Community Museum
In “Take Your Time, Olafur Eliasson”, Madeline Grynsztejn said: “The context between the cultural and commercial spheres over thinking and doing is one of the defining tensions in contemporary Western society. And the museum is the knife-edge location where this context is being played out, for there the conditions that determine or influence our [...]
Author Archives: August
Guest Post: Maria Mortati
Guest Post: Megan Blankenship
Recently, I read an article about arts engagement, and a quote the author plucked from a poem by Aleda Shirley struck me as appropriate in describing the precarious position the museum assumes when exhibiting work that could or does stir up controversy. Shirley, in The Rivers Where They Touch, writes “Falling backwards from his boat, [...]
Guest Post: Jeff Doyle
MacGuffins
Museums have been around in the real world for a while and a rich set of understandings and expectations have grown up around them. But the web is still something like a western boom town. We’ve tossed up some buildings overnight but we have yet to live in them for very long. Some are just [...]
Art Friday: Haley Nagy
Describing herself as both artist and procrasinator, Haley Nagy made an immediate impact on me with The Nagy Family Cookbook, a beautifully evocative artist’s book.
Working in mixed media, with a real feel for using encaustic, Haley creates captivating work often addressing contemporary issues such as homelessness and cultural rituals like birthdays. The crux of her [...]
Guest Post: Noell Wolfgram Evans
Participating Contributors
“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Marcel Duchamp
Say what you will about his art, Duchamp was right in his idea of turning spectators [...]
Museopunk Monday
For one week only, Museopunk Thursday will move to a Monday. There’s still lots going on over on Museopunk.ning.com and we are now up to 63 members which is brilliant. This week:
Introductions continue: please do chime in if you haven’t yet.
Jeffrey_r wants to know Who’s on the Twitters? as do the rest of us.
There is [...]
Guest Post: Vanessa VanAlstyne
“I want to be in New York City,” said my friend Paul Slocum, who ran a predominant new media gallery in Texas called And/Or. I’m definitely thinking about what he just said. No one is born in a small market that doesn’t dream about being able to move to New York or Los Angeles and [...]
Listen to the Gears: 15
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 [...]
Listen to the Gears: 14
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 [...]
Listen to the Gears: 13
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 [...]
Listen to the Gears: 12
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 [...]
Listen to the Gears: 11
‘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 [...]
Listen to the Gears: 10
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, [...]
Listen to the Gears: 9
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 [...]
Listen to the Gears: 8
Last weekend I had my first real-life demonstration of Layar. It was pretty impressive and it occured to me that you just can’t appreciate how it works as you move the phone, when viewing a demo of it on a computer monitor. Listening to KCRW’s Design and Archtecture podcast, I hit on the begininnings of [...]
Listen to the Gears: 7
Since listening to the Museum of Science, Boston podcast about vaccines a couple of weeks ago, I have been mulling over ideas. They discussed developments in cancer innoculations, but I have been considering the concept that museum visits could be prescribed as defence against aspects of the human condition.
‘Visits as vaccines!
Don’t end up complacant, [...]
Listen to the Gears: 6
What were you doing when the Berlin Wall fell? Is it something you remember or just something that you’ve read about in history books? German cultural magazine, Arts.21, is running a series reflecting on the country twenty years after reunification. In their latest videocast they investigated how visitors and residents of Berlin remember the Wall. [...]
Listen to the Gears: 5
A recent email told me that the Museums Association is holding a seminar on podcasting. I expect that this will be about the technicalities of recording and producing; content, delivery and publicity. Listening to so many podcasts each week I often consider the pros and cons of each. Consequently I have in my mind my [...]
Listen to the Gears: 4
We’re in a credit crunch. We all know that. I won’t bore you with the details you already know about budget cuts or the lack of jobs. What I have noticed recently coming through in the media lately is reflection on how people are working around it.
I started the week watching Alan Yentob’s Imagine: Art [...]
Listen to the Gears: 3
There has been an interesting juxtaposition in the podcasts that have caught my notice this week. They have been either about the very latest developments in technology for the future or the preservation of things that are being lost.
APM’s Future Tense talked to NASA about their communications projects. They have already tweeted from space, but [...]
