Archive | June, 2009

ArtFriday: Matt Held

C’mon, I’ve got to add Matt Held to the ArtFriday list, haven’t I?

I first mentioned Matt back in February when I first heard about his brilliant facebook group. It had about 300+ members then. That number’s about 4600 now and he’s now up to 52 portraits. None of them are me, before you ask.

I’ve chosen these three portraits because of (a) It’s a mighty beard (b) It’s kinda how I feel right now and (c) It’s the ever lovely An Xiao.

Always looking forward to the next one.

You can find Matt at his website, his blog, his twitter and of course, facebook.

Steve © 2009 Matt Held

Steve © 2009 Matt Held

Emma © 2009 Matt Held

Emma © 2009 Matt Held

An © 2009 Matt Held

An © 2009 Matt Held

Museum’s Most Important Function Part III

Back in January, I asked the question off the back of a Museum Association youtube video; What is the single most important function of a museum?

From the responses of my twitter followers and blog comments, I made a list and made a Wordle that turned out to be quite popular.

Earlier this month, Bruce Sterling linked to it and almost melted my servers, but also brought a whole bunch of new readers.

I want to ask the question again. When I first did it, I had about 400 twitter followers. Now, I’m pushing 1800. I figure it’s time to update the Wordle diagram, this time with more people adding to it. It would help if this was RT’d a bit.

@ reply on twitter or drop a comment here. You don’t have to do it again if you gave an answer first time around, I plan to put them all together. Hashtag for this is #musefunct. Put that at the end of your answers.

What is the most important function of museum?

“Why I Am Not a Curator”

Think about what defining skills make up the professional museum world. I don’t mean the people who are marketing, finance etc. No disrespect meant. I know that they provide excellent and necessary services that require a lot of knowledge about museums, but I believe that a good cultural marketing person would be a good marketing person anywhere. These people provide structure, not definition.

Which basically leaves the various guises and aspects of the “curatorial” staff. What were these people trained in? How do these people define themselves? I will make a generalised statement: most of them what fit into the following categories; archaeologists, historians (art or otherwise), conservators and what I tentatively call “educators”. There are some qualifications I’ve purposefully left out. Probably to the chagrin to many people I know, I purposefully left out things like “designers”. It’s a position I don’t believe many museums have, can afford or don’t delegate around the staff anyway. I imagine there are many other types I’ve forgotten.

But let’s look at the list. Conservators… well, it’s a pretty strictly defined role. Part scientist, part engineer and in some cases part artist. “Educators” I realise is a cop-out “Misc” category. But let’s get down to the crux of the issue:  when it comes to the curatorial process of museums, how has it become dominated by archaeologists and (…I stick my neck out here) art historians?

This is where I come to explain the title of this article, a play on the title of Frank O’Hara’s poem, “Why I Am Not a Painter“. I feel I have to explain these literary references. The last time I did it as a pun on a Roland Barthes essay, people thought I was calling for an end of curators.

frank ohara by m kasahara, Used under Creative Commons.

frank o'hara by m kasahara, Used under Creative Commons.

O’Hara’s poem describes the interaction between him and artist Mike Goldberg and the differences between their respective art forms. Years after I first discovered O’Hara, I found out he worked on the front desk at MoMA and eventually an assistant curator (some sources say he was an “associate curator”. I don’t know the difference).

I said a few times on here that curators need to come out of the shadows and offices and get there names and faces attached to the work they do. Then I think of Frank, more famous for his poetry than his work at MoMA.

Was there a better person suited to a New York contemporary art museum than New York’s finest contemporary poet? He – more than anyone –  understood the human condition of 1960s New York, hammering out poems on his typewriter, trying to capture the Present Moment knowing that the act of writing has put the moment already in the past. That’s why he used a typewriter; for speed.

So then I think, “Why aren’t there more Frank O’Hara’s” in the museum world?”

There are two things this is not a call for. This is not a call for a mass replacement of archaeologists and art historians in order to combat inertia. This is also not a call for more artist-curators, a term I don’t understand because of the very fuzzy definition. I can’t help but feel there are many artist-curators who are artists who project-manage their own exhibitions. Maybe involving some of their artist friends. What I’m talking about goes a bit further than that and not necessarily into art but definitely including it. A poet is an artist, true. But Frank was a very different artist to the artists he was curating. This was only to his benefit.

Who knows the power of meaning and interpretation of movement than a dancer? Who knows the effect of theatre and mise-en-scène better than an actor? Hell, who understands the forward-pushing narrative of one-thing-after-another than a comic book writer?

If you don’t have these people on your staff, then train them. This is professional development and possibly more fun than usual development courses. This is augmenting your staff’s creativity and innovation. Lord knows we need that now. This may be a very UK-centric statement now, but I just don’t believe we will get that by trying to force our museums workers into being part-time teachers.

Who understands the transfer of meaning within information than a journalist? Who understand argument better than a lawyer or a philosopher?

After you’ve been training your staff in the basics of various humanities they’ve never approach before, the other part to this idea is to use the museum as an outlet for their new skills. Talk about assigning emotional value to objects! Your staff write, direct and perform a play using the museum objects as stimulus (or… props?), you could reach new depths with all kinds of new audiences… if done right. As far as I can tell, the world of Frank O’Hara the poet and the world Frank O’Hara the museum worker barely overlapped despite him often writing poetry in his office. O’Hara went the usual route of publishing poetry. Today, we have far more scope in our museums to act as outlets for the staff’s abilities. The museum would almost become a production house of activity which could maybe bring out the poet in all of us.

ArtFriday: Libby Saylor

Two things I have to reward: patience and initiative. Initiative, because Libby emailed me with pictures of her artwork  and I do like receiving things like that. It brightens things up no end to know that you are a person somebody wants to show their art to. Patience, because Libby emailed me ages ago just as I had given up on ArtFriday V2, so I feel I owe it to her.

My Lord, what a selection to choose from. I decided to go for four of her paintings over her photographs or collages for the simple reason that I feel they are her main works and I should show them. You, however, should go check them out yourself.

As to why I chose these painting: Everybody, every once in a while, should indulge in epic uses of colour. It’s good for soul.

You can find Libby Saylor at her website libbysaylor.com.

Red Egg © Libby Saylor

Red Egg © Libby Saylor

Red Circle © Libby Saylor

Red Circle © Libby Saylor

Blue Field © Libby Saylor

Blue Field © Libby Saylor

Mobile AR

Another flurry of Augmented Reality videos doing the rounds at the moment. This time, it’s about AR in mobile phones.

Via O’Reilly Radar, an AR Game called ARhrrrr where you run around a paper map with AR buildings shooting zombies.

Via Futurismic, an app called Layar -- a mobile augmented reality browser.

I suppose what these videos demonstrate is this being the newest of the new media. You can affect, interact and manipulate the information or you  experience information in a 3D overlay. There are also two type of AR on show. The first one (I assume) uses barcodes and markers to set dimensions and the hardware adds the detail with loaded programming. The second one is uses GPS and an internal compass as positional tags to data request. It’s interesting to see which ways they both could go. I’ve looked at the barcode AR before, so let’s think about GPS AR

I haven’t found one, I’m guessing it exists or soon will, but what would interesting/useful is a mobile AR CAD program. Take your Android or iPhone and build a 3D object and assign a GPS to it. If it can shoot zombies, it can play with Lego. Or even build the object in the space you want it. When that happens, what will happen to the moderation? Does every one’s creation get put onto server’s for all browsers to access, creating a weird new search engine where we stand in a place and search for a word? Or will institutions provide there own apps with all the information preloaded and carefully constructed? I imagine both.

What concerns me in the first instances is what happens when a place finds out that someone has AR’d swear words all over a museum’s artwork or flooded the exhibition space with adult adverts? I think it will be the next mutation of cyber-squatting: your coordinates in GoogleAR are already dominated with a SecondLife style nightmare and what can you do about it?

Could Intellectual Property laws include coordinate-defined areas? “This model has been removed as it violates the GPSrights and Safesearch Filter of The Guggenheim Museum”.

Elgin KerPlunk

Where are their Heads? by T.SC. Used under Creative Commons.

Where are their Heads? by T.SC. Used under Creative Commons.

The Acropolis Museum in Athens opens and the media whirlwind picks up again. Apparently, there was “fury” at Hannah Boulton’s statement about the British Museum loaning objects on conditions of recognition of the British Museum’s ownership.

Which has always been their policy.

Which Neil MacGregor said over two years ago.

I wonder where all this was drummed up from? When the Guardian’s Stephen Moss goes to visit the new museum who else talks to him but the Greek minister of culture Antonis Samaras.

“The museum is creating huge momentum, a crescendo all over the world, including England, where public opinion favours the return of the marbles.”

“This museum is a museum of symbols and ideas and the whole world will come. That creates pressure on its own… Our goal was to have the best museum in the world…”

“This is a new beginning and this is something that not just the Greeks want; I believe it will be the whole world. What we’re doing here is unique, and from what we see in the museum stems everything that came out in western culture. The pressure will mount. There are 25 committees all over the world asking for these pieces to come back.”

acropolis museum by Wurz. Used under Creative Commons.

acropolis museum by Wurz. Used under Creative Commons.

This is where I can only state my opinions because any sense of rationality, accountability or objectivity left the conversation long ago: The Elgin Marbles should never be “given” back to Greece because the reasons should never be this shadowy Nationalism.

This is why I feel I can only state my honest-to-God subjective opinion on the matter. It’s not a moral issue because that’s pretty shaky ground to begin with. It’s not an ethical issue because it seemed the providence is pretty well known, definitely opportunistic, but not exactly underhand. The issue is purely and absolutely Political, hence why the discussion is a sea of varying degrees of opinion and little else. The British Museum, with its globalisation mindset and international outlook, are right to not encourage one museum’s Nationalistic ideology. Nationalistic symbols divide us, not unite us and it would be a greater tragedy if the Marbles became a symbol of Greece’s triumph over the British looters and the Turkish pillagers.

If you think that wouldn’t happen, they you have a far better opinion of politicians than I do.

Now, it wouldn’t be right of me to kick this hornet’s nest without coming up with a solution. Greece invented politics and diplomacy and are over-using one of then. Let’s try to use the other.

The trick would be to appeal to Neil MacGregor’s sense of global history. Create a new designated collection, call it The Birth of the West Collection or something. The tact for forming it would be this:

  • We don’t want the Marbles back.
  • We don’t want you to “Own” them either.
  • We are both Public institutions acting in the Public Interest.
  • We are both wishing to be on the International stage.

From that, you add objects to the collection from both museums, including all parts of the Marbles. Then, you tour like you’ve never toured before. Have that collection go all around the globe with the Acropolis and British Museum’s names at the top of the posters like big-shot film executives. The BM gets to advance its position as the leaders in museum globalisation. The AC get to advertise their position globally as being THE museum of the beginnings of Western-liberal-democracy that makes globalisation possible.

And you make a lot of money.

At the end of the tour, the two directors shake hands and maybe one says, “You know, that was fun and has really raised the profile of both museums to new heights. Wouldn’t it be good if we could do that all the time?”

Then, just kick around the idea, break new ground. Two international museum in the Public’s… no, no, no, in the Global Citizen’s interests (yeah!) form a Partnership for (let’s say…) ten years to have the joint ownership responsibility over a vital piece of Greek (therefore the world’s) history. A decade-long loan to a constitutional organisation that both museums have a 50% stake in to reach as many people as possible. The Anglo-Hellenic Museum Trust.

Then let’s see what happens. When you look at it, the Acropolis Museum would have everything to gain in exchange for losing their sense of Nationalism.

(Sensible discussion and arguments in the comments please. Ad hominem arguments will be deleted)

Monday Catch-Up

As I lost most of last week, there was a serious build-up of things that I couldn’t possibly blog about individually.

I dropped a lot of things into Tumblr. Highlight include a Museum Samurai, the return of a looted Afghan bronze chicken and Julia Oldham giving me The Fear.

15 things went on the delicious bookmarks, mainly a lot of stuff that I may make some proper comments on at some point. I’ve put a couple of sentences or quotes on each one.

Also, HUMAN FLESH SEARCH ENGINE.

Update

I’ve been missing for most of this week and what a week of problems it was.

First, tried to get this site working with Feedburner. Figured gaining a few pennies via the RSS feeds would be worth it. The plugin THEY recommended broke the entire site. Thanks to @ncartmuseum for coming up with a fix.

Secondly, was trying to experiment with Zotero to see if it can offer a new feature for newcurator. It seems the people who have managed to get Zotero to post a WordPress post with every clipping are using some form of witchcraft. I wasted a day despite my best efforts.

I shouldn’t be surprised. I still can’t get my Delicious.com saved bookmarks into a daily post.

Thirdly, WordPress pushed an update that cause catastrophic problems with my lovely theme. Literally, the whole thing went down. It makes you wonder that WordPress, one of the biggest providers of blogging software, would tell people about the little changes that causes their plugins and themes to break everything in sight. Thanks to @firetail for this solution.

Lastly, I have had to do all this with a delightful sickness that made walking across the room a trial. So I was bedridden, wondering what I did for everything to crumble about my ears. Hence the lack of any serious amount of blogging. I’m feeling a little better now, but do plan to spend the weekend recovering and catching up.

Like this, something I wanted to do as soon as I heard: My thoughts go out to the friends and family of Officer Stephen Johns and everyone at the United States Holocaust Museum. I read this today from their twitter:

Despite our grief and outrage we reopen our doors today-June 12-and every day after with a renewed commitment to the urgency of our mission.

It’s been a tough week. My silly little grievances pale in comparison to the loss of a hero in the line of duty. This weekend, everyone take a moment, recuperate, reflect so we come back Monday better than ever…

Because of the urgency of our mission.

Uni of Wyoming to lose Geological Museum, Spine, Integrity…

Big Al the Allosaurus by rynoceras

"Big Al" the Allosaurus by rynoceras

For those of you who don’t know, I’m in the UK.  For those of you who don’t know much about the UK, I can tell you that every single one of us has a deep rooted fascination and admiration for dinosaurs. It’s written into our code from a very early age because we were all thrown into the Natural History Museum as children to come face-to-face with a ruddy big Diplodocus. Believe me when I say I think they’re important.

So, also believe my anger when I hear that the University of Wyoming are going to close its Geological Museum, home of Big Al, a ruddy big Allosaurus. How many dinosaurs can you think of that get their own Wikipedia mention? Only the most important ones.

But then my anger turned to pity:

While the 10% budget cut has forced the elimination of several programs at the university the athletic budget will only be cut by 5% for fiscal year 2010 (the remaining cuts won’t come until 2011), so the university will “remain a competitive member of the Mountain West Conference.” The 2008 UW football team finished 1-7 in conference play, having failed to score against BYU and New Mexico.

It has become clear. We cannot blame the powers-that-be of the University of Wyoming for they do not know what they do. It’s time to stage an intervention for the UW decision makers are in the grips of a deep and terrible gambling addiction. Like the failed, down-and-out tinhorn of a gambling den, they decide to bet everything on the million-to-one shot of a sports team. They hope that the Gods will smile upon this unfortunate wretch to stave off Benny and Vinnie who have come to break his legs.

What influences the UW decision for one final punt to gamble so much academic integrity for such outside odds of success? The gambler doesn’t care. The gambler only has eyes on a perfect future after the enormous risk, forgetting all the enormous risks that got them into the situation in the first place and forgetting the there are wins just as well as losses.

Sign the petition, announce your intervention to help them with this terrible disease.

James Bradburne: Museums in 25 Years

Video via Dan Cull.

Changing the Rules: Museum Economies

Thinking back to the Standing Orders of John Robb, there was one that I struggled with and almost dismissed as being particular for a rising insurgency and not a reasonable guideline for museums.

Standing Order 2 – Grow Black Economies.

I focused on the outcome above the methods, that aiming for financial (and therefore, structural/political) autonomy was the reason for doing it. Museums aren’t going to go into organised crime and protection rackets. Also, the deaccessioning stalemate wouldn’t allow for such a reason, rejecting it with “selling art to pay the bills is abominable”. Regular economies introduced to the museum industry – such as cafés, bookshops, merchandise – only offer small percentages to the overall income.

A solution can come from “black economy” that aims to sidestep outright deaccessioning of public-trusted collections. But I’ve found to be rules against it already.

From ICOM’s Code of Ethics for Museums.

8.14 Dealing in Natural or Cultural Heritage Members of the museum profession should not participate directly or indirectly in dealing (buying or selling for profit), in the natural or cultural heritage.

From the Museum Association’s Code of Ethics for Museums.

2.15 Avoid all activities that could be construed as trading or dealing in cultural property unless authorised in advance by the governing body. Refuse to deal in any material covered by the museum’s acquisition policy,
to engage in private collecting in competition with the museum or to use a connection with the museum to promote private collecting. Refuse to acquire any items from collections that the museum has disposed of.

Having looked over the AAM’s Code of Ethics, I can’t find anything exactly like the above. There are several mentions of “public good rather than individual financial gain“, which sounds like loopholes within loopholes when a museum’s mission of public good is threatened by a real lack of financial gain.

If these rules were removed or rewritten to ensure ethical integrity of what I’m about to suggest, then museums could open up to a new realm of financial security without even touching the precious deaccessioning gospels.

Museums could create private side-collections. Objects not officially pushed into a collection for the public good, but bought as an investment. Museum professional then get to rely on the skills they already have: the knowledge in determining the value of an object or the skills to restore an object to a new found glory. The process means designating objects as being an “investment” before the sale. This would also call for a separate financial entity to avoid blurring what money is for investments and paying bills and what object are designated as such, but we’re talking about a standard audit trail here.

I imagine a problem (or criticism) being that such a change in ethics would turn museums into nothing more than private investors neglecting public good, apparently because ethics prevent all museum staffers turning into embezzling career criminals. Then the ethical guidelines can reflect the problem. Instead of these two rules, have them say that “investment collections” cannot exceed more than 10% of a museum’s collection in number or value and budgets for museum investing cannot be more than 10% of the overall budget. Or numbers to that effect. The Actual-Museum-Collection is still protected and held in the public trust. Museums get to build little nest eggs that when a five year economic downturn appears they can cash in to pay their staff.

The beauty in this is that it calls upon what museums already excel at: knowledge in material culture. Instead, the few museums that are lucky to have various investments have to rely upon systems that, I assure you, have damn fewer ethical standards!

ArtFriday: Christi Nielsen

This week on ArtFriday, I want to show you the photography of Christi Nielsen. I have chosen three images from her I’m Just About to Get Skinny series, a highly sensitised and personal analysis of body image. What keeps me returning to Christi work is the way she manages to orchestrate a sense of empathy that isn’t sickening. Something that I find difficult with most artists when the bare their entire soul in a work is the nagging feeling that maybe I just wouldn’t like this person. Christi Nielsen does not have this problem. (It may be because Christi is also hilarious.)

You can find Christi Nielsen at her website, her flickr account (for her more recent works) and her twitter.

Melted Fat © Christi Nielsen

Melted Fat © Christi Nielsen

Michelin Man © Christi Nielsen

Michelin Man © Christi Nielsen

Dialogue © Christi Nielsen

Dialogue © Christi Nielsen

John Robb’s Standing Orders

John Robb scares me. Not through any kind of intimidation, but the fact that his blog Global Guerrillas is such a treasure trove of articles analysing the future. Robb’s focus is the future of military and warfare, but mainly how a massive bureaucratic money pit of a nation’s army can be brought to stalemate by a loose organisation of insurgents with a fraction of the budget. This is what terrifies me most: the movement into the next generation of doing things, in this case, war.

Robb has put up 11 (I’m sure they’ll increase) Standing Orders for the modern insurgency. Let’s ignore that the ultimate end of these insurgents are death and destruction and opposition of “freedom”. Those are the ideological extras. When you look at these Standing Orders, you notice that these are just models of management. This list could have come from a silicon valley analyst. Through simple translations into other languages of industry, you have a very powerful list of actions. This is the new way of Doing Things. You see how this interests me in relation to Metrocurators, but also the way museums will struggle using old methods of structure.

Here are John Robb’s Standing Orders, I suggest looking at the original link for background because I’ll be strictly talking about this is terms of museums. (I also don’t want to plague John Robb’s blog with museum related links)

1. Break Networks – Not communication networks. This means getting in between people and their closed systems. What does this have to do with museums? Well, how many people in the industry got jobs through people they know? How much is the industry lacking innovation because people haven’t been allowed in? Think about what has the most influence in museums and whether they are still fully deserving of such a position. Just how progressive are those giant membership organisations?

2. Grow Black Economies – Originally meant to fund insurgency through organised crime, the reasons for doing so are noteworthy: independence. Now, museums are going to be running protection rackets, but the idea of finding new income sources to obtain autonomy has to be a priority. This would allow much greater freedoms in innovation. Things like Giuliani punishing Brooklyn museum by cutting off funding. Or the Cambridge museum losing funding by refusing to splatter a logo over everything. Museums are currently slaves to too many outside influences. There needs to be a growth in Museum Economies in order for growth in Museum Thinking.

3. Virtualize Your OrganizationNot so much about greater use of IT (although that may help) this is about having a greater flexibility and possibly a modular approach to organisation: “They do the job and go away”. Could an entire museum be run be freelancers? I’ve seen it done with some collections. I also wonder about the motivation is could cause. A person sitting on the same job for 20 years isn’t going to have the same hunger as a freelancer who has to hustle every day. Robb’s say that a specialisation of skill sets emerge in a short time because of this. Also, I must say, I’ve found more interesting things come out of the blogs of museum freelancers than anyone else. This is because freelancers have equal amounts of having to be employable and being innovative with an added extra of not having to “follow the rules” (a plus from being self-employed).

4. Repetition is more important than ScaleI wish this was true in museums, where the trend is for several-month long blockbuster exhibitions rather than weekly changes of new things. “Simple, low cost, easy, and repeatable… are both sustainable and generate the greatest potential returns.

5. Coopetition not CompetitionMuseums have systems already in place (mostly) to share information but are used in rather narrow parameters. This could be run parallel to great transparency in museums. This is about working towards common goals by using the same things.  To me, this is the difference between ArtBabble and Creative Spaces. ArtBabble is a platform run by IMA, but they’re working hard to have the involvement of other museums to create content. Creative Spaces had too much singular interest that, I think, removed its greater purpose.  To quote Robb, “rivals sharing common platforms… reduce costs… widen variety, increase flexibility, etc.  For example, coopetition is the basis for Internet standards and the Web“. You want to be like the Internet, don’t you?

6. Don’t Fork (the Insurgency)This one’s a bit harder to translate, but I take this to mean not being on the offensive against your fellow museums/staffers. Such as the amount of criticism against museums “breaking taboo” (see: Prissy Fatwas). I think this also means resisting internationalism/global issues for the sake of being a “local museum”.

7. Minimalist rule sets work bestOh God Yes. There’s no point replacing the old systems with carbon-copies of them. For museums, this is about policy and ethics. I remember one museum’s collection policy that defined OS Gridlines, for God’s sake. What was more ridiculous was they ignored them anyway, often accepting objects from 40 miles away. Let’s remember that the reason Neil MacGregor became so important and rescued the British Museum was his adherence to a founding principle from 1753.

8. Self-replicateCreate other versions of yourself, in short. This is related to all the other Standing Orders, in that nothing will work unless it spreads to other organisations, possibly third-parties. Even if you don’t find the idea of becoming something like a metrocurator, you have to imagine this is the best way to advance whatever your goals are. Whatever the priorities are, they will be helped with similar satellite organisations. I think means more than just outreach and education programs. You want to be copied, not just learnt from.

9. Share or copy everything that worksThink about Creative Commons and Open Source. The sharing of ideas, forming them and them kicking them out into the wide world for anyone to pick up. This is related to 5. The idea of hording ideas helps no one. Think about how the entire industry as a whole benefits from an Open idea, which can therefore lead to greater benefits to individual museums. I know several museums are already doing this.

10. Release often and early - I can’t say anymore than how John Robb puts it: “Innovations, from tactics to weapons, should be released as soon and as often as practicable.  Perfectionism, sclerotic planning processes, excessive secrecy, risk aversion, and other plagues found in hierarchical organizations are the enemy of success.” Right on.

11. Co-opt, don’t own, basic services - I get there this one is going, but not sure how to translate it into museum practices. I will leave this one up to the comment to help me unpick. What are the “basic services” and who has ownership of them? Part of me thinks about education and schools, but still not sure how it fits. Comments welcome. What do you think?

Museum “Fans”

From Paul Orselli

How would museum staffers do things differently if they were trying to increase the number of museum “fans” instead of “customers” or “guests” or “visitors”?

The examples were the fans of sports teams, Harry Potter and… a hotel. I’m going to dismiss the hotel because anyone could put a list of famous names for branding purposes. It’s no different to them wearing a watch or sipping a cognac. I’ll also dismiss the Harry Potter fan model because they are still customers. Their fandom is part merchandising demographic, part spectacle addict. The reason for queuing up from midnight is to be one of the “first” to experience. I think there are too many differences between the museum and book/film business plan that drawing comparisons are too tricky. For instance, the Harry Potter narrative has invaded four media: Books, films, DVD and television. Museums are pretty much a media in itself that tries to be “open-to-all” instead of “supply-and-demand”. I wouldn’t know how to shift between the two.

So that leaves sports teams. For my own benefit, I’m comparing museums to football (or “soccer” to those who don’t believe in definitions being limited by majority functions). At first I wondered if this was a merchandising thing as well. A football fan would buy the hat, scarf and kit emblazoned with the team logo and buy it every year. But I had misread the original question. How would museum staffers do things differently? The last time I did a “Make Museums Like…“, I had five things inspired by Monocle Magazine. This time in Make Museum Staffers like Football Players, I can only think of two.

1. I have this ongoing joke that David Beckham is the future of museums. Sure, both football clubs and museums are made up of team members that need to function together, but can you honestly say there are curators who people would say are their favourites?

Look at David Beckham, he has a set of skills that’s internationally recognised that got him a celebrity status off the pitch. The difference being is he performs in public. We can watch him do what he does best. Being a fan of David or the team he plays for means something because we hope/want the best performance. If I was a sports fan wanting the same thing from a museum, what have a got to support? The objects on display. They tend to be pretty static. I don’t have any actual people to support, they’re in offices and meetings. So all the museum performance/teamwork/skills on display are hidden and the fan only gets the end product. It’s like a football supporter only being able to support by getting the results. You may feel joyful or depressed by the results but it’s still just a list of numbers.

This is what I saw Nicolas Bourriaud try to do with Altermodernism. The whole exhibition was firmly placed under his name as he gave countless interviews explaining his made-up word. Within Tate Triennial FC,  Bourriaud was the captain, the artists were his squad, the other staff were his coaches and Altermodern was his tactic (like Total Football or Long Ball). If only he chose art that more people would have liked rather than the typical alienating/challenging contemporary stuff he probably would have made a bigger impact. Fans want to see goals and wins, they don’t care that much about where they come from.

Who else is there? Neil MacGregor certainly gets a lot of press for what he does, but he doesn’t have David’s hair.

2. Competition. Simple one, that. A fan wants their support to mean something and to celebrate wins. There’s barely any competition in museums, so what is the point in being a fan of one over another? What does a museum staffer got to work towards that would attract a fan base? There’s no league table to decide who’s doing the best. The current crop of museum awards are popularity contests or stamps of quality, things that matter to a “visitor” or a “customer”, but not a fan. Shortlists, judging panels or voting won’t make fans. Football does this sort of thing at the end of the season when all the playing as been done and the silverware has been lifted.

How would you do a museum competition? Based upon what? Visitor numbers? Doesn’t sound in the spirit of things. Or should two museums square off  in some kind of challenge in a knock-out competition to be crowned Museum Cup Champions? Some television rights, some decent coverage, some kit sponsors…

Hold on, I’m off to phone a television executive. I have an idea I want to pitch.