The Association of Art Museum Directors’ midwinter meeting, Jan. 22-25 in LA, will feature “a series of presentations on digital practices, highlighting some of the ways AAMD museums are using technology to better carry out their missions,” according to today’s press release.
Allow me to suggest some recommended reading to prepare for this discussion—The Brave New Museum Sputters Into Life, my irreverent analysis for the Wall Street Journal of museums’ digital prestidigitations:
As I wrote in the WSJ:
Intended to inform and delight, these innovations are often unintuitive, inadequately explained, or exasperatingly dysfunctional.
AAMD’s session on “Digital Strategy Implementation” will be led by officials from two institutions where such “implementation,” as I experienced it, left much to be desired: the Cleveland Museum’s director of interpretation, Jennifer Foley, and the Cooper Hewitt’s director, Caroline Baumann.
All may be upstaged by star turn of Tom Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum, who will discuss, “How (and why) the Met Does Digital,” along with his chief digital officer, Sree Sreenivasan. In a CultureGrrl follow-up to my WSJ piece, I had recounted how Sree caused me to “recoil in horror” when he excitedly demonstrated to me an app that animated one of his museum’s van Goghs, “First Steps, After Millet.”
Happily, his photo of that folly, wherein the toddler lurches from mother to father, is no longer the header image for Sree’s Twitter feed:
While we’re on the subject of Twitter and digital diversions, enough with #MuseumSelfie day already! I think I’ll just postpone accessing Twitter until tomorrow!
Digital innovation is a safe, popular hot topic. But I wish our nation’s leading professional organization for art museums would also tackle a tougher, pressing topic: The need to establish new, rigorous guidelines for single-collector shows, so that a debacle like the Smithsonian’s Cosby show never again happens.
As I mentioned here, AAMD needs to give more teeth to its 2007 guidelines, Private Collectors and the Public Benefit, which merely suggest questions to be asked before accepting loans or donations of privately held works.
After the New Museum’s Dakis Fracas became a hot issue, AAMD had tweeted that “clear protocols and guidelines [are] needed” for the “exhibition of private collections in museums.”
More than five years later, they’re still needed.