What does “the curatorial” mean? I’ve been wrestling with this concept since I first read (and re-read) Maria Lind’s essay for Artforum from October 2009. Lind’s brief article posits the controversial 2008 S?o Paulo Biennial (in which one of four floors in the Pavilion was left empty) as an example of the curatorial. Lind begins her piece with the following:
Is there something we could call the curatorial? A way of linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space? An endeavor that encourages you to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it? I believe so…
I thought I had a grasp on the curatorial until Vidokle very politely asked me to clarify his position as not being critical of the theory at least in principle, after I had suggested the opposite in my earlier NewCurator post about the expanding spectrum of what can be defined as curatorial activity. [See update to previous post, which includes a quote regarding his opinion of the curatorial.]
What is the curatorial then? And why does it seem focused on exhibitions as a starting point (“beyond exhibitions”) when organizing exhibitions is but one albeit highly visible aspect of a curator’s responsibilities? And are curators in disciplines other than modern and contemporary art engaged with the curatorial or is it a theory situated firmly in today’s art?
Why is this concept so elusive? I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a rigorous reader of theory. I’m sure that presents the biggest challenge to grasping this idea, which Lind likens to “Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the political’, an aspect of life that cannot be separated from divergence and dissent, a set of practices that disturbs existing power relations.”
When Jens Hoffmann, director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, declares, “My voice in making an exhibition is equally important as that of the artist,” is that the curatorial in action? Hoffmann’s quote comes from the 2007 publication Ice Cream, and follows this statement, “To make a provocative claim, it’s curators who have contributed to art to effect greater change in the art world than artists (I refer here, of course, to both negative and positive effects.)”
Later on Hoffmann says, “The shift in curatorial practice is a result of the increasingly close relationship between artists and curators and the utilization of artists’ practices by curators.” I imagine that the borrowing of artists’ practices would include institutional critique, which Lind specifies when she says she imagines a mode of curating that operates “like an active catalyst, generating twists, turns, and tensions—owing much to site-specific and context-sensitive practices and even more to various traditions of institutional critique.”
Is the curatorial a further internalization by museum professionals of the re-definition of institutional critique that artist Andrea Fraser articulated in her 2005 Artforum article “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”? As in, to quote Fraser, “It’s not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.” She continues, “It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kinds of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to.”
Is the curatorial inevitable? Or is it too late and too uninformed to ask that question? Is the curatorial, much like the over-use of the word “curator,” a development already so embraced and enmeshed in practice that there’s no turning back? Everyone seems to be acknowledging changes in the profession of the curator, but is this the actual progression or is it more an affinity being articulated by curators and theorists?
So, let’s talk curatorial-ly. Please. And preferably not steeped too heavily in cultural theory jargon. Did any of you attend the conference in Leipzig? Care to offer any observations on that or other essays, conversations, or ideas you’ve had?
One of the most intelligent things ever written on io9.com was by Matt Jones, Design Director of Berg. “The City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future“. Radical architecture designing an urbanism that is “increasingly linked and learning”. I strongly suggest you read this article. This quote from Dan Hill stands out.
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.
Everything we need to survive the possible outcomes of the future is dependent upon the city becoming an organism. The Internet of Things video from IBM says the “planet has grown a central nervous system”.
I don’t doubt that claim, except I say that the cities of this planet are going to be the first that actually construct a that workable system of system. We can really ramp-up the hardware inside our City Battlesuit.
The role of the city in the future will affect the role of the museum. All this data, all this information, networked and communicating along the city’s nerves, adding to the superabundance. Cross-referencing stuff will just produce more stuff. There will be organisations who will turn this into some useful apps, like the intelligent alarm clock that will check your calendar and your route.
The museum’s part in this must be to get directly immersed in this city’s central nervous system. It’s role will be like the lymph node, distributed throughout the city’s body (networked/linked) and providing the immunity against the city’s ills. Culture will be the city’s white blood cells.
I don’t see this as another form of social engineering. You can distract museum’s with all kinds of outside missions. I remember one museum who had to try to deal with the city’s knife crime problem. I don’t see this response involving a political step.
By being involved in the system, the museum can make its own responses. That data will be analysed (maybe into the visualisations that are so popular) to give the populous something to make their lives a little better. This isn’t just market research. This is about audience development. This is to make sure the living-city-organism doesn’t die or brutalise itself. This is to make sure the City has a Soul.
The greatest financial threat to museums and their workers was the global financial meltdown. The shock to the global system sent the museum industries into a freefall regardless of nationality. Museums based on a model of philanthropic support found the rich were giving less. Local government institutions have had budgets slashed. Everyone found their investments suffering. The final outcomes are identical regardless of the route: there’s a lot less money going around and culture is often the first to be cut. I imagine there was a second shock to many museums when they found there was a globalised system that they were just as much a part of as multinational banks.
Whenever I think about new systems of survival within globalisation, I am always lead to John Robb. This time, I’m drawn to his interest in the Resilient Community. The Community is taken as the smallest unit of support as the nation-state fails to do so. This approach will hopefully tackle the problem of the museum industry having very low average wages. This is a revolutionary approach with many high risks and many obstacles that would required much more thought than this blog post. Museums that like their current situation and feel secure need not change and this revolution is not for them. For the sake of this exercise, this is an act against the slow rot and mothballing of museums and hopefully create something sustainable.
The first programmes of “A History of the World in 100 Objects” kicked off today. The BBC Radio 4 flagship of the project began with the mummy of Hornedjitef. I agree with The Attic’s take that this is clearly a very personal project for Neil MacGregor as it seems to be the biggest cross-media platform he will get to talk about his vision for the museum in a globalised world. I’ve always like liked to call MacGregorism because I feel the man deserves to have an -ism named after him.
I’m slightly surprised at the format and rather glad. I was expecting fifteen minutes of academic analysis of single objects. Instead, Mr. MacGregor uses the object in question to hang the rest of the ranging topic to. Case in point: it was far more interesting to listen to and there wasn’t much of an actual detailed physical description of the mummy and coffin. If you want to know what it looks like, you can look online. Why waste the precious fifteen minutes? I like how this whole project doesn’t assumes that everyone lives in a technological dead zone.
The World’s History is being focused on one object at a time. It is going to be a very British-Museum-branded history, meaning a globalised history. A bold approach that edges more on the importance of the journalistic/media aspects. I applaud it.
Also on today was the Culture Show special (iPlayer link. Probably doesn’t work outside of UK). MacGregor was good. Kermode and Collings did some very interesting reports in the spirit of the project. Neil Oliver was trying too hard to be poignant and proves his 360 spin shots only work on top of a cliff. Tom Dyckhoff almost made the whole thing an episode of Blue Peter. Interestly, usual presenter Mark Kermode was sent off to the Isle of Man and replaced by BBC World News presenter Mishal Husain.
The website connecting all this together is part brilliant and part frustrating. The flash-heavy main page is probably the best way to search over the actual objects because of a great way they’ve categorised and interlinked the data. My God, it takes a long time though. Ignore the “In Your Area” tab altogether and use the “BBC Area” in the sidebar, trust me. The blog looks to be shaping up into a really good resource.
I will make your life easier to linking to the podcast here, which took me too long to find. I will also give you this page, which I think will eventually turn into the list of all the episodes and iPlayer links. How they’ve organised the lists of the actual programming is a bit of a nightmare. I’m surprised there isn’t a dedicated page on BBC’s iPlayer either.
I’m expecting the “Add Your Object” section will clutter things up pretty soon. You’d need a BBC ID, whatever that is. Would have though signing in with Twitter/Facebook/Google would be an option. For some, this aspect will allow them to add to the project as a whole as well as learn some basics in collection management (Honestly, the BBC offers a better collection database than some museums I’ve known). I see this causing problems already, like why is Swansea Museum adding stuff as an “individual” and not a museum?
No dedicated twitter account? I suppose it’s going to be all over the official British Museum one anyway.
All together, this is clearly the beginnings of something impressive. I’m looking forward to the rest.
This time last year, I launched newcurator.com. Since then, this site has developed into many different areas, expanded into some very interesting subjects and has had its readership grow beyond all expectations. To mark this occasion of newcurator’s first birthday, I want to thank all the people who commented, followed me on twitter and facebook, submitted guest posts, everyone who kept returning to read and everyone who ever clicked on one of the adverts.
Over the year, I have read and written about many things concerning the Future of Museums through a very particular lens. As is the custom to look back over the previous twelve months and find some kind of conclusion, I wish to start the Newcurator Awards. A very simple affair. Only three categories: Person of the Year, Museum of the Year and Website of the Year. No shortlist, no voting, no judges apart from me, no fancy images/trophies. Three awards to where I just want to hold up in recognition the efforts that have impressed me.
These awards are for those who are equal parts Now and the Future. Now, they are impressive. In the Future, they are going to make a difference. Without further ado, I present the winners.
Person of the Year – Maxwell L. Anderson
You only have to look at the incredible level of work coming from the Indianapolis Museum of Art to understand what Mr Anderson has that is lacking in so many other museums across the world: an entrepreneurial leadership that allows his stars to shine. Think about the marvellous ArtBabble or the great efforts the IMA puts into its social media/networking. Think about the level of transparency the IMA has, such as the deaccesioning database or the statistic generated by the dashboard. Think about free wifi, which is painfully lacking in so many places still. This just scratches the surface of what the team at IMA does.
Think about the aneurysm some museum directors would have at the mere mention of some of these things. Mr. Anderson has often spoken on the metrics to measure the success of the museum, which has put the IMA on an international stage of recognition where it would be so easy for him to say no, to be too cautious, to stick with simple goals. Mr. Anderson thinks big and allows his staff to think big. Whilst the successes of the museum and the online aspects deserve as much recognition as Mr. Anderson, it is the adoption of his management style in other museum would definitely make him part of the Future and the first Newcurator Person of the Year.
Museum of the Year – Brooklyn Museum
One of the major points in remembering the past year is the financial hammering museums took. Brooklyn Museum was no exception, having cutbacks to avoid layoff and a small rise in ticket prices. This didn’t stop them winning three awards at the Museum and the Web Conference, having one of the first museum iPhone apps as well as a mobile guide, leading the way in the Wikipedia Loves Art project, the 1stFans community, releasing a collections API and a great program of exhibitions without excessive use of the “blockbuster”. All this in the face of incredible adversity. Brooklyn Museum is an inspiration and highly deserving of the Newcurator Museum of the Year.
Website of the Year – Museos Unite
There are an incredible amount of amazing museum websites and blogs out there that have been going on for a long time, but I give this award to a blog that has only been going for six months and has totalled just over 30 posts. Why? Because of what it represents. Nothing is more important to the Future of Museum than the development of new museum staff. This blog looks at those trying to gain entry-level positions despite being highly talented and still facing uphill struggles. There is nothing so poignant than reading in the sidebar that of the four contributors, two have moved into other industries, one cannot afford union fees and another has no union to join. “Recession” was probably the most-said word of 2009 and Museos Unite looked to keep the interests of those hardest hit in museums; those at the bottom of the pile. For capturing the zeitgeist of museums in 2009, Museos Unite is the Newcurator Website of the Year.
Congratulations to the winners. Now let’s fire up the engines of 2010 for the upcoming year and keep moving towards that Future.
I”ve been playing with the new Android app by Google called Goggles. The name’s a little daft and means I’m rereading every mention of it to make sure I haven’t confused the spelling.
I am very impressed with this. You take a picture, its gets scanned with something that looks like an edge-detect and it seraches results based upon that. This little video explains it.
Visual search technology. At last, we have something that could use all that effort we put into digitisation. It works too. Despite the limitations that they admit to, it’s really quite powerful. As a test, I took a rather blurry scan of a postcard of one of my favourite buildings, the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. Top result was the Wikipedia page.
In a truely incredible feat that makes this even more relevant to museums, I scanned this postcard I picked up from the Imperial War Museum.
This somewhat staggered me. The top result it offered was this image from the London Transport Museum.
It had found the image I scanned inside another image hosted by a museum. The link took me to the artist’s biography.
At first, I was doubting some people’s claim that this was an augmented reality app. I could see how the technology could be used with other things and the “pointing at businesses” was a little thin, but I just saw a new form of Search. This is still a Google Labs product. Is it much of a jump to think that real-time video could be scanned/searched? Right now, we take a picture to be analysed. One day, we just need to stare at something for the revelant Google results to appear.
And in real-time, no doubt. Looks like we won’t be needing those QR codes after all. No wait, it scans those as well. And text. Amazing.
If there’s ever a time for museums to get their photography policy sorted, it’s right now. People will be wanting to scan stuff to get more information. Do you really want to deny that?
Speaking of Nick Poole, seems he wants to do a Britian-centric version of previous Wikipedia projects such as Wikipedia Loves Art.
Britain Loves Wikipedia. Click to find out more details, but the idea is to get 10-20 UK museums involved. I would love to see this be successful. I don’t think enough UK Museums are getting involved in this sort of thing. Hell, I don’t see enough UK museums on twitter.
Contact Nick via email nick(at)collectionstrust.org.uk or on twitter @NickPoole1 to find out more and hopefully partner up.
I often come back to the idea of “slack space”. A term coined by artists in Margate who turned empty commercial properties into art exhibition space. Many other terms have cropped up to describe this process. Many similar projects have appeared. I’m not sure there is a single former-Woolworth’s in the country that hasn’t had this idea associated with it at some point.
Sharing information like this is a good example of Museopunk. Even if it seems to be more art-focused, the information is easily adaptable should anyone want to try.
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 sense of self are scrutinized in a conscious and concentrated way.”
Major art museums have been grappling with this question of providing a place for the public to look at themselves and their world through a non-commercial lens. As Ms. Grynsztejn puts it: “…we have arrived at a point when art, the museum, and cutting-edge commerce increasingly share visual modes of organizing meaning and express related ambitions to provide the individual with what have been described as “models of experience, opportunities for self-recognition, and the ingredients of identity”.”
One approach to maintain this identity space for the public (in large institutions) is to offer big, bold, and sometimes luscious immersive experiences- such as Eliasson’s. I’d like to talk about another. It’s a local, low fi, and nimble approach we’ll call the “Community Museum” model. Yes, along with farmer’s markets and food carts, museums have a place in the back-to-local world.
These are small institutions or ad-hoc spaces where the primary ingredients for visitor experience are: location, participation, elevation, and sharing. What they have in common is that they are more about providing a place for their public to shine and share, and less about suggesting what they ought to know.
In the Denver Community Museum, Jaime Kopke created a place for her neighborhood to respond to her “challenges” and participate in culture and identity- all in a neighborhood setting. At the San Francisco Mobile Museum, we are experimenting with taking the “making” and the museum to the neighborhood (and our first exhibit is a collaboration with the DCM).
When I began the Mobile Museum I wondered if it would result in a nuance on the “wisdom of the crowds”. Yet through the process of making and sharing our participants are having deeper experiences and deeper thinking about their world than they would have without it. They are also inspiring their peers (our visitors) to participate. These informal environments also fit their level of making experience. All together, it seems to fill a need for creating moments of intellectual pause and reflection for the public, as well as a platform for cultural expression by the curators.
In this small scale context, I see a world where the curator is also part journalist, part community ringleader. The visitor is at times audience, artist, and critic. The coming together of these two groups makes the museum.
The latest version of Museum Identity Magazine is up. You can get the digital edition here or email greg(at)museum-id.com to sign up to the mailing list for your free print copy.
You will also see the first of a regular column written by me. Greg Chamberlain said I could write about anything I wanted. So I’ve entitled it NOT WITCHCRAFT.
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, the diver would see, beneath the surface busy with leaves and eels, how the rivers don’t seem separate after all and perhaps tell us what night so often tells the pilot, the cartographer, the pair of lovers sighing from a bridge: that an edge is never a simple or a sudden thing”(1). Without too prosaically dissecting the museum with this quote, it is useful to ponder the edges that arise neither suddenly or simply in museums, most tangibly in the intersection of values, rhetoric, and experience that is the art exhibition. At a macro-level, with the whole picture spread before us, when a museum exhibits art that could be deemed controversial or incite conservative ire, it is seemingly justified by how it communicates the goals of the institution as a space for talking about the “tough stuff.” However, from a staff’s perspective, often what we see is the here and now, a scary drop into the dark abyss ahead as we attempt to appease the public, to push the boundaries of art and conversation, as well as sate the aesthetic tastes of our funders. Navigating sharp edges that appear to push and pull in a myriad different directions. How do we delve below the surface, as the diver in Shirley’ poem, and see where these many currents fuse as one? In response, I want to explore Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo, a popular culture exhibit at the Portland Art Museum.
As part of the Marking Portland exhibit, visitors could stand behind this monitor and get pictures taken with superimposed tattoos on their bodies. This is another example of the museum bringing in the public as part to the exhibit and not simply as spectators.
I had the fortune of interning there this past summer and witnessed first-hand the public outpouring of support for Marking Portland, which was actually kept up for longer than planned because it was so popular. The show took place in what I call the thoroughfare gallery; the museum is two buildings and this gallery space connects the two in a long, wide corridor. Here, a projector screen was placed on one wall and images of tattoos were projected in a rotating fashion for the public to view. The photos were all publicly-sourced; the museum set up a Flickr account strictly for the purpose of collecting images of body art from Portland residents or whoever had a mind to post their photos. Every day, a crowd gathered in front of the screen and on the benches in the gallery for long periods of time, as if watching a movie. The statistic that states that visitors only stand in front of an art work for an average of 3 seconds, or an equally dismal figure, did not apply here. The shared authority evidenced in this exhibit allowed the public a conduit for contribution, and ensured that meaningful dialogue around Marking Portland was not simply the responsibility of the museum, but was shared by the public. Of course, not everyone who saw the show thought it was something the museum should be exhibiting. But on a larger scale, the museum must be commended for smartly attempting to connect the popular culture aspects of the tattooing with examples of tattoos in its ancient Asian art collection. For some, this helped elevate the topic from mere spectacle as it linked it to the wider art historical narrative.
Fiona Cameron writes, “In attempts to marginalise conflict, many institutions deny the inherent politicalness of topics and audiences and instead promote the public reinforcement of a particular set of values” (2). Here, Cameron like Aleda Shirley, is addressing edges, not simply from a safe aerial view, but below the surface where institutional narrative and community values are not so divergent. They can successfully be united around a controversial exhibit as the Portland Art Museum demonstrated through the shared authority that made Marking Portland a success and not simply another attempt by a museum to institutionalize popular culture or become a gimmick for attracting a younger, hipper audience.
(1) Katz, Jonathan. Understanding the past; Envisioning the future. WESTAF Symposium Proceedings: Re-envisioning state arts agencies, 71-78.
(2) Cameron, F. (2006). Beyond surface representations: Museums, edgy topics, civic responsibilities and modes of engagement. Open Museum Journal, August 2006. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://archive.amol.org.au/omj/volume8_index.asp
Megan Blankenship is a graduate student in the arts and administration program at the University of Oregon, blogs at MJ Writes, and is currently immersed in researching the role of the art museum in facilitating dialogue concerning controversial exhibitions. Questions, comments, and wine recommendations can be directed to mjwritesblog(at)gmail.com.
“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 into contributors. While this is an important concept in art appreciation, it’s perhaps even more important as a survival philosophy for museums and historical societies.
From the beginning, museum spectators (visitors) have taken a passive stance in their relationship to their museum. This, it goes without saying, needs to change. The continued growth of social media tools can not only be beneficial in enabling museums to start intentional conversations with their visitors but also can be used to turn those visitors into participating contributors. It’s allowing visitors to do everything from helping to shape the direction an exhibit will take to supplying some of the content to be displayed.
The advantages to developing this relationship with the visitor are numerous. At the top of the list though may be the way that this entrenches a visitor within your (or perhaps more accurately their) museum. Additionally, a visitor with items on display is perhaps the strongest advocate a museum could have. With a personal connection to something to talk/Tweet/Blog about the contributing visitor is now not only part of the curatorial team but also part of the marketing unit as well.
Let’s look at a few examples of this concept. As you consider these remember that there are opportunities to integrate visitors through technology no matter the size of your organization.
One of the best examples can be found at the Ontario Science Centre. In a space that focuses on Toronto, they have an exhibit that explores the city by using a web-enabled kiosk loaded with a map from Yahoo! Maps. The exhibit encourages people to take pictures of themselves around the city, tag the photos, and then upload them to the museum’s Flckr account. These photos are then pulled directly into the exhibit map so that when the visitor tries to learn more about say the local coffee shop, the image that comes up is the one of that visitor at the coffee shop which they took and uploaded before leaving for the museum
In a completely different environment, The US Army created a mobile exhibit trailer for its recruiting efforts. When you enter the trailer, there is a touch screen panel whose initial graphic is a map of the United States. You can use that map to find your region and there watch videos which were created and uploaded to the site by other potential recruits.
At a different level, The Summit County (Ohio) Historical Society (in conjunction with other local organizations) has established the Summit Memory Project. It’s a place that allows people to share everything from postcards to first person accounts of the area’s history. People submit their photos and stories and then members of the Historical Society scan and format the material to maintain a consistency.
These are just three examples of many. While museums continue to work on social media as a method of communicating, there should also be equal time spent on exploring how those tools can be combined with existing exhibits or used separately as a standalone exhibition tool. If the goal is to move visitors from Duchamp’s passive “spectators” to participating contributors, what better way is there to do that then by re-purposing the tools they are already using?
Noell Wolfgram Evans is the Senior Writer/Producer at Mills James. You can follow him on Twitter at Noell_MJ. He can also be reached at nwolfgramevans[at]mjp.com
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:
There is a review of the Steampunk exhibition in Oxford. Have you been to it yet? Tell the rest of us what you thought.
There is an interesting discussion started by Erika Dicker about being the official blogger for your museum. It would be great to hear from more of you on that.
“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 thrive. It’s romantic; the whole art world is full of that romance stuff, and so few of us do anything but dream about what could be.
I look out the window and see the storefronts around the gallery space, thriving a few years ago, now mostly empty, with little hope now that the art events will feed them with people. I don’t think Paul knows what he gave to everyone around him, but with the economy, and the limited amount of people in his field working around him, he felt it was time to move on.
If it wasn’t for And/Or gallery, I’d never have seen a physical Corey Archangel piece, I wouldn’t know who Micheal Bell Smith is, I would have never encountered JODI in a gallery setting, and I wouldn’t have thought YTMND’s could actually be transformed into a quirky show. If it wasn’t for his small gallery endeavor, I don’t think the digital art scene in Texas would even be what little it is. Paul worked like a shaman, spinning the air of technology around himself and drawing us all into his web of laptop death matches and 8-bit chicanery. He is always calm, calculating, and smart, and the few months his gallery has been closed have felt like a black hole ripped open in the fabric of our little regional continuum. I feel like those of us who are staying behind are holding our breath and wondering if the promise of budding art communities in smaller cities – once a hot spot of attention – will continue to have any relevance now that the patrons of the big art markets are feeling the money pinch.
The rest of the country is feeling it too; weekly you hear about another gallery shutting its doors locally or in one of the larger markets. The people who tell you “hey did you hear XYZ is closing” look at you with watery, fear-soaked eyes, like they want a solution and just don’t know what to do. The answer isn’t that simple. As long as the United States art community refuses to do anything but hold onto the traditional gallery setup, which lofts anything displayed in a few overpriced and barely livable cities, things are going to take a very long time to recover. The investors who fuel the art market just aren’t going to invest when times get tough. Galleries and artists seem to respond to this by just bearing down and hoping that if they can forge the long winter, things will be fruitful again when the ice thaws.
I can’t help but look at And/Or’s doors closing, its contribution to the small scene it was in, and wonder if more people would be willing to just put together shows right now, in any space – virtual or physical – if this would help push more artists through this difficult time. Paul’s space was never doggedly traditional, and he paid for it with a day job and by living in a closed-in area in the back, but what he did that was amazing was expose otherwise isolated people to new things. He brought in artists from around the country and world, and I don’t think this is something local collectives, online collectives, or progressive people should be unable to do. After all how many artists have Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, twitter, etc? How many artists are just an e-mail away? If the art world wants to thrive instead of just falter, it needs to start thinking about working together in less ordinary, and more extraordinary ways.
Vanessa VanAlstyne is a digital artist in her third year of an MFA. You can see more of her work on her website, her blog and follow her on twitter.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
HP has been developing 
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