonts, hundreds of different column layouts, random splashes of colour with as many badly taken photoshopped images crammed into every space. There’s also the side of formatting which is the physical: the size, the shape, the quality of the paper, the number of pages. all of which slight changes can make a huge difference. Like when The Guardian changed from a broadsheet format to a thinner Berliner format. They’re sales shot up because of the easier to handle paper for reading on planes/trains as well as aligning themselves to be more like European papers as per they general pro-European/international stance. “Format” is one of the most important priorities. Lets the writers/journalists/(curators) get on with being creative and filling that format.
Twelve Monthly Issues. This is where I give people an aneurysm. Monocle does an edition once a month. How often does a museum do a complete turnaround? A temporary exhibition once every couple of months? I’m saying museums need to do massive changes, whole New Editions, once a month to keep a readership interested. I’ll let you work out how to pay for it.
Something Worth Collecting. Now, I admit most magazine are cheap trash to be read once and recycled. Monocle differs because it looks great, has high production values, it’s as thick as a book and it shows me the world. First edition copies of issues one of Wallpaper* Magazine (Tyler Brûlé’s previous job before Monocle) are extremely collectible because they are worth something. In museum terms, the product on offer is an experience. Make people want to collect the experience. Make them something tangible to say This is Mine. Not merchandising, but an intended object. I go out and buy Monocle Magazine because it’s worth something. In 40 years time, I’ll be able to say that whilst there monetary value may have increased and they’re becoming increasingly rare, it was the excellent level of magazine journalism and quality of design during an era of insipid media cultures. Museum experiences shouldn’t be memorable, they should be collectible.
That’s five things, “which require little or no modification of visitors’ existing behaviors”. I’m damned sure that most visitors buy magazines. I’m sure I could think of many other points, like magazine racks in shops covering a wide variety of topics and demographics other than “family” or the priority of reporting first and offending second, but this would turn into a thesis.
This is a call out to anyone who reads this site who’s a dab hand at creating a little webapp.
Basically, I’ve had an idea but lack any coding ability to pull it off. I could try to use some of the tools out there already, but it would look messy. Would prefer someone to do it for me and do it properly.
You know that part were I said I have no coding ability? Well, I’m also not sure what abilities someone would need. I imagine php, mysql, css and maybe something else weird and alien to me.
I don’t see this as a large project. I’ve seen more complicated facebook apps than my idea. What I can’t do is pay you. What I can do, and what expect, is something on it saying “developed by…”. I wouldn’t mind somehow releasing it under Creative Commons to solve any ownership issues.
Yes, it have something to do with museums. If it works, it’ll be a nice piece of activism.
Interested? Drop me an email at pete(at)newcurator.com and I’ll send you the details of my idea. If lots of people reply, then I’ll choose the one I like the most.
IMA Director Maxwell L. Anderson’s address at the Museums and the Web 2009 conference, Moving from Virtual to Visceral. The video is a little over an hour long and well worth watching just because of the mass of inspirational ideas one can take from it.
A closure of one of the special-exhibition galleries
I’m glad that everything is being done to limit the amount of staff cutbacks, especially a staff that wins awards for its work. Too many other museums are, in my opinion, turning to the rash option of reducing staff numbers during these tough economic times.
Whilst there is nothing I can do about a 35% decrease in their endowment, there is something I can do about the fall in membership.
The topic of individualism in museums can cover a lot of areas: The use of individual fame to sell exhibitions, the (lack of?) autonomy museums have or, the museum visitors themselves.
One other area that I hope to turn into a semi0regular feature is the trend of new museums entirely dedicated to one individualised area. If we were to create a taxonomy of museums, how many would there be? Off the top of my head, I can think of local history, natural history, science, military, maritime, art and what I’ll call “memorial” (The Holocaust museums, for instance). I’m sure there are plenty of general labels like this, but I’m interested in the expansion of what would come under “Other”.
I promise not to turn this entirely into a Museum Freakshow with links to one man’s Museum of Roadkill or The Museum of Humiliating Break-Ups. Otherwise I could be linking to any lunatic with a website and a camera. I will expect some level of actual institution.
For instance, in this first feature of the Museums of Niche I have two for you.
“This is an object of contemporary society and a museum collects such items,” curator Nils Olander told AFP.
“And it is a part of our mission as a museum not to avoid complicated questions,” he said.
Nil Olander may also be entirely in line in saying, “Look. This is the server that delivered the most popular web site to come out of Sweden by spitting in the eye of international copyright laws. Don’t you think this is important?”
The Guardian and the Saatchi Gallery (who else?) are putting on Your Gallery @ The Guardian exhibition. In short, a panel of judges have shortlisted 30 artists (from the 10,000 who submitted on saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/) and now the general public will reduce that 30 to 10 who will be put on display (by voting at arts.guardian.co.uk/yourgallery/ or texting it in).
Crowdsourcing the curatorial decisions of an exhibition. The process of museums has been brought to the lowest common denominator, pitched somewhere between reality TV and youtube’s most-viewed list. My point is about individualism in museums is entirely proved.
Let’s make the comparison between museums and the “old” news media of print and television. Let’s face it, they are both firmly “media” in the industry of information. You can argue the differences somewhere else. For the sake of my argument, museums are an “old” media. Possibly one of the oldest. What makes it the exception is that new/social media hasn’t completely ruined it or caused a massive rush to adopt it. You’ll find the Guardian on almost every social network or new technological advance. I think there’s about 10 UK museum institutions on twitter.
They are two methods for media to take, both opposite ends of the individualised spectrum. At one end, individuals-to-individuals. Old media does this with celebrity and personality as intermediates that we consume. We choose Bill O’Reilly or Keith Olbermann to shout back at us our own political bias. We listen intently to to those objects of our fandom as they tell us stuff. New mediathe Internet Blogs are starting to cotton onto this, as I read more and more of “blogger-as-curator” or “celebrity blogger” (terms I don’t think would exist without the Cory Doctorows of the world) and “original content” becoming the an Internet Brahma bull and that Stephen Fry is King of Twitter or something.
This is only half-occurring in museums (probably in the same way I can only half-argued museums as old media). Celebrity is certainly becoming a more central feature but that’s certainly been the case with art since the year dot. It’s when David Beckham curates an exhibition of his favourite British archaeological treasures you know the paradigm has truly shifted. Museums may have its occasional superstar director, but ultimately the curator is hidden behind the institutional banner.
Individuals-to-individuals firmly puts the power into the hands of the consumer, with everyone else trying hard to make enough noise to become famous enough for you to listen.
The other end is individuals-as-social. The Internet is all over this and old media often have to rely on the new to provide access to this construct to which they had no answer. They best is the glut of phone-ins associated with reality TV, as the social-individual-media-consumer votes to keep or kick some dancer/singer/c-list celebrity. The new gave the people a voice in media of conversation. Granted, the majority of the social media voice may not adding much and with so much noise we often return to the Doctorows and Stephen Frys to show us stuff. What individual-as-social creates naturally though is the ability to create lists. Youtube has a Most Watched. Delicious and Digg have top items. Twitter loves to tell us who has the most followers.
One of the casualties of media is journalism, and this is where the comparison offers a warning. Proper journalism, as in a job with actual skills to do right, is bumped behind individualism. You can be any kind of celebrity and be a popular blogger or columnist and reach that individualistic market. That hill is very steep to be a “celebrity journalist”. We only need one O’Reilly/Olbermann. We don’t need either to see what the most popular music video is or what’s the world most favourite picture of a cat. The Crowd and tell us that for us automatically.
Museum curators and print journalists have a lot in common, in that it is their skills that turn an amount of information into something worth giving a damn about. There are plenty of other places to find out about the DefCon of journalism, especially the ever increasing problem of how to get paid. At this current moment in time, the museum curator is “safe”, got nothing to worry about. “It will all blow over”. The fact that there is a gallery in London who are going to offer thousands of people, many without art history degrees, the ability to choose what goes on the wall. The first step new media did to try to kill old media was to make the skills unimportant under the banner of “democratising”. “Everybody can get involved!” also means “It doesn’t matter what you know!”. Suddenly, your art history or archaeology degree isn’t looking so important, your museum post-grad may not be enough and your years of experience don’t mean much in the world of facemuseumtube when your job can be done by a thousand unpaid contributors. Curators may be safe now, but they would do well to look over their shoulders to their destitute journalist buddies.
“In the world of new media nothing can be achieved alone; by working with exceptional companies such as Apple we can use the internet to help fulfil Tate’s mission to make art available to all.”
Apart from, you know, those without iTunes. Which I don’t so I can’t offer any more comments. Would be good if I could find those videos somewhere else without having to download a program I don’t want.
It’s interesting to see that the Tates are the first museums on iTunes U. The rest are universities.
The first one is the Shigeru Ban’s Nomadic Museum (good pictures here), which is made out of shipping containers and cardboard and is… shipped all over the world to host an exhibition.
The other one is the ContainerArt project, where containers become temporary exhibition space. It appears that the containers were used more like mobile installation pieces. Still, it’s very clever.
I think about something between the two. A museum of stackable exhibition spaces. Not just side-by-side art pieces or just a large building to put stuff in, but a set of containers… containing a museum as a whole, travelling around the world. Set the displays right and you’ll only need to close the doors and be on your way. Design the exhibition right and the containers could stack in multiple different ways to fit a variety of spaces.
I’m starting to believe you don’t need museum buildings anymore. Just a whole bunch of mobile or temporary exhibitions in mobile or temporary buildings with maybe a single centre for conservation and storage.
Before jumping to conclusion, this could be a good thing. What would you do with all these items? Many are probably treasures. Even those that are just his personal items could go a long way of humanising a dictator and oppressor rather than try to deny him and turn him into a mythological symbol. This could be a real healthy way for Iraq to deal with it’s past. Turning over the items to the people and establishing the lessons to be learnt. A greater memorial aspect could be worked into a purposefully jarring juxtaposition of one man’s splendor.
(To make this post a little less serious) All those lookalikes he hired to pretend to be him at public events. They must be out of work now. I would hire them to be in-character tour guides and act like real heels. In fact, I would have one tour guide walk around telling utter lies.
Okay, serious now. The items are clearly going to all have in common the fact they were Saddam’s and there is an opportunity for a museum to act as a positive movement of Iraqi culture, that is if they can accuratly set the tone of place straight away.
“They will be displayed for all the people of Iraq, future generations and visitors from of all over the world to admire.”
To summarise, union rules say workers don’t have to work Sunday but must get paid overtime if they do but worker now expecting to be paid even when not on the rota.
I think.
Also, the maritime museum, the museum of archaeology and the City Art Gallery in Southampton are on strike over…
…a demand by the council’s Tory bosses that eight staff at the three attractions work Sundays as part of their contractual hours, rather than as overtime. Under the proposals, they would also no longer receive pay enhancements on Saturdays.
Economic downturn museum trifecta: cut-backs, lay-offs and now strike action when the last of the museum workers are being screwed over. I predict a lot more to follow very soon.
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