Hey, want to chat? Online? About art, specifically Kandinsky?
The invitation comes not from me, but from the Guggenheim Museum. Nowadays, it’s holding online discussion and chat sesssions called Forum, which it billed as “innovative” in a recent Guggenheim Magazine. The point, it says, is “to discuss and debate topics related to major museum exhibitions.”
Its seems a bit retro to me, but I’m withholding judgment. According to the Guggenheim’s website, the first Forum was last summer. It was titled “Between the Over- and Underdesigned.” I read the posts and the chat and felt — under-enlightened. It was bland, deadly bland. See for yourself at that link.
But there’s another chance coming this week, starting on Monday and through Oct. 23. This panel of experts will talk about “Spiritual (Re)Turn” in relation to the musem’s Kandinsky retrospective:
This…Forum takes as its point of departure Vasily Kandinsky’s famous advocacy for a union of the spiritual and art. Overall, however, modernity has seen fine art and religion diverge. Now that spirituality has become increasingly divorced from religion–Kandinsky himself approached the issue through the esoteric belief system of Theosophy–is it possible that we could see now see a reunion of the two?
The online chat part starts on Thursday at 2 p.m. EST and involves moderators Krista Tippett, the host of the popular public-radio program, Speaking of Faith, and Louis A. Ruprecht Jr., the William M. Suttles Chair of Religious Studies at Georgia State University.
The other panelists, who’ll comment during the rest of the week, are Huma Bhabha, who won the 2008 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Mark C. Taylor, Chair of the Department of Religion and co-director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University.
And good luck to them. Still, I thought, haven’t we been here before? I decided to consult Max Anderson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who’s usually up to date on museum activities on the web.
He reminded me of several efforts moderated by cultural historian/critic Maurice Berger for the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum earlier this decade, here and here, for example. Before that, in the 1990s, the Whitney Museum had tried online chat, moderated by Echo, which still exists.
Of course the Brooklyn Museum has since become the leading museum in using technology to build an online community. It has plenty of ways to involve people — check them out here. I didn’t see chat, though.
I wonder whether moderated forums, in an age when anyone can comment on virtually everything on the web, resonate — and with whom. As Max pointed out in his email, the chat will be “only be as successful as the participants are thoughtful, clear, and compelling and the online audience is engaged. So, like the other precedents, it will need to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and will rise and fall along with the quality of dialogue.”
Enough said. I don’t want to chat online. But maybe others do, and I give the Guggenheim credit for trying — as long as too many hopes aren’t hinged on Forum and too many resources expended.