No doubt about it: the research released by the National Endowment for the Arts last week on arts participation is eye-opening. In its entire 104 pages, there’s hardly any good news and only a few hopeful signs. And believe me, I searched.
I took one morsel of hope, though, and made an anecdotal survey of how well art museums are exploiting one aspect of it: Forty percent of adult Americans who use the Internet used it last year to “view, listen to, download or post artworks or performances.” And, “typically once a week, 20 percent of all Internet-using adults viewed painting, sculpture or photography online.” (Granted, that finding says nothing about how Internet users view art online, and doesn’t define whether “photography” includes snapshots, photojournalism or, for that matter, pornography, but…it is what it is.)
In any case, the finding brought back to me a moment a few months ago when I was looking at the Morgan Library website, and was surprised to find a tiny “Social Media” link at the top — with a link to its YouTube channel (as well as to Twitter and Facebook).
Cool, I thought, until I looked at the channel’s results, which I just did again: Since joining YouTube in July, 2008, the Morgan has gained only 5 subscribers, and the last sign-in was a month ago. That makes sense because the Morgan hasn’t uploaded a new video in five months — and that makes sense because the video with the most traffic was viewed only 780 times. Not a virtuous circle. (Total video views are just over 3,000.)
Admittedly, YouTube is only one way to look at art online. I’d bet that more people view visual art by looking at photographs of a collection or exhibition. For video, art-lovers in the know may go straight to ArtBabble, the hub at the Indianapolis Art Museum that now includes 20 partners. (I last wrote about ArtBabble, including some usage statistics, here.)
But I know that many museums have a presence on YouTube, and the Morgan’s experience makes me wonder if that makes sense. Should they spend precious resources generating video content? And when they do, is it easy enough to find?
So I looked at a random sampling of more than a dozen museums’ websites — and found varying approaches.
Here’s what I found on the ease-of-access. Only one museum that I surveyed had a direct link to its YouTube channel on its home page: the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art.
Several museums now, like the Morgan, link to a page of social media — the Cincinnati Art Museum also a “social media” link on its home page, which leads visitors to podcasts and a link to YouTube (where it has 119 subscribers since joining in 2006) and 13,906 video views.
The Art Institute of Chicago and the Baltimore Museum of Art similarly use an “Interact” tab on their home page that takes visitors to their YouTube channels (with 137 subscribers, 13,546 video views and 60 subscribers, 5,231 video views, respectively).
The Museum of Modern Art and San Francisco MoMA both have an “Explore” link on their home page that leads to “video” or “multimedia” (but not a YouTube channel).
None of the other museums whose websites I visited had anything on the home page or a home page drop-down menu that led to videos or a YouTube channel: Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts-Boston, Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, Andy Warhol Museum, St. Louis Art Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum.
Except one: the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which seems to have a pretty smart strategy. If you go to its website, click on “community” at the top and then on “videos.” There, the museum invites people to shoot videos in the museum following posted rules, upload them to YouTube, and email the link to the museum, which may or may not link to them from its site (with the maker’s permission, of course). It makes sense to get others to make your videos for you.
Photo: Courtesy Brooklyn Museum (bottom)