SFMOMA has a new website

For whatever reason, 'tis the season for new museum websites. SFMOMA's new site is here. Major museums such as LACMA and the National Gallery of Art are working on new sites too. So how'd SFMOMA do?

It's a mixed bag. Outside of the Pulitzer, I've not seen a museum use so much Flash. In fact, you don't so much as see SFMOMA's website, you hold still while it throws itself at you. One of the things we love about art is that we can take our time to look, to discover, to make a work of art part of us. SFMOMA's front page mostly fills me with the desperate need to blink more often.

Then there's SFMOMA's ArtScope (above), a single page on which the museum presents 3,500 works of art sub-thumbnail style for us to click on. Because apparently some people prefer looking at 3,500 artworks at once instead of... one. Why was this a good idea? (Preferred.) (FWIW, SFMOMA describes the page thus: "This visual browsing tool features more than 3,500 objects from our collection, arranged in a continuous, map-like grid. Zoom in on an eye-catching image, search by keyword or artist, or just have a look around. In any case, we suspect you'll see our collection in a different light.")

It's not all bad: The collection section of the site is a massive improvement over SFMOMA's old presentation: More works are online and more pictures of more works are online. For example, at the old site not all of SFMOMA's 30 Clyfford Stills were online. Now they are. SFMOMA does fab-cool online features. SFMOMA's resources for educators are easy to find.

Still, there's nothing here that's both new and interesting. San Francisco is ground zero for web and software innovation, but you won't find evidence of that here. (Instead, try here.) The museum hasn't tried to integrate much that's new and interesting -- say, Twitter -- into how it interacts with its audience, not does it provide new ways for its audience to interact with it. SFMOMA's site is mostly more of the same.

(And from the usual mistakes file: Most museums are afraid to tell us who they have on staff, what they do and how to contact them. I have no idea why.)