Over the last few years, it has become a required museum activity: they have to make and post videos, in the galleries and on their websites. Media experts say people — especially young people — want it (not just from museums, but also from newspapers, magazines, and so on).
So the other day, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art emailed me with news that it had posted on its home page a time-lapse video showing the installation of its Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion exhibition — “a unique look at a gallery’s transformation from empty space to all-encompassing work of art” — I decided to watch. I found it amusing and even charming. Didactic, no — but what’s wrong with wasting a few minutes?
The Metropolitan Museum,* for its part, has loaded its new website with videos — 142 of them, some long lectures — plus 80 podcasts, and various other elements of “media,” interactive and not. And the Met, along with 31 other museums or arts institutions, is a member of ArtBabble, founded by the Indianapolis Museum of Art (which has posted 252 videos there).
I’m not sure all these videos, if made especially for the web, are worth the effort, but that’s one of the good things about video: It is easy for museums to see, over time, what’s in demand because the web keeps track of the number of times videos are viewed.
But posting videos made for exhibitions in the exhibitions — well, that’s another matter, I think, requiring more thought about what they’ll add or subtract from the items on view.
The other day, though, while at a exhibit that did have videos in the galleries, I was hoping I would find them later on line, and I didn’t.
I was at the Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts to see the Hats: An Anthology By Stephen Jones exhibition (sample, by Schiaparelli, at left). Roberta Smith in the New York Times gave it pretty much of a rave, but I found myself wanting more context. (There is a catalogue, but I didn’t buy it.)
Several galleries offered small, mostly black-and-white, historical videos. But the galleries were full, the screens were tiny (smaller than my computer monitor), the sound was very low, and a handful of people crowded around each one.
I went home to watch. But while the situation cried out for the videos to be online, they weren’t. So either Bard missed the boat here — it’s a gallery for an educational institution, after all, not strictly a museum — or there’s another problem, possibly the inability to obtains the right to put historical footage online.
Professionals are always searching for “best practices.” Here’s one: I’d ask museums that have videos in their galleries to share them online, for people at home. They could create a virtuous circle, adding to the knowledge of people who’ve seen and exhibit and drawing more people from their computers to go see it.
Photo Credit: © V&A Images, Courtesy of the BCG