New Media and Supporting the Old Interface

Arianna Huffington posted this a few days ago, about how much New Media to let into museums. I've been entertaining holiday guests and too busy to post till now, but I have been thinking about what she says.

It isn't that Huffington provides great insight into where museums are or should be going. It is more important because how often do museums have thoughtful, literate people who are not trained in museum studies, or with a PhD in Art History or 10 years of experience running a science center, but who have embraced new media, talk to them about new media and offer this hands-off point of view.

I think that as an outsider Huffington has missed some of the point of a few of the museums she gives as examples' various web-based projects--that some of them are much more experimental than she seems to think--because most people who come from a traditional museum background see only the telos of the closed museum. However, when museum audiences embrace a post-modern vision of the museum as the final authority on how it does business, but not necessarily on every detail, this kind of new media begins to make more sense.

This conversation is one I keep coming back to. How do museums embrace the changes in how we interpret objects, present information, use the internet, in a way that makes sense to people who have grown up with a completely different conception of museums? What does rebranding museums as a place of dialogue rather than education look like? How do we get people like Arianna Huffington to see where we are going and get on board? Or do we just have to wait for a younger generation to come forward and carry on museums as they have always understood them?

A Tug of War

I have been wondering how diversifying funding streams would affect things like the Smithsonian family of museums since the Fire in my Belly debacle broke. Today the Warhol Foundation has announced that unless the portion of Wojnarowicz's video that was a part of the Hide/Seek exhibit (scroll down for details) is restored, they will not consider funding future requests from the Smithsonian Institution. The New York Times article can be found here: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/warhol-foundation-threatens-to-end-financing-of-smithsonian-exhibitions/.

There are many issues to unpack in this development. Will the government move to ban outside support from Smithsonian exhibits so they can continue to censor as they please? Or will the Smithsonian find itself in a place to fight back? Are we re-enacting the culture wars like it may have seemed a couple of weeks ago, or is there a greater shift at the horizon?

Blog roll

So today's post is a simple one. I started this blog because I could find lots of blogs about exhibitions, or collections, or museums in general, but very little aimed at administration. I'm wondering what kinds of industry blogs my readers are writing, or admiring as something a little different.

One of my favorites is museumssuck.com. It's no longer updated, but the author has a dark sense of humor that I can definitely appreciate.

Another not-your-usual-blog is TMS Blog. It's a way to keep up with tips and tricks for The Museum System, but includes discussions of other relevant technology.

You don't need a log in to leave a comment on this blog, but if you blog yourself, please leave your URL!

Staff Morale

So many of my friends have been talking about the removal of A Fire in my Belly by the late artist David Wojnarowicz from the Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture show at the National Portrait Gallery (US), and I finally found an interview with Martin Sullivan, the Director of the Gallery, about why the Smithsonian chose to remove the piece. You can hear it here. In the interview, Sullivan details the difficulty of accessing the piece, which is part of a touchscreen display where users would have select A Fire in my Belly from within a menu including several other works. He does a great job of describing briefly the process of putting together a show, and how loan negotiations don't always come together the way curators and directors would like. He also described how the video may be hard to read as portraiture. Toward the end, with about a minute left, Sullivan starts discussing what he describes as "another moment" where we in the arts are fighting for the freedom to mount shows that have educational value, to engage, to get people talking. Its the early 1990's culture wars all over again here in the U.S., and curators and museums are going to have to contend with more than just the usual budget and logistics issues in putting together exhibits.

It is a great moment to talk about the let downs of curating: of not getting the show to have the look or feel originally conceived--because of budget, because of difficulties securing loans, because of the controversies the show might stir up. Integrity--of curators, institutions, even artists themselves--rests largely on the shoulders of administrators and boards and I think its important to support them as they work to make the best out of our current climate. I'm wondering if any readers want to share stories about how they made the best of a bad situation in putting together a show, or how administrators or board members have made their jobs easier, by making phone calls, taking the heat, or trying to get the impossible accomplished.

grant deadlines

In about 30 minutes, I am teleconferencing with an agency that wants me to write a grant for them. I am about to tell them no.

I have worked with the agency over a period of several years to secure funding, and design and revise programs. They were recently put between a rock and a hard place when a partnering agency let them know that they would not be included in next year's funding application. In a panic, and deservedly so with only three weeks until the deadline, this agency wants me to respond to the same RFP they were just cut from. This entails creating a community collaborative of at least 10 partners, who will all have to assist in a needs assessment. Meanwhile, agency staff have to plan how to expand programming from one very well-established, precision targeted and long running program to include a program for foster youth, outreach to parents and the community at large, and possibly provide service opportunities for participating youth. Instead of finding a bullet for their new funding problem, they are hoping for a buckshot miracle.

I can see the amount of time and energy required--not just for writing the RFP response, but also hiring and training new staff, writing or researching new curriculum, and other strains that the organization may wish they were up to conquering. Their enthusiasm is met only by the fear that with a loss of funding, other funders will pull out as well. It is every organization's worst nightmare.

Instead of just telling them no, I have found a similar but smaller grant that has a deadline 3 months away. This grant from the same funding source is specifically targeted to programs that provide information and education, and has about half the minimum funding requirement compared to the RFP they approached me with. The additional funding they will receive will allow them to take the 6 months between award notification and the start of programming to have plenty of time to focus on their strength, information and education programming, and expand their program to already identified additional target populations while fortifying their position with current funders. There is no need to create a collaborative, and a much smaller set of documentation requirements.

Sometimes it is hard to say no to a chance to apply for funding. It can often feel like any money is better than no money. But when a deadline is short and everything seems impossible, listen to your gut instinct. No one at the agency was that excited about doing the work that the RFP would have required, which should have been the first sign. They contacted me because they hoped I could work a miracle. Hopefully, by finding a more appropriate funding source with a longer deadline, I have.

Kickstarter

I thought a great way to start off this blog would be to share a review of a website called Kickstarter. It's an innovative idea for creatives who need to raise funds, but it can be really useful for museums too. Basically, for my American readers, it's like a PBS fund drive. If you donate a certain amount of money toward a goal of say, $5,000 toward publishing a new exhibition catalogue, you get a reward (like say a past exhibition catalogue or some gift shop surplus stock). The difference is that only if the campaign makes the goal, then peoples' cards get charged. If the goal isn't met, no one pays.

One organization's experience:

LocalWiki and Kickstarter

And the actual Kickstarter website:

kickstarter.com

It's a new way to generate unrestricted funds, requiring a lot less effort than an event. Of course it has some drawbacks, but that's why I was so excited to see a review.