What this is about...

I started this blog because I have a strong interest in strategic planning, increasing revenue while maintaining organisational integrity, and making museums engaging places that are accessible to the widest audience possible. It is my goal to start conversations or trains of thought that can help museum stakeholders improve their organisation.

Friday, December 31, 2010

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?

Monday, December 13, 2010

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?

Sunday, December 12, 2010

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.

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Friday, December 3, 2010

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.