I’ve been involved in discussions about what punk is before and they’ve never ended nicely. You’ll always get arguments about authenticity, terms like “true punk” or “real punk” get thrown about and soon afterwards someone makes the statement that everyone else is wrong.
I will hammer anyone who tries to push this discussion into those terms. Go take it to some record shop or music forum. I realise the term is weird and wide-reaching, but I refuse to get bogged down in semantics.
To avoid this happening, I threw the question out on Twitter and Facebook. What I’m more interested in is “punk” as a suffix. Cyberpunk, Steampunk, that kind of thing. I wanted to make sure I was going to speak about something that there was a general consensus on. Thanks to everyone who responded. The same kind of words were appearing, if not slightly different takes on them. Things like “Rebellion” or “Alternative” came up, but a general sense of an underground or fringe/”not mainstream” approach. Sarah Anton (Phillyspice on twitter) said that “It could be a desire to explore the new, desire to push boundaries just to do it, etc.”
I dunno about any solid definition, but this will do as a basis for what I’m talking about. There’s a reason people write books about this sort of thing. There’s also a reason why people hate the use of “punk” as a suffix as it is, that every use bleeds anyway any real meaning.
What a time to then introduce the concept of Edupunk.
I also plan to annoy these people even further by stealing including what Dan Cull called PrezPunk (I suggested AcetonePunk).
In the true spirit of using a punk-suffix that has no link to the original meaning except an overused statement of rebellion and promotion of the alternative, I offer Museopunk.
What does that mean? This is the exciting part: I’m not sure yet. I’m not going to put forward anything like a manifesto. Lord knows we have enough of those flying around and they barely make any difference. We live in a time that’s beyond manifestos. I guess this is why I like the -punk suffix. It’s not laying down the rules in stone.
I’ll tell you something, I think we’re creating a generation of Museopunks. There’s too much talk of museums and money. Endless securing of funding and applying for grants. Corporate sponsorship or government criteria. And when it all goes wrong and money is diverted away or philanthropy ain’t what it used to be, don’t you wonder when museum’s lost their soul? Dan Cull said (on Facebook) that “punk” is about the community over profit margins. Well, for a non-profit sector, we sure are concomitant to profit-making world.
I imagine the satirical situation, where a museum staff spend all their time applying for funding so they can get paid to apply for more funding.
I don’t want to get to that.
Yet, it seems to me that some of the most interesting people I have spoken to because of Newcurator are freelancers, graduands/post-grads, those barely starting out or clinging onto the bottom rung. This is where the Museopunks are. They have some of the best ideas and the most energy yet they aren’t very high in the hierarchy.
Notice how I don’t say, “they don’t make much money”? We do it for love, not the money. As Paul Orselli points out, the upper echelons are all about fundraising anyway.
Something I’m not going to go into (because it needs more research/questions) is the innovative uses of technology and a strong belief in keeping things Free. This, as you can imagine, is almost another article, especially with the Tories in the UK making noises about how they plan to stuff culture but also the soon-to-be-widely-available museum APIs. This makes me instantly think about John Robb’s Standing Order 11: Co-opt, don’t own, basic service, which at the time I couldn’t make much sense of in the museum world. This requires further thinking.
Edupunk is about the anti-commercialisation and DIY attitude for teaching and learning. Dan Cull’s Prezpunk focused on conservation, citing many community projects, which I liked the idea of deinstitutionalised . I’d say Museopunk overlaps Edupunk a bit and encapsulates Prezpunk, so there’s a lot more -Punk to fill, and I’ll admit that Nina Simon probably has a few things covered.
But when you think about all the functions of a museum or a curator, nobody in those two Wordles said anything about making money.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this business of Southampton City Council selling off artwork from the collection in order to pay for a Titanic Museum/heritage centre. Mainly because I hate the idea of politician meddling in collection management policies. Also because Southampton City Council hasn’t exactly been stellar in its stewardship of the museums it already has.
Not that local paper has helped. I swear, if you a sample of the most philistine opinions possible, check out the comments section of the reports from The Daily Echo. I had to laugh at the suggestion that the Southampton City Art Gallery, which is free to enter, was “elitist”.
When it comes to deaccessioning debates, I may have got too caught up in the US version. I like the idea of museums being able to further their autonomy. I like the idea that collections could be made more precise and that objects be made available to other museums. I like the idea of a process that means museums don’t have to hold onto something for the sake of holding on to it.
This is where I neglect the UK aspect: I hate the idea of elected officials sabotaging museums to meet their own ends, especially with such short-term prospects. Make no mistake, this is not art to be sold for a Titanic Museum. This is art being sold to get politicians re-elected after they can show off their new tourist attraction building.
Thankfully, it seems the councillor who set up the Southampton City Art Gallery had the same thoughts. Robert Chipperfield made sure the Tate was consulted in anything concerning his bequest. Now that this museum heavyweight have made its feelings known, the Museum Association (who have been surprisingly quiet) have also said this risks breaching ethical guidelines.
I’m part of the Save Our Collection facebook group, who have done an excellent job on keeping everyone informed. They organised protests, petitions and even had someone on Antony Gormley’s plinth holding up a cut-out of Rodin’s statue. I’m really pleased at all they’ve done and proud to support them.
But this will only happen again soon. Some other council without any foresight will start targeting collections as some sort of plunder-able resource. It will continue until the Museum Association does something and states that elected officials cannot make deaccessioning decisions and that all such decisions must be made by museum institutions alone.
‘What’s the real story, then?’ asked a man of his eight or nine year old grandson, who had said that the museum’s text about the portrait of a 16th century gentleman farmer ‘wasn’t right.’ The boy told him an epic tale of bullfighting instead. It was fascinating to listen to and underlined for me the power of images on the imagination.
Photographer Taryn Simon’s recent TED presentation was about her work taking images of ‘secret sites and worlds we wouldn’t normally get to see’. She discussed two projects: photographs of other-wordly, behind-the-scenes locations, and wrongfully convicted people at crime scenes. Simon is interested in the multiple truths attached to images and opined here that the viewer’s perception hinges on the intent of the creator. She brings forth some compelling ideas about the use of photographs in criminal convictions for instance. In explaining the intent behind her own photographs, she outlines her own intent in presenting them, but what if she didn’t? What would we think? As she suggested, I would bet that it might not be exactly what she had just explained to us. There are always other stories surrounding the work: the idea of the other, the alternative.
The reading of art changes over time and with new evidence or thinking comes reinterpretation. Traditionally we learn from art historians about the meanings behind works. ArtBabble’s newest partners, SmartHistory made use of new technology to present a different kind of discussion about classical art. Describing themselves as a ‘dynamic substitute’ for traditional art history learning, they used Second Life ‘correspondents’ (real-life art historians) to interpret using a recreation of Michelangelo’s ceiling to the Sistine Chapel. In conversation they explained its significance, making, which techniques were used and focus on particular scenes, all of which you might expect from a traditional lecture. What made the difference is that it being Second Life, it can be viewed in the round and they can also fly about to see things close up. I would love to see this used to greater effect giving alternative explanations and with opposing historians and interpreters having debates in-situ in Second Life.
Or what about some children giving their opinions? In the Our City podcasts, schoolchildren made recordings about their hometowns in a worldwide learning experiment. I do wonder how much input the children have into what they think is important in their city and how much the adults guide them. The episodes I have listened to describe their cities in rather pedestrian terms. Whilst I realise that there has to be guidance, they could use the children’s own language and creativity to a greater extent.
This leads me to an idea. Make a podcast wherein children could to tell others about both the real and imagined stories of the paintings. What would it be like to step inside a Gainsborough or a Mondrian. Would it be hot or cold, would there be other people or creatures in there? What might have happened just before that captured moment? This could lead to a large-scale outreach project set up between museums and galleries worldwide to supplement traditional art history and promote wider engagement between children and paintings.
There was a storyteller in residence recently at my local gallery, as part of an archaeological exhibition about the Stone Age. Performing at the height of the school holidays, he held swathes of children rapt with tales of hunting, fishing and trading. More than the life-sized wall painting of a mammoth or the guess-the-smell-of-the-stone-age boxes, he really brought the period to life for the visitors. They could ask him questions and recieve an accurate answer (I believe that he was an archaeologist who was also an amateur actor); they could see how a Stone Age person would dress and how he would use weapons. But none of this would have really come together had it not been for his verbal delivery. That made it come alive.
I have already addressed what makes a ‘good’ podcast (for me). I came up with a number of suggestions for ease of use and interest. One thing that I didn’t mention was the perhaps the most important: the style of presentation. When listening to podcasts and watching videos, I’m sure you notice as I do that no matter how interested you are in the subject, sometimes the presenter just bores the pants off you. That’s when I find my mind wandering from the latest developments in exhibition design to what I’m going to have for dinner, or what might be on at the cinema. This is clearly not what the makers of these media intended.
One of the most charismatic podcasts for storytelling that I have found (well, apart from The Moth, of course) is The Memory Palace. The latest episode reported on German prisoners of war escaping an Arizona prison camp in the 1940s. While this might not sound all that enthralling to you on the face of it, the presenter Nate DiMeo has that same great delivery as the Stone Age man. This coupled with an evocative backing track that lent itself to the spirit of the story really kept my attention.
I think it is well worth museums utilising people who can deliver the stories into museums and galleries to bring their exhibitions alive: even if only for special events. Get your podcast-makers to lay more emphasis on the delivery of the content too. The podcast and its presentation is one more layer of the interpretation, and one which needs equal standing with the gallery exhibits. In fact, it could even be just one part of the whole of the exhibit or collection, where you have to listen to the podcast to gain specific information in a museum version of transmedia storytelling.
I like to think of it like this. The most important person in the museum for the visitor is the assistant at the front desk who can tell them about that day’s tours and events, why the museum has loads of Simian ware but little flint and where is good nearby for lunch. The most important person to the podcast listener or video viewer is the presenter. They are the public face; the first impression for the whole outfit. It’s all in the delivery, people.
You can contact me at August(at)newcurator(dot)com.
* Catherine Manning – To act as ’story keepers’ and to encourage people to interpret the world we live in from different perspectives.
* J@simpleposie – To risk being with the art, immediately and contemporaneously and to offer it in that spirit; to love showing art to people.
* Max Rhino – To ensure the proper balance between preservation and accessibility for a given collection; to act as a subject matter expert available for consultation by anyone requiring information.
* Perian Sully – To mediate between raw experience and information. To give material culture life and uncover new paths for uninformed and informed minds alike to travel.
* Karawaane – To help the development staff fund raise via smart & engaging shows/programs/etc.
* Steve Smith – Provide Context. (To, for,and with an Audience. Driven by Mission. Within the limits of space, budget, time, and technologies.)
* Kirsty Hall – Placing artists and works in a new context that encourages a deeper understanding of the art.
* JenniferNg – To challenge audience to new knowledge, or to think about existing knowledge in new light using the most effective means possible.
* Mia Ridge – To collect stories, whether sublime or ridiculous, to let us know which is which; be able to tell us significance of objects
* Museum of Folly – Contextualization is the most important curatorial function.
* Paolo Viscardi – Enabling intellectual and physical access to and effective future development of museum collections.
* Joanie San Chirico – To create a work of art in itself by hanging a cohesive, well thought-out exhibit.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to respond. I appreciate it.
Big and right in the middle; people. I’m not sure if there is a more poignant symbol for the function of a curator. Yet, there are still many curators who hide in offices all day. Right next to “people” is the word “connections”, which many of the responses had as a theme. It appears that the expectations of curators is to provide the legwork to provide meaningful “connections” in a society overrun with “links”.
Also of note, “new”. Strange, when you think that curators and museums are mostly dealing with historical information, yet there must be a “newness” to the outcome. A “new” viewpoint, a “new” fact, a “new” object or a “new” experience (if nothing else, then “new” to me). What fascinates me as a reader of Lipovetsky (who says that the Supermodern era is not an era of new culture and fashions, but a recycling of previous trends) is how this appears to mean that the curator, who has collections/objects of a “historical” era, is having to do just that.
As per usual, I’ve put this on a mug, but also a magnet and a sticker this time. All can be bought from the newcurator shop.
* Stephanie Stambaugh – The curator must liberate. First free all art from its unseen existence, then free patrons from their fear of seeing art.
* remaerdyaD – To serve as an antidote to the common misperceived charity of benefactors by publicly reflecting the state of artifact
* Oh No Jo- Imparting universal appeal, so any level of art & culture background realizes importance of works and can learn more.
* KirstenTeasdale – To help people sort through an excess of information/choices and to shed light on objects that might be missed; to sort wheat from chaff.
* Jay Jordan – To be able to speak coherently after an exhausting install, opening reception, and wine with dinner
* Thomas Tunsch – To connect the histories in order to preserve cultural heritage by enrichment
* An Xiao – To deeply understand both artist and audience and be an excellent steward of both.
* Gilliane Richardson – To spark the thoughts of others, intrigue their intellects, and inspire people of all ages to appreciate history
* Francesco Spagnolo – Explore and create connections that artists, academics and the public do not (yet) see.
* Anon – To elicit new connections and possibilities, to act as an intermediary in service to both the artist and the public
* Laura (opheliacat) – Impart understanding, sharing knowledge of objects & their history in a way that is accessible and even entertaining! (AND) The curator is custodian of a collection that s/he must understand & interpret.
* Allison Brown – Educating & inspiring a new generation of (art) history enthusiasts.
* Mar Dixon – TO ensure the artifacts are maintain & kept in safe environment & available when/if needed. Preservation.
* Suzanne Fischer – Making choices, making predictions, making connections. Helping people make meaning from the past.
* Emily Hummel – To draw connections, bring meaning out of the seemingly meaningless. To enlighten.
* Elena Gonzales – Work for good. Get folks to question and share. Move things forward. And, yes, facilitate.
* Maria Silvestri – To tell a story that a viewer makes themselves.
That’s 25 answers. I would like another ten. Drop them into the comments (Make it short), twitter me @newcurator or use the #MIFC hashtag.
And, if it isn’t plainly clean, all these people are worth following.
Last time was an interesting exercise. Want to ask another question and compare the results.
Usual process. Respond to @newcurator on twitter, use the #MIFC hashtag (so I can keep track) or answer in the comments with a single sentence. Don’t worry if it doesn’t appear immediately. It has to go through a validation process.
I would really appreciate as many answers, retweets and passings-on as possible. With these things, it always works better this more people’s involvement.
I’ll probably do the Wordle and possibly a mug again, but this question really interests me because of my last post. Curators are changing into new roles yet others are considering the curator as an ideal. So its high time we need to ask:
I don’t strictly know what to make of this. I’ve long been saying that museums are a media and can learn a lot from the problems of other media industries. Especially when it comes to adapting to the future methods of consuming media. One warning is when the media is entirely consumed by the methods. The music industry will long be used as the example of non-adaption. Newspapers and journalism seem to be the next ones seriously thinking about this. My Death of the Curator articles were about a similar trend where the role of the curator would change beyond what it is recognisable now by crowdsourcing or social media being used to make curatorial decisions.
Four articles that came to me over the past couple of days has caused a major rethink. I took the “Death of the Curator” scenario to be part of the similar early movements like copyright-infringing MP3 downloads and Myspace Music or “citizen journalism” and free online news content. But there appears to be a line of thinking towards a bizarre convergence. The Curator may die but in it’s place will be New Mutant Curator.
I was originally going to talk about two more instances of Death of the Curator that offer glimpses of the new role I was originally talking about.
Via Nerdgam’s excellent tumblr (because, curiously, none of the links work) is London’s Next Top Curator by Salon Contemporary (No, me neither). Six contestants each run a pop-up gallery to compete for a final put to public vote on the website. This must be the first time I’ve seen curators put to vote in this way. Heh, maybe I should enter.
Another project is ArtPrize, but again seems to be mainly an artist competition with an interesting use of several social media outlets. I like how Art:21 called it “decentralised curation“. From what I can tell, it’s the role of curators and galleries in this competition that needs to be noted. Whilst their final decision-making privileges are put on hold, they get the chance to influence:
…playing a large role the formation of the event, each presenting a collection of entries that reflect their own sensibilities and expertise.
Fascinating. We’ll come back to this.
Continuing on the theme of learning from other media industries, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine continues to try and save newspapers. His latest delightful neologism is “Hyperdistribution”. But hold on, let’s pick through this strategy a bit.
* Reverse-syndication – Okay, maybe this one is newspaper-orientated, but it generally means acting as a base for a network of people to distribute. “In the link economy, value is created by he who creates content and she who delivers audience.” Hell, I get a lot of messages from museums telling me about their stuff. Social networks do this sort of thing, especially on twitter. But maybe there’s an organisational model here to make affiliate bloggers.
* The embeddable paper – Getting content out there? Getting other people highly involved in your content and to pass it around? Can you say “The Commons“? How about Powerhouse putting their collection documentation under a Creative Commons license? I would list Brooklyn Museum’s stuff but there’s too many of them, but they have certainly branded each and every one very well.
* Specialization – I could argue that museums are too generalised, I could argue that they’re not. There aren’t too many general museums that aren’t ancient and successful anyway. But I have noticed more newer museums pointing towards a particular theme.
* Social engagement – Museums are all over this.
Well, so much for learning from other media. It seems museums are ahead on the innovation scale. Newspapers need to become more like museums. Hold on, aren’t museums already going through a period of intense cutbacks? Saving newspapers by using social networks, technology and media to deliver hyperdistributed content… just like Brooklyn Museum, who still took a financial kicking recently.
And now it’s being said that “Curation is the new role of media professionals“. Relying upon a person’s expertise and style to act as a information filter for you tastes. They use Arianna Huffington as an example, but I could throw in the Boing Boing crew, Warren Ellis and Tyler Brûlé and any number of people, experts in their interests, organising research, delivering in a unique and interesting way. Hell, I could argue that Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann fit this model. Personalities bigger than the news they’re supposed to represent, acting as filter and commentator to a specialised audience.
All my talk of museums learning from other media innovations and mistakes and now they’re all talking about becoming museums! Just try to draw a diagram of this! And museums curators are slowly being replaced by audience-participation-heavy social media experiments, instead taking on the role of… an expert… a filter… a commentator… relying upon the force of their personality and position to influence and direct a particular audience.
The Curator is Dead. God only knows what this new Über-Media Mutant Curator of the Information Superabundance Age coming to replace it will be like. But there will be many of them. In a less dramatic way, the convergence of many media roles into a “Curator-class” seems inevitable.
“My proposal has three parts. First, the unnecessary restriction on deaccession proceeds should be eliminated. Second, when an important work of art is deaccessioned, other museums should be given an opportunity to purchase a work – to keep it in the public trust or its region – in much the same way the United Kingdom and other nations regulate the export of works of art. Finally, when any museum is considering a deaccession, it must provide reasons for the sale and publicize the decision to allow for public comment.”
Sounds good.
A final point concerning Southampton’s decision to sell artwork to fund a Titanic museum, I don’t think the AAMD rules would allow that. To be honest, I’m very surprised the UK guidelines have allowed it. Pretty sure Southampton City museum workers were going on strike over pay not that long ago and now the council want another museum?
This is a case where I’m against this deaccessioning. Southampton City Art Gallery has a very particular reputation. They decided a very innovative collection policy of securing art that would greatly appreciate in value. This often meant they had a knack of picking future prize winners. They acted like a commercial art collector, but with the reputation of a public institution.
This is why I would like a Forth Part to this proposal: The decision for deaccessioning must never be made by an elected official.
I like to think this would keep deaccesioning along the lines of collection management.
Marketing through social media and social networking is nothing new. Integrating your blog, your museum’s Facebook page, and twitter stream into your marketing plan is the smartest way to do it. But I want to talk to you today about real-time marketing and the opportunities it presents.
What’s real-time marketing?
I swiped the term from Paul Dunay, who writes about the idea on the Marketing Profs Daily Fix. He talks about a customer-service issue that was resolved in 15 minutes using twitter. Dunay offers the analogy: “if you had a leak in your basement would you wait 45 days for a consultant to put on a webinar on How to fix your leaky basement?”
People want your attention now.
As I was reading Dunay’s post, I was in the middle of listening to the audio book version of Groundswell (2008) by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.
There’s a great chapter on listening in Groundswell. The authors talk about companies that carry out market research by creating online social networks for their customers. One example is the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, one of several cancer centers in the U.S. that have introduced patient social networks. M.D. Anderson didn’t need foster community – there was already a vocal community of cancer patients connecting online. Inviting these patients into this new environment helped them learn where they were failing their patients, and try out new ideas — in real time. M.D. Anderson got feedback in real time, instead of putting together focus groups, planning complicated surveys, and probably asking the wrong questions anyway.
At the same time, I was reviewing a new report by Universal McCann, called Wave 4. The Wave reports annually highlight research into online social media and social network usage world wide, and break it down country by country. More than 22,000 people who reported that they used the Internet every day or every other day in 38 countries were surveyed.
Wave 4 sees active Internet users consolidating their content creation and sharing in their online social networks of choice – Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, etc. — rather than through stand-alone sites like Flickr, YouTube, or Blogger. And social network users are sharing stuff more than ever: 76% upload photos, up from 45% in the previous survey; 33% upload videos, up from 16.9%.
Skeptics say that people join social networks and then never use their accounts. UM’s study says that nearly two-thirds of Internet users have managed their own social network page, and 71.1% of users have visited a friend’s page.
Online social networks nowadays emphasize real-time communication, and people are using them.
People want information in real time. They want entertainment in real time, they want sharing in real time, and they want an answer in real time.
According to twitter lead engineer Evan Weaver, 80% of twitter usage happens through third party programs on computers or mobile devices. That means if someone is visiting your museum, not only do they have the means to comment on the excellent or awful experience, they are likely to do so.
There is an opportunity here for marketing the arts, and by marketing I mean just about everything everyone in your institution does.
Lots of museums are using twitter now. Lots of them are using Facebook. And most of these are using real-time communication to send advertising messages.
This is the part of the post where I’m supposed to talk about conversations and engagement.
But I’m thinking more about listening and responding.
Are you using tools like BackTweets to find out who is linking to your site and what they’re saying about it?
Are you using Twitter Search to listen to the chatter (or lack thereof) about your museum, or your upcoming exhibition, or the lecture that happened last week?
And if you are, how do you plan to respond?
It’s a customer service opportunity – someone driving around with their family looking in vain for parking around your building could be directed to the parking deck with the discount for museum visitors.
It’s a market research opportunity – are people talking about the Surrealist posters they got at your gift shop when you thought they’d be raving about the more art-historical aspects of your Dali blockbuster? Is your approaching exhibition on Galileo on anyone’s radar screen?
It’s a museum marketing opportunity – let’s say registration is slow for your family workshop next Saturday. Can you create a promotion on the fly to share on your Facebook page, something that encourages parents to spread the word?
I’m not saying we should abandon marketing planning. But in 2009, planning should be flexible. You have the opportunity to use online tools to listen more closely and react faster, and take advantage of real time communication that counts. If you show up in their Facebook updates, people pay attention to you.
Today, the more nimble you are, the better able you are to respond to crises big and small. If you work for a large museum, this may seem like trying to turn around the Titanic. But the opportunity is there. Champion the idea of real-time marketing inside your institution or risk being sunk in the long run.
Thinking out loud on twitter, I said how I was thinking aloud that newcurator should have a weekly comic strip. Some kind of simple sitcom interlude.
Well, too many people liked the idea.
So I had to take it more seriously. After a weekend of thinking, I’ve come to some conclusions.
1) The idea of a possible four-panel strip about museum volunteers has something about it to work as a plot.
2) I cannot draw.
3) I’ve not been able to design some kind of stick-figure style that I can use to get over this.
4) I do not feel right asking people to help with this.
I know what I want it to be like. Think about Diesel Sweeties by the excellent R Stevens. That style means he doesn’t have to make a brand new strip every other day, he can copy and paste the characters and make minor adjustments (Well, he could. Truthfully, I have no idea how he works). Something like this means I could concentrate on writing rather than spending lots of time drawing features on character faces.
Look at Zero Punctuation by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. I love how this looks. It’s essentially stick figures, but there’s a style to it (that I’m in danger of ripping off if the early drafts are anything to go by). Again, simple, circle hands, circle heads and a variety of eye expressions. Some cutting and pasting and it looks good.
Oh, and don’t suggest stick figures. XKCD.com has all that sewn right up.
So, I’m screwed. I can write the damn thing, just no way to make it. I experimented with characters with QR codes for heads. It didn’t work.
To everyone who came back with suggestions or offered to help. Thank you every much, but I’m just not sure. Several people recommended programs or websites with comic book templates. This is instantly sticky. The main reason I haven’t completely ripped off Yahtzee is because I don’t want to get sued and maybe want to make a t-shirt. I’ve looked at them and didn’t feel the copyright issue was solved.
Massive thanks to the artists to offered to do something, but again I’m not sure. This is for a few reasons. Nobody will get paid, except maybe me and Google ads and possibly a T-shirt (which again throws up problems). I remember early ArtFridays. People were busy, which is fair enough, but some weeks I couldn’t get 20+ artists to get me an image of what they’ve done.
No, I would need to do this myself. I don’t feel right asking someone to commit to it every week with very little going back to them. Especially when they’ve got better things to do.
I did toy with the idea of an “open source” comic. I write the character descriptions, biographies and the scripts, a small online community do one-four panels each. Again, have no idea how this would work. It could probably be an interesting experiment, but what happens when nobody does anything for a particular episode?
So… I can only ignore this for now. I’m going to concentrate on the writing part and see what happens. Don’t expect anything soon.
Crowdsourcing or curating, or a bit of each? It’s the talk of New Curator and the talk of the airwaves. Since Pete’s posts Death of the Curator I and II, I have noticed aspects of this debate turning up more and more in podcasts. None in the realm of museums themselves admittedly, but in areas like business and architecture: you’ve got to think laterally here. During the past week, I’ve picked up on these three.
Harvard Business Ideacast discussed the pros and cons of giving the consumer what they have asked for. Does it really work? In talking about business strategies in the recession they championed ‘Innovation that transforms the meaning of things.’ (Isn’t that kind of what curators do in interpretation?) Business professor Roberto Verganti argued that the Wii would never have been invented if Nintendo had listened to the gamers. Players wanted more powerful passive consoles with more functions. Seems they didn’t know they wanted something to get them up and actively moving and interacting until it was presented to them. His argument was basically, if you ask people you get more of the same and nothing new. While I realise that not all curators will go for radical reinterpretations of their collections either, this does appear a good case in point against relying too heavily on market research or crowdsourcing. It will just be the same old, same old.
On the other hand…
Carol Coletta’s Smart City radio show took the theme of city planning in response to emotions this week. Talking to Vancouver planner Larry Beasley, Coletta asked why experiential planning was better than the more traditional efficiency-of-services based way. Beasley argued that designing at the level of the human being, appealing to our emotions, would make us want to live in cities again and ‘feel true affection for them’. It is not made explicit but it seems that they have done extensive market research to come up with these conclusions, which are then actioned by ‘the city’. Obviously there is an element of selection going on, or Vancouver could have have ended up with giant candy floss trees and bright yellow municipal buildings. Essentially though, the idea is that the city can then choreograph an innovative vision for their community in accordance with all the things that its people need for feelings of wellbeing.
In the middle of talking about magazines branching out onto the web, NPR Pop Culture put forward that the magazine is the only medium with a distinct point of view, that of the editor, and this distinguishes it from all others. This comment made me stop and think. Of course, I have to disagree. Museums do this too. Exhibitions, galleries and whole museums are put together from the point of view of their editor: the curator(s). So, if we took crowdsourcing to its logical conclusion, museums would not have the distinct point of view of their editor anymore, the curator. Does that matter?
Remember this? Crowdsourcing, the darling of business 2.0, being able to replace the work of a curator trying to create a coherent set of displays. Even more worrying if the crowdsourcing if based upon the low-brow model of reality TV.
Thinking of algorithms for recommendation systems, I instantly think about last.fm. Music recommended to me based upon the listening habits of thousands of other people who have similar tastes as I do, offering to “fill in the gaps” to my listening collection.
Brooklyn Museum pull another rabbit out of the hat with BrklynMuse, a mobile-friendly recommendation system. A “Gallery Guide powered by people”. It takes the data of other people’s likes (and their moods) and offers you things you may like. I asked Shelley Burnstein (in a rather vague way, I admit. I wasn’t sure how to frame the question) if they were tracking stats that could be used to passively crowdsource curatorial decisions, like a Brooklyn Museum Top Ten. I’m kinda glad Shelley said they weren’t. But you see how such a system could be used as a market research/performace rating system for objects. I believe Brooklyn Museum are focusing this as a guide than anything else.
I mean, you’d want to use this to get people to walk all over your museum, not narrowing their attention.
Five months after I said it, and a year after Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition, TEC-CH Blog talks about a design exhibition called Democracy. Tagline: The Curator is Dead. Long Live Democracy, which irks me because it suggest that curators are not part of a democratic process. If anything, curators within museums are providing (often free) access to education, historical information, art and culture. I would say they are fundamental to a democratic society as a free press.
Powerhouse Museum are doing (organising? Particopating in?) a community curated event, Common Ground. A projection of each institution’s top 25 images in the Commons as voted by the community.
I antagonised a lot of people when I said the curator was dead. Perhaps intentionally. I didn’t want to say “The Change of the Curator” because that happening all the time. This change is sudden and quick and could be a real shift in methodology. Not that I think curators would vanish. To me, I would consider Shelley and her team to be the curators behind Click!, creating systems rather than completed products. Or tell that to people like the BoingBoing crew. Xeni Jardin calls herself a “Curator of Internet Esoterica, Anomalies, and Curiosities” on her twitter account. I think she’s doing alright for herself.
That may be the little death that brings total oblivion for curators: Fear of having to become famous.
Latest Comments