Archive | October, 2009
In the last Listen to the Gears, I talked a lot about research, dissemination and perceived value for money. Really, it seems it is all about Impact. Unusually for this column, I am going to discuss only one podcast. There was a very interesting panel discussion, recorded at the recent Cambridge Festival of Ideas and put out on the Guardian Culture podcast. In ‘Austerity for the Arts?’ four British arts professionals considered the state of arts and culture in the UK in the light of the recession.
Sue Hoyle discussed the economics of mixed funding and the decline of arts funding at a local level. Calling for strong leadership in the arts, she championed those who would innovate and not just keep chugging along the same way people had done it for years because ‘that’s the way we have always done it.’ Huge changes in funding need to happen, but someone has to be strong enough to take those risks.
Peter Florence from the Hay Festival made a very good point: the arts did not end in the 30s/40s/50s. Austerity in itself is not bad for the arts. He’s right. Creative people are not going to stop making/writing/creating just because there is little funding for it. Florence again stressed the importance of finding new and creative ways of funding and claims that people in Britain are good at this due to a very rich cultural education. In fact referring to the SAS in the first instance and bemoaning the Olympic bid he uses the marvellous line:
‘We are not world class in anything other than killing people and culture’
So, that’s our impact then? That is what we are known for? Help me out here, rest of the world! Really?
Sheryl West from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (one of the main funding bodies in the UK) addressed the impact of the cultural sector in her talk. What can the public be seen being done? What is the impact of their research? She argues that academics and arts professionals need to demonstrate the value of funding to the taxpayer more. So, how can we all do that? Make it more accessible? Would websites work? TV programmes? Exhibitions? Blogging?
Oh. Hang on a minute. Remember how they don’t like that? What to do? It seems there are polarised debates on Impact – some say it is good: tell everybody about what you did and how it can help them! Some say it is bad: keep your head down and only publish it in esoteric journals. West argues that there are real problems with academics being too embarrassed or modest about their research, so nobody gets to hear about it. She also hits upon the same problem with dissemination that I discussed last time: namely that academics are not rewarded for impact but for things like journal based research which mainly stay within the academy. Her ending statement is this: ‘In a period of austerity we need to OWN the idea of impact and get behind it.’ So, in museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, how does that affect us?
What do you feel about impact? How do you measure it? Is it to do with money? Value-for-money? Visitor numbers? Is it how much outreach you can do in the local community? Or for your institution is it about how many journals your staff can get published in and how much funding you can get from that? Or do you even think that you can measure impact?
As you know, Pete is away this coming week. If there is anybody who would like to write a guest post, you can reach me at August(at)newcurator.com. Tell me your ideas for the future of museums. I’d like to hear them.
I’ve got a few things I need to do this week, including a much needed tidy-up of the top right of this site. Then I’m basically be off-grid for a week as I’m leaving the country for a week.
I will be handing the keys over to August for that time with the only instruction of “Go nuts”. Should be interesting.
It would also be really good if there were some guest posts just to keep things ticking over. I don’t like getting overly editorial, nor do they have to be very long.
As a set of guidelines, I like articles about the future of museums or strange underground movements in the museum world. I do like opinion pieces if they’re about a really interesting topic. I don’t exactly have a list of what I don’t want, apart from I try to avoid review-style posts.
Ideally, I need to get this all set-up and scheduled before I leave. Email pete(at)newcurator this week if you’re interested.
There were plenty of fascinating and diverse topics to listen to this week, but I am drawing these together in order to think about two tier systems.
New policy and technology podcast, Surprisingly Free Conversation had an interview with Tim Lee. He advocated for bottom-up processes where nobody is in charge (eg wikipedia or linux) rather than top-down processes like government (or microsoft) where you can easily lay the blame on one entity, which we seem hard-wired to do. In discussion, they considered the inefficiencies of top-down organisations, but realised that it would be hard to run some of them bottom-up.
It is an interesting concept to think about in terms of cultural institutions. Are most museums bottom-up or top-down systems? I think that there are probably both out there and also many shades of grey inbetween. I would suggest most are top-down systems: we’re always having to get permission to do something, aren’t we? Collections management systems are one place that bottom-up processes take place in a lot of museums. Records can be added to and altered as time passes. How could bottom-up systems be spread to other areas of museum and gallery running?
Also somewhat tied into a two-tier model is the dissemination of research. JISC talk about the recent report ‘Communicating knowledge: how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings‘ published by the Research Information Network. What emerged is the same old argument about the traditional versus the new. Once more it all appears governed by money and what they described as the ‘value-for-money aspect’ of research funding. The report found the continued dominance of journal articles as a ‘highly legitimate form of scholarly communication’. This basically means that it is the method of dissemination which will attract you the most funding. Tell us something new?
They went on to discuss the ‘more rapid dissemination’ of conferences, briefings and working papers (still pretty traditional, there) and only latterly digital technology. For people who were debating something on a podcast, they didn’t seem to think that digital technology was all that great as a tool for publications or publicity. That given, they did admit change needs to happen, but that in research and academia these things take (aeons of) time to catch on. Apparently the theoretical physicists are blazing the trail with their wikis, blogs and podcasts.
I think museum people are pretty good at doing this too. How do you all disseminate your research? If it is via the more traditional methods, do you additionally get it out there via digital technology? If not, is it because it won’t attract the funding, as suggested? I’d be interested to know how this has affected your research.
Lastly, something on a lighter note. You might well wonder why I am asking you to watch Threadbanger‘s video tutorial on how to make a Michael Jackson costume for Halloween (apart from that you might be looking for costume ideas for this year). Real reason is: I would love to see this kind of tutorial for costumed interpreters or museum re-enactors to use. It challenges the notion that you have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to gain good costumes. There are so many people with making skills and with a little appropriate research, what a resource it could be for museums and freelancers on a budget.
There’s three neologisms I’ve been kicking around on this blog. This is them together into one place and maybe separated out a bit.
Metrocurator
This came from a story about a couple of artists who turned an architectural blip (in this this case, an empty gas meter box thing on the side of a building) and turned it into an art gallery. It dawned on me that a decent number of these type of displays could make a “street museum”, in the same vein as “street art”. Not as an outreach project or fluffy “museum-without-walls” intent, but as a museum spread across an entire city.
What is the biggest resource and the biggest outgoing a museum has behind objects and staff costs? A large building that needs maintenance, heating, lighting and a number of things that are only for the building, not the museum. A Metrocurator, I suppose, is a design response to the scenario of having a completely decentralised base but still keeping high levels of access to objects and information (as opposed to displaying objects in other kinds of building i.e. banks, hotels etc.) The idea is to be as highly modular as possible.
Being a Metrocurator also means having a decent understanding of architecture of the city as a whole. There’s no convient blank walled space to act as a neutral framing device. Location and juxtaposition will be additional contexts. Just like architecture, be aware of resorting to Libeskind-style spectacle. It may not get away with it. This includes dropping a cargo container into the middle of a street and trying to claim it as a Metrocurator project. This is just substituting a building for a different kind of building, be it a temporary one. Also, a cargo container/cavavan/kiosk would be unusual and out-of-place, thus acting separately from the city it intends to meld into.
Two things. This could greatly increase access. Take as many objects as possible and put them out there into the populous. Let someone else be innovative with security and conservation. The other thing is how easy this would be and how little money would be needed. This could be run like a start-up. Without constructing/renting a building, the core of a museum mission could still be obtained at a fraction of the cost. It just means some other changes to the system.
I remember describing Metrocurators as: “lightweight, deals in very little bureaucracy, has a DIY attitude because of very limited funds and basically is running all over a city pushing small outbreaks of museums into public spaces.”
You can see where I need to seperate the definitions a bit. A Metrocurator can or not be a Museopunk, but a Museopunk doesn’t have to be a Metrocurator.
Museopunk
A DIY attitude is very Museopunk, and kind of makes sense for a start-up Metrocurator. But if MOMA released a bunch of Metrocurators into New York with a ton of cash behind them, they could probably get the job done. Same thing with bureaucracy; a Metrocurator wants to deal with as little as possible. A Museopunk wants to change bureaucracy to allow for greater freedom of innovation, especially in reaction to failing “cookie-cutter” models or corporate interests.
Museopunk borrows from, and probably partially overlaps, Edupunk. This word encompasses all museum parts with a punk notion. Prezpunk, a punk outlook on conservation. Who ws it it that said “Curatopunk”? Sorry to who said it but I’ve lost where that came from. I came up with Registrapunk to cover the punk approach to collections management.
Personally, I’m seeing the best of Museopunk innovative thinking coming from the wannabes, the bottom rungs or the outsider freelancers. I suppose these are the people who want it the most and want to succeed and see an entrepreneurial approach as the way to do it. That is to say that there isn’t a lot of things going on in museum institutions that could be considered Museopunk. Involvement in the Creative Commons for one. Putting CC licenses on photos or entire documentation records. Building your own software. Not getting overly involved in these ready made blockbuster exhibitions that are put together and sold as a packages (I want to call them “Microwave Exhibitions”).
In my opinion, Museopunk is a reaction and a desire for museums to regain some of that soul. Which goes onto my next concept…
The Mutant Curator
Yeah, allow me my over-dramatics.
I can barely go five minutes without reading something that says Duff Media X needs to be like Just-as-Duff Media Y to create a Supermedia because Z is like a Curator. Newspapers needs to be like magazines because of Tyler Brûlé. I liked Joanne McNeil’s idea that publishing needs to be like record labels because of Tony Wilson. Music needs to be like theatre because of Amanda Palmer. This needs to be like that.
This may just be endemic of the transition stage of all media. Digitising audio and visual information is collapsing the old boundaries of solid state media, making them splice together towards the inevitable interconnected Superabundance of information. The Media Soup.
It’s down to personal opinion if this is a good thing or not, but the thinking is that we will then turn to Mutant Curators to sort through it. People with influence or celebrity or hero-status will tell us what music to buy, what news or commentary to read, what beer to drink and more importantly, who else to listen to.
I mean, thanks for being a filter against the InfoShock and all, but this is how cults start. Twitter will become a compound to preach. Remember, we are their “Followers”.
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Museopunks and Metrocurators are going to be up against the oncoming beast that is the Mutant Curator of convergence media. One of the main reasons I use the word “mutant”, apart from it being the bastard offspring of the All-Media, is that it will mutate the word “curator” into something that is a shadow of the original meaning. The New York Times got it wrong. Curator doesn’t mean selecting and culling nor does it mean “I have a good eye”. It is a job. With Skills. I would have thought the journalist writing that article would have been more sensitive to the misappropriation of a title to the lowest common denominator.
Museopunks and Metrocurators are, I believe, a way for those skills to survive.
I’m wondering if there’s a book in all this.
Just throwing this idea out there. Hopefully someone with greater economic knowledge will come up with some points.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Brixton Pound, and other similar attempts of community currency. As described on the organisation’s website behind it, the B£ is intended to help promote local businesses during recession. Money that sticks to Brixton is the tagline. From a BBC report:
Proponents of local currencies say they boost the community’s economy by keeping money in the area, but critics dismiss them as fashionable gimmicks, tantamount to protectionism.
“A local economy is like a leaky bucket. Wealth is generated then spent in chain stores and businesses. It disappears leaving an impoverished local economy,” explains Ben Brangwyn, part of the team behind the Totnes Pound, launched in south Devon in 2007
The report goes on to talk about the problems (and there are some great ones in the comments), the fundamental one being that they are seen as nothing more than gift vouchers.
It is just gimmicky? I think there a certain flaw in restricting use to an area, but think about Book Tokens. They helped promote the giving of books as presents (especially when it was difficult to be certain what type of book to get). So why not promote visiting museums? Use them either to pay entrance fees (Yes, many UK museums aren’t free), for tickets to special exhibitions (like in the Nationals) or use them in the shop.
I’ve not been able to find such a scheme. I’ve found vouchers for individual museums but I think it needs to be on a wider scale. It may work locally: museums/cultural institutions of an area/state/region could form a partnership to accept these. I think it would work best on a national level. All museums in a country accepting and issuing Museum Currency. An international Museum Currency would be even better.
I’m sure there could be a better name. Museum Denarius? Go for the historical reference?
This is for the UK, I’m afraid. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in other countries. I wonder if it could be possible if the Museum Currency was an automatic declaration for Gift Aid, which is tax relief to increase the value of a donation. I do know some museums do this on an entrance fee. Yes, yes, I realise that it’s not that simple.
Comments welcome on this. I think there is a lot of scope for interesting things. A new “currency” could be dismissed as a marketing ploy or just for tourists. Well, it would benefit museums by being just that.
Earlier this week I had a conversation with an American colleague about (amongst other things) the British way of holding your cutlery and the comedy value of the thing in my garden that I call a water butt. After we had stopped laughing we got into a discussion about the extent that your own cultural background and the way in which things are presented to you affects personal interpretation. I kept this in mind while I was listening to and watching the gears.
The designer Stefan Sagmeister gave an insightful TED talk about the power of taking time off. He closes his design studio for a whole year every seven years, explaining that he is ‘…shifting five of his retirement years to his working life for greater creativity’. I really like that concept, and maybe one day I’ll be able to afford to do it too. Sagmeister spent his first sabbatical in New York, trying to look at his adopted hometown differently; his second in Bali where he made t-shirts and furniture inspired by the ubiquitous stray dogs. In an entertaining presentation he tells of how subsequently he ‘felt closer to design’ but also went on to make art inspired by his time out. Particularly striking are the products of the logo generator and his numismatic art which was ultimately taken into custody by the police.
Fostering creativity was also the topic of KCRW’s DnA podcast. Their case study was Central LA High School Number Nine (better known as the School of Performing Arts). This controversial building was discussed by its students, teachers and the architect Wolf Prix. He had wanted to create a ‘reference point in the city,’ that would inspire creativity not only in its pupils, but in the general public too. Can a building inspire creativity? Or is it about the people who are involved with its running and use? The building could be seen as a container for the creativity which goes on within and around it. Does it actually contribute though?
If you take as a basis the way a frame acts around a painting then yes, the building can and probably does contribute something. NG director Nicholas Penny talked about the way frames interact with images in the National Gallery podcast. ‘Frames isolate the picture [and] therefore they affect the way we view art.’ Using a case study, he discusses how frame colour and decoration affect our perception of paintings.
In addition to talking about the practical aspects of using frames, Penny advocates telling the gallery public whether they are looking at an original frame or not. But how important is this really? It is not something that I have ever really considered. However, our perception of a Mondrian or a Gainsborough will be altered by the way in which we view it as a whole. By this I mean that the frame is as much a part of this experience as the information on the label, the colour of the gallery wall or even just having somewhere to sit and look at it. If there was simply the canvas itself, our personal interpretation may be different (like viewing a painting online in white space, you might say). So in thinking about the artist’s original intention: this might be entirely altered by our viewing it in a non-original frame. We could be taking a wholly different experience away with us. Does that matter? Or do we do that anyway, simply by all coming from different backgrounds?
Every Thursday will have a bit of a summary of what’s going on over at Museopunk.ning.com. All my notes, links and discussions on the Museopunk subject are going to be on there rather than on newcurator.com.
Really happy with how its going so far and very pleased with who has signed up. Feel free to sign up and join in the conversations.
* Introduce Yourself – Everyone’s announcing their arrival
* Your Definition – People are airing their thoughts on what Museopunk means to them without forming manifestos. It’s a bit rambling and side-notes at the moment, but I like it like that.
* Paul Orselli: Museopunk – If there’s anyone who has influenced Museopunk before I made the word up, it’s Paul Orselli.
* Video – Dan Cull has uploaded a ton of Edupunk stuff. Good reference points.
Just gathering things together.
* There will be no manifesto, at least not from me. What kind of -punk would start off by laying down some rules anyway?
* Dan Cull has written about Prezpunk ethics and uses big words like “consequentialism” or “deontology” but importantly concludes that “ethics” should be one of “process”. There’s six things at the end of the post that I like.
*I feel that the Museopunk approach to ethics would be to “make your own rather than slave to someone else”. Steal, adapt, change and share. Find freedom in your code rather than submitting to outside influences.
* Don’t be scared to not be part of a club.
* Playwright Howard Barker on his theatre losing its Arts Council funding: “”You can’t tick the boxes if you aren’t doing the work they want. It’s not about art, it’s about sociology. We always fooled the Arts Council by pretending that we were doing things we didn’t do, but, of course, we were going to fall foul of them at some point.”
* Interesting side note; Tweepz, which came from Nina Simon’s delicious feed. It searches through the bio text of people’s twitter accounts. Search for “museum“, get just over 2000. Search “museums“, get around 600. This will include all those who list these as nothing more than an interest, but aren’t you surprised at how small that number is? Under 3000? Now lets knock out those dead accounts and those accounts used as nothing more than press release mechanisms. Let’s guess at a number of actual people actively involved in the museum-twitter community.
1000?
Now, how many of them are freelancers? Students? Graduates? Or just starting out? Now think about which museum-twitters are the most interesting to you?
* Museopunk, like Edupunk, is about priorities. Edupunk puts education above that of corporate and financial interests. The museum world seems dominated by these interests. If the money is tight then staff are the first to feel it. If the funding can’t be found, then the action doesn’t happen. The Museopunk will go and do it anyway.
* The Ohio Historical Society… Just… God, now they’re making stickers.
* At some point, I’m thinking we’ll need a Museopunk toolkit of technologies and applications.
* Also, I need to do a compare/contrst of all these neologisms. I’m thinking the metrocurator and museopunk concept could work without many problems but I see how the “Mutant Curator” (or “Content Curator”, as its known in more grown up circles) will cause problems.
* The Mutant Curator, seen by many in the media industry as their future and saviour. They notice how there are certain people on the Internet (Warren Ellis, Xeni Jardin, etc.) who can drive traffic via their own interests, acting as human filters to the superabundance of information (especially on twitter). 2.0 sites like Digg are crowd-driven and a bit faceless, so the old meeja likes the idea of an actual person (and a paycheck) “curating” the news. This only works with a pedestal. Doomed industries like pedestals. They can put a price on pedestals.
* The Museopunk does not want your pedestal. The Museopunk will make their own.
* Museopunk.ning.com – An open-to all ning site that I’m still tinkering with/breaking as we speak. I think there’s a need to discuss Museopunk and unpick it a bit and create a knowledge base/toolkit.
There is a lot of interesting discussion about copyright on the airwaves at the moment.
Charles Arthur from Guardian Tech Weekly interviewed Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons who talked about the different levels of licencing available and how they might be used in different situations. Of course, Creative Commons is of most use in countries which are concerned with enforcing copyright, so it is not necessarily of interest worldwide. Those who do use it to effect include Ridley Scott, the White House, Al Jazeera and the Powerhouse Museum (amongst many other museums), whose case study makes interesting reading if your museum or gallery is thinking of contributing to The Commons on Flickr.
View of Woman Holding a Fancily Decorated Bicycle from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, used under Creative Commons licence.
Ito discussed some of the cases which had come to court recently involving Creative Commons licences: it was ruled in the US that breaching a Creative Commons licence was a breach of copyright. Will this now make Creative Commons seem more safe as the law has been tested?
As an investor in Twitter, Ito also addressed the growing push to monetise the service as part of a general discussion of business models and friends networks. That is a whole other discussion which there isn’t room for here, but is worth listening to for the latest developments.
If you’re in the UK, keep listening. The second segment of Guardian Tech Weekly discusses putting together a new BBC programme about the impact of the last 40 years of technological change on the British family. In researching for Electric Dreams, Gia Milinovich visited the Centre for Computing History’s Computer Museum in order to find the most appropriate technology for the family to use in each year of their realistic-as-possible journey. Some interesting observations were seen during the programme’s making including the apparent confirmation of a 1980s gender divide in computer use. I wonder, is this kind of social phenomenon reflected in computer or science museums?
Mark West’s The Mr Science Show branched out this week into enhanced podcasting in order to give a slide show of photographs. West had been affected by the red dust storms in Sydney and illustrated his meteorological explanation using some amazing Creative Commons photographs from Flickr.
Sydney Dust Storm by Ianz, used under Creative Commons licence.
Lastly, I think it’s pertinent that you all see this Monocle Culture video about Alfred Sirleaf, a newspaper editor in Monrovia. Each day he writes up the Daily Talk using local vernacular on a large blackboard outside his office, in order that the people can have access to the news where otherwise they could not afford to.
You can contact me at August(at)newcurator(dot)com
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