The Economist gets Arty

Everyone keeps talking about this. It's an article in The Economist about how business has taken a turn to being a bit art-obsessed. And I don't mean what's hanging in their lobbies.

The interesting part to me was talking about the fact that artists know how to tell stories and that is an important marketing tool to business. I naturally thought to myself "but museums also know how to tell stories!". I've written about museums expanding to function as community centres, and bulking up their bank accounts by going in more commercial directions. The thought of museum exhibition designers being loaned out or freelancing to help marketing agencies is an interesting one. An even more pressing issue, however, is internal cooperation.

One of the complaints I've heard from staff who work in admin is that they feel a bit disconnected from the actual work of the organisation. The more accountants, marketers, development workers and other professionals who don't work directly with exhibits and day-to-day operations can gain input, the better. If a curator can help the marketing staff tell a story, they should, just like accountants rely on budget justifications to know why departments spend what they do. It's so important with our shrinking pool of resources to work as a team. So maybe next time you have a staff meeting, try sitting next to someone from another department, or ask someone from another team to lunch. Or maybe something like this award-winning program for staff at an American regional museum.

Investing in Culture

This has been kicking around for a while already, but I wanted to give it some press. Mission Models Money has released their Capital Matters report, which discusses the sick funding cycle of museums and cultural organisations (in the UK but it could be anywhere, and not restricted to culture) that feed into this idea of "using" funders, rather than having a mutually beneficial relationship that views funders as investors.

Here is the page on their website to download from. There is a space for comments on the page, and in the coming months, they will be publicising some of the conversation the report inspires.

It's been too long!

In the process of changing continents, I dropped the upkeep ball. I've seen a lot of great articles in the last month and a half, but just have a couple to share. One is from an art history blog, and one is about a developing story.

Linked below is a two part article about museum security. It's interesting advice for all sizes of museum. One of the points is to have your security guards greet guests. Don't have security guards? A volunteer who is willing to just say "hi" or "hello" can be just as effective. As the article reminds us under point number 4 (about CCTV use), surveillance is a great deterrent. If would-be thieves and vandals feel they've been noticed, they're less likely to commit a crime.

Part One and Part Two

The other article that really got my interest this week was about the Chinese mummies that are/are not on display at the Penn Museum right now. On one hand, the Chinese say this is a simple problem of not checking all of the bureaucratic ins and outs, while the director of the museum says it's all one big misunderstanding. If I had to make my staff replace objects with photos and papier-mache, I would be very disheartened. They say the visitors like it, but I keep going back to grad school discussions about the power of the object and reproductions. Has anyone seen the mummies at any point in their current tour, or the exhibit at the Penn?

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.