Museums in the Digital Age: Changing Meanings of Place, Community, and Culture by Susana Smith Bautista asks as a series of case studies, taking the temperature of digital initiatives in five art museums around the country: the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, California; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York.
Today, for the sake of brevity, we’ll be discussing the first three examples.
Unfortunately, I found in my reading that many of the digital projects have already disappeared from the internet entirely, replaced by new or different enterprises. This is remarkable, considering that the book was only published in 2013. Only six years have passed and yet the digital world looks entirely different. Instagram isn’t mentioned once! This serves as a timely reminder of how fast technology moves, how quickly the digital world can change.
Still, it it important to remember that new does not always mean better. As historians, we should know – it’s important to look back at the past for ideas. Some of the ideas from the digital past still hold weight. Just because they are not in practice in their home institutions anymore doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t fit nicely into another institution’s website or find themselves just at home in a museum gallery.
The digital projects of the Indianapolis Museum of Art serve as a fantastic example. For instance, at the time the book was written, their web address was iam.org. Since then, the museum has undergone a bit of a brand redesign. It’s new name and web address reflected its location among over 100 acres, alongside other institutions: Newfields and discovernewfields.org. The digital projects touted in Museums in the Digital Age are now no more. However, several are tantalizing and inspiring.
Two prime examples are the tag tours and the “first impressions” feature. Digital collections are searchable because they are tagged with things like “Renaissance,” “Impressionism,” etc. The Indianapolis Art Museum invited guests to supplement tags on works by suggesting new tags. From there, museum staff curated “tag tours” that would guide visitors through somehow related art works. Refreshingly, these tours did not take themselves too seriously. Art museums are are usually critiqued for being stuffy and self-important. The titles of these tag tours disprove this critique. They include “In the Nude,” “LOL Catz,” and “Impress My Boss/Grandma/Hot Date.” Tag tours allow visitors to encounter and interact with the collections in a casual, fun way. “First Impressions” was equally fun. When looking at a piece of art online, visitors were encouraged to click on the thing they noticed first. Afterwards, they could see what other online visitors clicked on, comparing the density of clicks in red to their click in green. I only wish they were still live so I could go through them.
Another fascinating project took place at the Walker Art Center. Called 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection. Visitors were encouraged to vote on the pieces they wanted included in the exhibit, without the influence of curator comments via labels. The digital component came in in the voting stations, which took place on kiosks placed around the museum space. As the name implies, half of the gallery space went to the choices of the guests, arranged in order of the votes, and the other half was traditionally curated.
All the museums stress the importance of opening the museum up to a global audience, beyond the local community and the institution’s four walls. However, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art seems to have put the least stock into digital projects. In fact, its digitally-equipped physical spaces were treated as a bit of an afterthought, only to be included if they have a space they don’t know what to do with. Called Learning Lounges, they are a place behind a closed door, separating the “sacred” gallery space from more innovative digital spaces.
Though you can’t find some of these digital initiatives online or on the gallery floor anymore, they still provide lessons to learn from and ideas to “steal” moving forward.
MUSEUM MUSINGS 