So what does this mean? A lot more unemployed in the culture sector for starters as the most likely replacement will be a small team within the Culture department. A lack of a national body to oversea museums probably means that local councils will be able to do what they like. Can we expect a bunch of new job losses in the smaller museums? Or what’s stopping the selling of collections?
Presentism, as this blog often cites, is the short-term decisions of living in the Present over building for a long-term future. Now is important over working out where we are going. I am a firm believer that growth is the way get us out of problems and cuts do not promote growth.
I ask all of you now; with the MLA going soon, will you miss it? How will it affect you? What do you foresee happening? Drop a comment below (it may take some time to approve).
And if anyone in another country wants to see my CV, send me an email.
The Centre for the Future of Musuems made five predictions about the museum of the future. They said Green, Personalised, Comfortable, Interactive and Flexible. Read the article to get the explanation of each one (especially “Interactive”. They means something a bit more advanced. I think a better word would have been something from the Nina Simon lexicon “Participatory”)
I pretty much agree with these predictions, so I would like to offer five of my own.
I predict the museum of the future will be:
1) Closed. As in the doors are shut and the staff laid off. Whilst the financial and business world are slowly recalibrating themselves to try to deal with the new systems in places, I imagine there are a great number of museums that just will not have the ability to adapt for whatever reason, or the reasons will be out of their hands.
2) Enslaved. I think this to be the best antonym for autonomous. What I mean is that there will be ever increasing influences or a museum program from outside the museum. Corporate sponsorship of exhibitions, oppressive criteria for funding, government social engineering agendas and media lynch-mobs of ignorance. The actual museum will be very few decision left to make.
3) 3D digital. A more positive one. It only makes sense that the current digitisation projects will move into the next phase and an extra dimension. Considering there are people doing basic 3D scanning using only a webcam and other people doing amazing handheld highly-detailed scanning, museums are going to have to start soon.
4) Sillier. I agree with the CFM’s statement that future museums will be Flexible, but I feel that’s a statement about requirement rather than actuality. Distributed sites and chameleon spaces are sensible suggestions but urban regeneration through the construction of massive monuments isn’t going to go out of fashion. Well, it’s not as long as our concept of a city doesn’t change too much. As nobody has a set idea about what a museum or art gallery has to look like, they can build ever more bizarre buildings in attempts to be iconic.
5) Curatorless. Celebrity curators (like Shaq rather than Koons) or tyranny-by-majority decision making processes to pick out favourites. I wouldn’t be surprised if the task of curators is outsourced either to voting schemes or freelancers. Those banks sitting on large art collections will probably have more need for curators anyway.
Those are my five. Anyone else want to come up with five of their own?
Here’s the challenge: how can museums (and museos) make money enough to pay salaries while furthering their mission? “If you build it, they will come” is not working. We need to do more. Any ideas on how we can put the profit back in nonprofit?
Mission, as they rightly point out, means you can’t resort to opening cinemas. Getting people through the doors by any means is out of bounds. The museum mission has to be part of it.
If only it was that simple. There are plenty of other unspoken rules. Let’s say you have the opportunity to put on an exhibition that fits your museum’s mission/identity/policy and it has some real star quality to it. Win-win? Nope. You’ll gets all kinds of people crawling over you saying things like “conflict of interest” or “buddy-buddy”. I really feel for the New Museum. They have gone through some real unnecessary treatment. As if a trustee and supporter of a museum would take his resources to some other institution. Why would they want some other organisation to benefit? And why on Earth wouldn’t you want to work with people you’ve worked with before and have a close personal and professional relationship with?
Once upon a time, this kind of action was called an Art Movement
Also, we should be applauding Damien Hirst. I say that whilst not being his biggest fan. He paid money from his own pocket to keep an exhibition free and without having his name plastered next to some corporate logo.
“So museums need to start thinking more like for-profit businesses, right?” says Museo Unite’s Kat Hinkel. Of course there are hints to be taken from the commercial world, but be too much like it and you’ll will have people folding their arms in disgust. Contemporary artists? But they have agents and collectors! Public viewings would raise the prices! Scandal! Scandal!
The philanthropy-grantmaking model was unsustainable, as proved by it didn’t work in an economic meltdown. Well, the other option is go for international megaphilanthropy (via The Art Law Blog), which isn’t always an available option and I don’t know how this exactly fits within a museum’s mission.
We just can’t win, can we? The required sweet-spot between financial stability, museum mission and corporate interest is a tiny speck surrounded by a lot of foot-stamping and indignation. Be aware when trying to answer the question, there’s a lot more to a nonprofit’s status than just the finance.
So, the Arts of the Samurai exhibition at Met has an increased ratio of male viewers. Maybe because of the interest in a period in history when masculinity was measured upon the integrity of one’s code of honour and that this culture appeared almost on the other side of the world.
Is this a joke? Am I not getting this? Have I missed the point a bit? A lot of people are linking to this article and yet not commenting on it.
I’m pretty sure that if this was written by a woman who went on to suggest exhibitions like “Washing Up! A History Involving Dishcloths”, “Shoes – Have Another Pair” and “Keeping Your Man”, feminists and anyone with an ounce of respect for gender equality would be ripping this to shreds. Quite right too.
Tits, violence and meat. That’s how to get men into museums. Because that’s all men would care about. Not history, not craftsmanship, not other cultures, oh no. Did you not hear? The “Manly” demographic has devolved a few millions years and European paintings will probably make you gay.
Dear New York Times, if you’re allowing any old nonsense in your paper, I’m cheap and have a backlog of all kinds of things I can offer as articles.
Back in April, I wondered why there wasn’t some efforts by Google to work with museums. They had put some ultra-high definition photos from the Prado Museum into Google Earth in January, but that seemed to be an exercise in photographic technologies and some much needed publicity for one of Google’s products.
I mean, can you think of any link between art and mapping? Of all the visualisations available on Google Earth, 14 images places upon a single geolocation in Spain seems a little odd. I mean, what’s the purpose?
What are they up to? Of all things, a digitisation project? 14,000 photos of the 5,000 remaining objects in the museum.
Does anyone else think this feels like a story from about 8-9 years ago?
I hope, no, I wish this will be something more than just interesting PR for Google. They can be game-changes to almost anything they get involved in, and it seems like they will photograph collections! And put them online! There are museums up and down the UK photographing stuff. Most of them are using volunteers.
Unless they can do something amazing with it. Unless this is a test for some greater plan that will blast inferior collection management software out of the water and begin some decent level of connectivity between museums. I suppose we will have to wait for “early 2010″ to see the results.
Fairness and justice for museum workers – A Facebook group dedicated to the museum workers of both the Canadian Museum of Civilization and the Canadian War Museum. They’re into the tenth week of their strike action to demand the same basics as other federal workers.
The second has the response from the Mike Weiss Gallery, which didn’t mention the inspection but made some pretty libelous remarks, insinuated something by her dance background and then saying that she did it for the web-traffic.
Hi! My name is Jenny, and I’d like to extend to you all an invitation to attend the Leicester University School of Museum Studies’ PhD Symposium “Materiality and Intangibility: Contested Zones”. Organised by the PhD community here at the world’s oldest department for Museum Studies, it aims to challenge the fixed division between ‘the material’ and ‘the intangible’ which is so prevalent in museological thought. It runs on Monday 14th and Tuesday 15th December and promises to be a fantastic occasion!
For the bargain price of just £20, you get lunches, refreshments and two days worth of speakers and events. Keynote speakers include Dr Richard Sandell, Dr Sandra Dudley, Professor Sue Pearce and Dr Kostas Arvantis. Delegates are attending from 6 different countries, so the international mix will be great. But there is so much more – we’re running an art show as part of the symposium and (this is my favourite part) we have by and large banned PowerPoint! Speakers have had to come up with inventive methods of presenting their work and we hope that many of you will join us to come and see the results.
If you want more details, or to download a booking form, please follow these links.
Jenny Walklate is a PhD Researcher at the University of Leicester – You can contact her via jaw50(at)le.ac.uk, piratemoon on twitter and as a regular blogger on The Attic, the Leicester Museum Studies Blog.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
D’aaaaw, isn’t that cute? A six year old applied to be “Diwector” of the National Railway Museum in York. He was only offered the new position of “Director of Fun” and obviously happy to accept the lesser appointment due to the economic situation.
Sam Pointon, I hope this whole exercise is a lot of fun for you and get to enjoy yourself.
But I’m going to talk about how this makes me sick to my stomach. First, watch the video in the BBC article. Now watch this.
You see, not only are they exploiting the cutesy factor of a six year old boy to act as the brand-padding to their “child-friendly” image, it’s not even an original marketing ploy.
And this gets down to the crux of the issue for me. Any of you who thought, “That’s so nice of the museum to do that” or “That museum is so child friendly”. Stop. This is what they want you to think. Is it nice for a museum to use a child to get column inches? We normally think these actions appalling when a celebrity does it, pushing their children around in the vain hope that it will get their picture in the glossy magazines.
Is the museum “child friendly”? Personally, I’m beginning to despise the term. But this story tells you nothing -- nothing -- about the policy, design or ethic that make this a child-friendly place. If it is being geared towards access for children, it’s more likely because there are 4 or 5 curators or education officers working damned hard to make it so.
You know what alerted me? How many six year olds do you know that post letters? This report may give the whole idea that it was the kid’s “application”, but come on, there are adults behind this. An adult would help him write it, and adult would have given him the stamp and told him how to address is (if this even happened at all), and adult read this and passed it onto someone who saw the marketing potential and an adult arranged the press releases.
From Culture 24: (Do you think Sam honestly had anything to do with this?)
Sam is taking his new appointment particularly seriously and is already canvassing the public for suggestions on how the NRM could be made more fun. If you have a suggestion for Sam and his team then you can fill in the online comments card.
Not so cute now, huh?
And one kid, just one, gets to act as poster child for a museum’s excellence with children and you all go “Awwww”. Suckers. You’ve allowed yourself to be completely taken in by a highly orchestrated event masked as a spur-of-the-moment altruistic occurrence. They didn’t show you the education officer dealing with 100 kids a day and getting industry based awards. They could have the best child-access-policy-whatever in the country that’s been made completely inauthentic because they showed you a kid in a tie being told to act like an advert.
There’s no such thing as “harmless PR”. I accept that every one of us at some point will tow the line or promote our bosses or say the marketing spiel to sell a little bit of our souls for the sake of hopefully benefiting the whole rather than the individual, but can we wait until they’re reaching voting age before you single one out to be your branding puppet? The misdirection was good in this but I can still see the strings. This boy is being used to increase visitor numbers.
I find that sad. Museumchausen by proxy.
I wonder who was behind this. I wonder if it was more a “marketing” person than a “museum” person. I would think the former because a marketing person is more likely to have the contacts/abilities to get BBC News to cover the story and I like to think a museum person wouldn’t be insensitive to the thousands of under-threat or laid-off museum workers by showing that a cute/marketable six year old can get job when you can’t.
Hopefully, Sam will get the authority of governance to remove someone when they’re not being fun enough.
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. Surprisingly, on asking the public, people of all ages could not really remember where it had once stood. Although much of has been removed, this really surprised me. It really isn’t that long ago. Do our individual memories really overwrite such a monumental physical change in the cityscape so quickly? I tried to think of some more instances to mention and even investigate, but could not come up with anything on the same scale. Forgetting where the old town hall once stood is one thing; the Berlin Wall seems quite another. The question is, does it matter? The Wall lives on in museums, infilms, as the parts still standing and in souvenir form on mantelpieces the world over. Its significance will not be forgotten, but it seems that its location might.
NPR’s Pop Culture podcast discussed the seminal British TV programmePlaying Shakespeare. In 1984, Ben Kingsley was the only universally known actor featured in the programme but now it appears filled with the greats. However that’s not why I’m recommending that you listen to it. Pop Culture highlights a line from the then little known Sir Ian McKellan about how definitions of acting ‘naturally’ change over time. King Lear was played very differently in the British Empire of the 19th century to how he is interpreted today. The grand certainty of the delivery reflected how the nation was situated in the world. It is an argument that lends itself to museum collections. The interpretation of museum objects depends on the social norms of the time, often causing controversy if it does not. For instance, in the West we generally no longer display galleries of taxidermied stags’ heads as blood sports are less popular. There is discussion and debate about the inclusion of golliwogs in children’s museums. Cases that have not been updated for some time can reflect past racist, sexist, and colonialist attitudes on the part of the museum.
I must ask, is it right to just hide this history of interpretation? Museums reflect the cultural mindset of the times in the same way that theatre does, but we have the chance to tell a further story. Dilemma labels which highlight that which is ‘out of touch’ (often in ethnographic displays) are nothing new, but I suggest using them more often in all kinds of exhibits to provoke debate from visitors and from staff.
Child psychotherapist Camila Batmanghelidjh suggested an amusing 60 Second Idea to change the world. She believes that skating on rollerblades would make political meetings less boring and generate more creative thinking with faster outcomes to tough problems. She has tried and tested her theory with various physical activities in meetings, including yoyo-ing and reports that it works. Could this be an experiment for museum staff? Would the economy of thought help in curatorial decision making? Let me know if you try it out… if you can get it past a health and safety risk assessment, that is!
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