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Category Archives: Presentism

The inclusion of increasingly recent/current events into the museum.

Mar 09 31 comments

You Are Not a Curator

The Information Superabundance. It flows all around us and drowns us. It saturates our increasingly mobile computers. It follows us around through our increasingly powerful phones. It engorges our still-infuriating television. It invades more and more space.

It managed to turn the music industry inside out. It turned the film industry into a paranoid delusional inmate. It scares the living daylights out of the newspaper and journalism industry. It has proved the fiction publishing industry to be delightfully stubborn.

In response to the Superabundance, the buzzword has become “curator”. There’s too much stuff and even that stuff is being repeated so how do we get to the good stuff? Well, curators just select stuff, don’t they? We need curators to sort this stuff out for us. The definition of a curator is becoming mutated. So, I’ve come up with the carefully designed test.

Ask yourself: Am I a curator?

The correct answer is: If you had to ask yourself that, you are not a curator.

You are, at best, a filter. You may make a name for yourself by excelling at some kind of selection process, but you are not a curator. “Curator” does not mean “I have good taste”. That just makes you some kind of fleshy gauze for the rest of us. The good come to us whilst all the pus and snot that came through your information media streams stay on your side. You are a makeshift step before a more advanced algorithm is invented.

Also, anyone calling themselves a “curator” when it is clear that they are dealing in merchandise should have their thumbs removed. You are not trying to fool us into believing that your job is anything outside marketing, branding and selling. Be proud of what you do without assigning the make-believe title of “curator” to sound more important. You have not reached some cultural apex through the range of shoes you have on offer. You are not a Connoisseur of a Stock-Take.

You Are Not a Curator. Don’t worry, there’s no shame. Just keep repeating it to yourself. You aren’t an editor of a newspaper by just simply choosing what articles to print. You aren’t an army general by simply shouting, “Charge”. So an inflated sense of worth in your Pick ‘n’ Mix does not a curator make.

I have becoming increasingly frustrated by the nonsense being stuck to the term “Curator” because people struggle to find the word for “Someone (Else) to Sort Through This Rubbish”. I still maintain that a curator, a job with actual skills, is starting to be abused by people from industries notorious for abusing definitions. This is why I sometimes despair at my Museopunk group when they start straying into territory that I covered in the Death of the Curator articles and calling it punk. It’s all well and good to get lots of involvement from your visitors/users/patrons/etc. but if you don’t have it based around an honest-to-God curator, do you know what you end up with?

Reality television. Prove me wrong. Very high participation from an audience who get to crowdsource the answers/outcomes/selections to the most base and voyeuristic products of the underculture.

I believe an antidote to this may well be Nina Simon’s new book, THE PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM. At the very centre of everything Nina says in this book is the curator (or more specifically, museum staff) as facilitator, designer and collaborator. Not just a presenter, as I fear curators will become when someone thinks participation means voting for favourites.

I warn you again; there needs to be a proper handle on curatorship before others start claiming it or misrepresenting it (I’m looking at you, U.S. NEWS). The very notion of a museums is integrated with the action of analytical thought. We go to museums to define ourselves, the world and the civilisation around us. If the curator is devalued cheapened through this woolly thinking then museums could lose all respect as cultural bastions. When I asked what the most important function of curators was, we saw how complex and varied the job was and not a single person said “selecting“.

Jan 04 0 comments

Internationalism, Museum Expansionism, Presentism

The First Annual Newcurator Awards

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.

Dec 12 5 comments

Architecture, Individualism, Politics, Presentism, Technology

Museum Future Predictions

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.

Autodesk University 2009: Z Corp from Core77 on Vimeo.

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?

Dec 01 1 comments

Individualism, Internationalism, Politics, Presentism

Nonprofitable Museum Actions

Museo Unite put the question out there.

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.

Nov 27 1 comments

Architecture, Museum Expansionism, Presentism

Slack Space Handbook

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.

Found this via Artabase. A 25-page how-to pdf guide from the Empty Shops Network. It’s good to see so much momentum in these kind of project still.

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.

Nov 24 0 comments

Individualism, Presentism

How Wrong Was I?

Well. I admit. I’ll throw my hands up and say I was wrong. Several times I have said David Beckham would be the future of curating through great use of his celebrity and wide appeal of his name.

Turns out, its Shaquille O’Neal.

I’d be very disappointed if every label didn’t include RANDOM ACTS OF SHAQNESS.

Nov 23 0 comments

Individualism, Presentism

GLYPH – Intro

I started writing this as part of NaNoWriMo. I missed a few days because of travel and illness and became so far behind the daily requirement that I basically gave up on hitting 50,000 by the end of November. What I have done is about 11k words and I’ve hit a bit of a wall in the plot.

Here’s is the opening paragraph. Like all good NaNoWriMo projects, it’s rough, full of spelling mistakes and could do with some serious editing. I think I put part of this up here to (a) amuse me and (b) to fill out the time where posts have been lacking. It may also start some thoughts about what on Earth I do with it.

Without further ado – GLYPH: Chapter One

Ben Talisman’s 120th birthday was about a month away and the feeling coming from deep within his bones told him that retirement was rapidly approaching. He had been working at the museum for ninety years, serving as Head Curator for the past forty. Today would be the 50th budget meeting at Civic Centre he was summoned to. Every year, he walked alone with his craggy face set in a graven stare. He used this time to go over his strategy. It took an incredible amount of planning and research to make sure the museum wasn’t shut down or ransacked for financial reasons. The first few meeting, Talisman had relied upon presenting all the good work and all the beneficial effects the museum had. After one close call where the museum was saved from closure within the last forty-eight hours, Talisman took to gaining advantages from researching whoever was the current Portfolio Direktor.

The strategy had worked so far. The problem was no reason or excuse could be used twice. The trick was to stun the bureaucratic system whilst getting the desired result from whoever had the authority to sign off on the budget. This meant these meetings had become increasingly bizarre. One year, Talisman had planted false evidence in the Direktor’s house to suggest that his wife was a keen patron of the museum. He did this when he found out that the Direktor’s brave face hid a deep neurosis over his wife’s death six years previously. Another time, Talisman had found the Direktor was addicted to a rare hallucinogenic made from the sweat glands of poisoned West African Children, so he conducted the entire meeting dressed as a reptilian archangel sent by a Pulsar God from the other side of the Cosmos.

Nov 14 0 comments

Internationalism, Politics, Presentism

“Materiality and Intangibility: Contested Zones”

INCOMING GUEST POST/PLUG FROM THE ATTIC.

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 14^th and Tuesday 15^th 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.

Provisional Timetable

Booking Form

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.

Nov 13 0 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism

Guest Post: Maria Mortati

Community Museum

In “Take Your Time, Olafur Eliasson”, Madeline Grynsztejn said: “The context between the cultural and commercial spheres over thinking and doing is one of the defining tensions in contemporary Western society. And the museum is the knife-edge location where this context is being played out, for there the conditions that determine or influence our 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.

Maria Mortati is curator of the San Francisco Mobile Museum (twitter: @sfmobilemuseum) and a Senior Exhibit Developer at Gyroscope Inc.

Nov 09 1 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Megan Blankenship

Recently, I read an article about arts engagement, and a quote the author plucked from a poem by Aleda Shirley struck me as appropriate in describing the precarious position the museum assumes when exhibiting work that could or does stir up controversy. Shirley, in The Rivers Where They Touch, writes “Falling backwards from his boat, 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.

Nov 06 0 comments

Individualism, Presentism

Art Friday: Haley Nagy

Describing herself as both artist and procrasinator, Haley Nagy made an immediate impact on me with The Nagy Family Cookbook, a beautifully evocative artist’s book.

Working in mixed media, with a real feel for using encaustic, Haley creates captivating work often addressing contemporary issues such as homelessness and cultural rituals like birthdays. The crux of her work is to explore the ‘hidden’.

In the photoessay series Saving Yourself: Steps to Preserving the Chastity of Adolescent Girl, Haley causes her work to interact with its audience by leaving dirty smudge marks on their fingers, in an exploration of the connotations of the word ‘unclean’.

It was difficult to choose only three pieces of Haley’s work, but I have selected the following pieces to show her range. The first is a detail from the artist’s book which first captivated me. The second is from her Seen but not Heard series about the homeless. The third (look closely) shows the subtlety of her latest work.

You can find Haley at her website, Flickr and follow her on Twitter.

Cookbook Front Cover © Haley Nagy

Anything will Help © Haley Nagy

Conceal © Haley Nagy

Nov 04 0 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Noell Wolfgram Evans

Participating Contributors

“The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” Marcel Duchamp

Say what you will about his art, Duchamp was right in his idea of turning spectators 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

Nov 02 0 comments

Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism

Museopunk Monday

For one week only, Museopunk Thursday will move to a Monday. There’s still lots going on over on Museopunk.ning.com and we are now up to 63 members which is brilliant. This week:

Introductions continue: please do chime in if you haven’t yet.

Jeffrey_r wants to know Who’s on the Twitters? as do the rest of us.

There is 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.

All this and also digitisation, unconferences and even some music videos just for fun.

Head on over and join up if you haven’t already.

Nov 01 2 comments

Museum Expansionism, Presentism, Technology

Guest Post: Vanessa VanAlstyne

“I want to be in New York City,” said my friend Paul Slocum, who ran a predominant new media gallery in Texas called And/Or. I’m definitely thinking about what he just said. No one is born in a small market that doesn’t dream about being able to move to New York or Los Angeles and 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.

Oct 30 3 comments

Presentism

Listen to the Gears: 15

In the last Listen to the Gears, I talked a lot about research, dissemination and perceived value for money. Really, it seems it is all about Impact. Unusually for this column, I am going to discuss only one podcast. There was a very interesting panel discussion, recorded at the recent Cambridge Festival of Ideas and put out on the Guardian Culture podcast. In ‘Austerity for the Arts?’ four British arts professionals considered the state of arts and culture in the UK in the light of the recession.

Sue Hoyle discussed the economics of mixed funding and the decline of arts funding at a local level. Calling for strong leadership in the arts, she championed those who would innovate and not just keep chugging along the same way people had done it for years because ‘that’s the way we have always done it.’ Huge changes in funding need to happen, but someone has to be strong enough to take those risks.

Peter Florence from the Hay Festival made a very good point: the arts did not end in the 30s/40s/50s. Austerity in itself is not bad for the arts. He’s right. Creative people are not going to stop making/writing/creating just because there is little funding for it. Florence again stressed the importance of finding new and creative ways of funding and claims that people in Britain are good at this due to a very rich cultural education. In fact referring to the SAS in the first instance and bemoaning the Olympic bid he uses the marvellous line:

‘We are not world class in anything other than killing people and culture’

So, that’s our impact then? That is what we are known for? Help me out here, rest of the world! Really?

Sheryl West from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (one of the main funding bodies in the UK) addressed the impact of the cultural sector in her talk. What can the public be seen being done? What is the impact of their research? She argues that academics and arts professionals need to demonstrate the value of funding to the taxpayer more. So, how can we all do that? Make it more accessible? Would websites work? TV programmes? Exhibitions? Blogging?

Oh. Hang on a minute. Remember how they don’t like that? What to do? It seems there are polarised debates on Impact – some say it is good: tell everybody about what you did and how it can help them! Some say it is bad: keep your head down and only publish it in esoteric journals. West argues that there are real problems with academics being too embarrassed or modest about their research, so nobody gets to hear about it. She also hits upon the same problem with dissemination that I discussed last time: namely that academics are not rewarded for impact but for things like journal based research which mainly stay within the academy. Her ending statement is this: ‘In a period of austerity we need to OWN the idea of impact and get behind it.’ So, in museums, galleries and other cultural institutions, how does that affect us?

What do you feel about impact? How do you measure it? Is it to do with money? Value-for-money? Visitor numbers? Is it how much outreach you can do in the local community? Or for your institution is it about how many journals your staff can get published in and how much funding you can get from that? Or do you even think that you can measure impact?

As you know, Pete is away this coming week. If there is anybody who would like to write a guest post, you can reach me at August(at)newcurator.com. Tell me your ideas for the future of museums. I’d like to hear them.

Oct 16 2 comments

Architecture, Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism

Neologisms

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”.

—

Museopunks and Metrocurators are going to be up against the oncoming beast that is the Mutant Curator of convergence media. One of the main reasons I use the word “mutant”, apart from it being the bastard offspring of the All-Media, is that it will mutate the word “curator” into something that is a shadow of the original meaning. The New York Times got it wrong. Curator doesn’t mean selecting and culling nor does it mean “I have a good eye”. It is a job. With Skills. I would have thought the journalist writing that article would have been more sensitive to the misappropriation of a title to the lowest common denominator.

Museopunks and Metrocurators are, I believe, a way for those skills to survive.

I’m wondering if there’s a book in all this.

Oct 13 6 comments

Internationalism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism

Museum Currency

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.

Oct 08 0 comments

Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism

Museopunk Thursday

Every Thursday will have a bit of a summary of what’s going on over at Museopunk.ning.com. All my notes, links and discussions on the Museopunk subject are going to be on there rather than on newcurator.com.

Really happy with how its going so far and very pleased with who has signed up. Feel free to sign up and join in the conversations.

* Introduce Yourself – Everyone’s announcing their arrival

* Your Definition – People are airing their thoughts on what Museopunk means to them without forming manifestos. It’s a bit rambling and side-notes at the moment, but I like it like that.

* Paul Orselli: Museopunk – If there’s anyone who has influenced Museopunk before I made the word up, it’s Paul Orselli.

* Video – Dan Cull has uploaded a ton of Edupunk stuff. Good reference points.

Oct 02 0 comments

Education, Individualism, Presentism

Listen to the Gears: 12

There is a lot of interesting discussion about copyright on the airwaves at the moment.

Charles Arthur from Guardian Tech Weekly interviewed Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons who talked about the different levels of licencing available and how they might be used in different situations. Of course, Creative Commons is of most use in countries which are concerned with enforcing copyright, so it is not necessarily of interest worldwide. Those who do use it to effect include Ridley Scott, the White House, Al Jazeera and the Powerhouse Museum (amongst many other museums), whose case study makes interesting reading if your museum or gallery is thinking of contributing to The Commons on Flickr.

View of Woman Holding a Fancily Decorated Bicycle from the Powerhouse Museum Collection, used under Creative Commons licence.

Ito discussed some of the cases which had come to court recently involving Creative Commons licences: it was ruled in the US that breaching a Creative Commons licence was a breach of copyright. Will this now make Creative Commons seem more safe as the law has been tested?

As an investor in Twitter, Ito also addressed the growing push to monetise the service as part of a general discussion of business models and friends networks. That is a whole other discussion which there isn’t room for here, but is worth listening to for the latest developments.

If you’re in the UK, keep listening. The second segment of Guardian Tech Weekly discusses putting together a new BBC programme about the impact of the last 40 years of technological change on the British family. In researching for Electric Dreams, Gia Milinovich visited the Centre for Computing History’s Computer Museum in order to find the most appropriate technology for the family to use in each year of their realistic-as-possible journey. Some interesting observations were seen during the programme’s making including the apparent confirmation of a 1980s gender divide in computer use. I wonder, is this kind of social phenomenon reflected in computer or science museums?

Mark West’s The Mr Science Show branched out this week into enhanced podcasting in order to give a slide show of photographs. West had been affected by the red dust storms in Sydney and illustrated his meteorological explanation using some amazing Creative Commons photographs from Flickr.

Sydney Dust Storm by Lanz, used under Creative Commons licence.

Sydney Dust Storm by Ianz, used under Creative Commons licence.

Lastly, I think it’s pertinent that you all see this Monocle Culture video about Alfred Sirleaf, a newspaper editor in Monrovia. Each day he writes up the Daily Talk using local vernacular on a large blackboard outside his office, in order that the people can have access to the news where otherwise they could not afford to.

You can contact me at August(at)newcurator(dot)com

Sep 29 5 comments

Individualism, Museum Expansionism, Politics, Presentism

Yo Punk

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.