Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Technology

The DIA’s Many Facebook Fans: Will They Show Up in Person? — UPDATED

The Detroit Institute of Arts sent me a press release today that, at first, made me chuckle. It wasn’t about art at all — it was about the number of people who “like” the DIA on Facebook — or, as the DIA says, its Facebook fans. They now number more than 100,000. In fact, when I checked this evening, they numbered 102,758 — are probably growing fast.

There’s a reason. The DIA is offering its Facebook fans free admission during the month of March. Furthermore, one such pass admits four people. Coming off a strong turnout for “Rembrandt and Jesus,” this is smart marketing. (see update, below.)

The press release cites Museum Analytics, a website that tracks museums’ social-media audiences, for comparison numbers. It says that, as of Feb. 28, only six U.S. art museums have more Facebook fans than the DIA, and they are all in New York.

The Museum of Modern Art has the largest number among museums worldwide, with 978,838 fans when I checked, while the Met has 610,000. The Whitney Museum of American Art has 145,317, the DIA said.

Detroit also stacked itself up against non-NYC museums (I did not double-check these):  Art Institute of Chicago, 97,095; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 56,280; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 32,612; Cleveland Museum of Art, 22,168; and Toledo Museum of Art, 31,545.

I checked a few others: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 20,633; Seattle Art Museum, 32,807; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a surprisingly low 78,818, and the Dallas Museum of Art, 28,748.

These numbers are changing all the time — and spending a lot of time and effort to build them is probably over-rated. But the DIA was enterprising when, on Feb. 24, it announced the free pass offer with a goal of reaching 100,000. On that day, it had just over 97,000 fans.

The point is conversion — I’ll look for press release that says how many fans took up the DIA’s offer and visited the museum’s stellar collection. Here’s what else they’ll see.

UPDATE: Here are some specifics on the “Rembrandt and Jesus” exhibition at the DIA:

–116,392 visitors to the show
–More than 4,800 new and renewed memberships were purchased during the run of the exhibition
–CaféDIA saw an almost 50% increase in customers.
–Visitors came from 48 states, including Hawaii and Alaska. Group sales were robust, and tours were booked as early as last spring. In addition to metro Detroit, groups came from Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and Windsor, Canada.
–Private third-party rentals for the show: 22 bookings and a total of 1590 visitors. Some of the organizations that booked private events include the Harvard Club of Eastern Michigan, Archdiocese of Detroit, University of Pennsylvania, and the College of Wooster in Ohio.
–Both the hard and soft cover exhibition catalogs sold out, as did the postcards that feature the DIA’s Face of Jesus. Very strong store sales, period, especially for Dutch candies (!).

Photo Credit: The DIA’s Great Hall, Courtesy of the museum

 

 

The Ghent Altarpiece: Ready For Its Close Up

Of all the art works in the world, the Ghent altarpiece is one of the most admired — and now it will perhaps be one of the most studied, certainly the most studied from afar.

The Getty Foundation on Friday announced that it was making available a website that will allow deep technical study of the 1432 work by Hubert and Jan can Eyck. Viewers can zoom in and look at all of the oak panels in macrophotography, infrared macrophotograpy, infrared reflectography and x-radiography.

Here’s what the Getty did: “Each centimeter of the altarpiece was scrutinized and professionally photographed at extremely high resolution in both regular and infrared light. The photographs were then digitally “stitched” together to create highly detailed images which allow for study of the painting at unprecedented microscopic levels. The website itself contains 100 billion pixels.”

Those high-definition digital images are now available to all on a site called Closer to van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece. You can zoom in and you can dispay different any two images from the panels side by side. I pasted an example at the bottom of this post, an image using digital macrophotographs (left) and digital infrared reflectograms (right).

The site takes some getting used to: it sometimes takes a little time to load the images. When I played with it today, though, I was able to go behind the picture, so to speak. The image upper right is the virgin’s crown in infrared macrophotography, while the image at left here, is an infrared reflectography image of part of the singing angels’ panel.

While I enjoyed my exploration, I think the site will be most useful to scholars, which is a good thing.  (There’s a good ‘how to use this site’ section.)

 The photography was made possible by a dismantling of the altarpiece for emergency conservation work. But it will also inform the comprehensive cleaning/restoration that begins next September.

The Getty paid for much of the website, but the whole project is a collaboration with the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage, Lukasweb, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Last July, when the Getty’s study was underway, the Los Angeles Times had this to say by way of background.

Leonardo At The Movies: Lessons For The Future — And News

Most of you, I’m guessing, did not travel to London to see Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan at the National Gallery (which I’ve written about here and here). Neither did I.

So I was very curious to see Leonardo Live, in HD, the movie version. It was simulcast live to movie theaters in the U.K.on the night of the exhibition’s opening, and now it is being shown here in the U.S. and in other countries, mainly last Thursday. But I went to a showing at NYU on Tuesday night, where my friend Robert Simon, the dealer who has been involved with the newly attributed Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, representing the owners, made a little news. More about which in a minute.

First the movie: it’s worth seeing, but it is flawed. On the pro side, it explains how the exhibition came to together, a bit about the conservation of the National Gallery’s Madonna of the Rocks, including how the chief framer purchased a new period frame in Italy and made up the missing pieces, and gives a pretty good tour of the galleries, along with background on each painting and on Leonardo himself. That was a scripted in advance.

On the negative side is almost all the unscripted material. The two anchors, especially during impromptu interviews, try to whip up excitement in a way that rings false. Their questions are often insipid, frequently trying to plumb whether Leonardo’s works are “relevant” today. (I will refrain from being sarcastic about that.) The producers’ choice of interviewees — with the exception of curator Luke Syson, art historian Evelyn Welch and and the aforementioned conservator (Larry Keith), chief framer and perhaps one or two others — is dreadful. How could there be many more? There are — one for each painting and the Burlington Cartoon. There’s an Anglican bishop, who calls the artist “da Vinci,” a composer or two, an actress… etc. They are mostly uninformative, at best.

Should you see it? Probably.  (Here’s a little preview.)

There’ve been hints that producers, eying the success of Metropolitan Opera simulcasts, want to do more of these for once-in-a-lifetime exhibits. But should future producers in this genre do it differently? Also yes. It seems the makers this time were afraid to have too many “experts,” lest they turn off ordinary people. But none of the experts in this movie — except Charles Nicholl, one of Leonardo’s biographers – spoke in high falutin’ language. Nicholl’s final statement, or rather the face he made at the end, was greeted with laughter on Tuesday night. People can see through his condescension.

Now to the news: Simon was interviewed in a Q&A after the viewing, and one member of the audience asked whether we New Yorkers will have a chance to see Salvator Mundi.  Simon didn’t promise, but he essentially said he’s talking with… he didn’t say.

But Luke Syson, the exhibition’s curator, has moved to the Metropolitan Museum* from London. My betting is that’s where it would go.

Photo credit: Leonardo Live

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

 

 

The van Gogh Exhibit: Where’s The App? A Lost Opportunity

A comment, from MarkCC in Austin, on The New York Times website, following Roberta Smith’s review of van Gogh Up Close at the Philadelphia Art Museum:

Fabulous! Where’s the app? I probably won’t make it to Philly to see the exhibition but if it was an app it would be the next best thing. I could see the paintings on my flat screen, I could zoom in on them almost as close as I want. I’d even be willing to pay an “admission” price.

You see a lot of uninformed and sometimes stupid comments on the web, following many articles and reviews, and this occasion was no exception. Take a look at the comments for yourself.

But MarkCC — from more than 1,400 miles away, afterall — has a point. PaulCommetX also chimed in with this:

How sad it is that painting and sculpture are still in the dark ages when it comes to the internet. We should be able to “rent” art on iTunes or Amazon – the works displayed on large HD flat screens in great detail. It’s ironic that we can enjoy music in the most technologically advanced way but the visual arts are closed to us except for mousy little pictures that do no justice to the original works.

I looked on the Philadelphia Museum website to see what is available. There’s a good range of programs, and a place for discussion of the exhibit, but that’s about it.

I’m going to get to Philadelphia to see this exhibit, but I wish Mark CC could access the catalogue, or something, with an app. I went to Amazon to see if the catalogue is available on Kindle — nope.  How about the Barnes and Noble Nook? Nope.

I know museums are stretched, but here’s a case where reaching out to the public via technology could really have been worth it.

 

 

Ariana Huffington To Museums: Don’t Forget Your DNA

Arianna Huffington posted an item about museums on her blog yesterday that held two surprises.

ArianaHuffington.jpgFor one, although she is clearly a person interested in the arts, someone who once wrote a book about Picasso, it never occurred to me that she thought much about museums. Or, as she revealed, that she would be invited to speak to a group of “museum presidents and directors” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But she is certainly a successful entrepreneur, and she was out in front of other media groups on new media. So there you are.

The second surprise, though, was more interesting. Huffington called herself “a complete evangelist for new media and for institutions adapting as fast as possible to changes new technologies are bringing to our world.”

And yet, she advised caution, saying that she was reticent about urging museums to expand audiences and enrich the museum experience via social media.

…the danger of social media becoming the point of social media — connection for connection’s sake, connection to no end — is one museums need to particularly guard against. Reducing the museum experience to more apps providing more data is just as laughable as reducing the experience of going to church down to parishioners tweeting: “At church, pastor just mentioned loaves and fishes, anyone have some sushi recs for later?” Or whipping out their iPad to quickly look up the fact that the Sermon on the Mount took place near the Sea of Galilee, which, following a link, I see is the lowest freshwater lake in the world… I should totally tweet that!

Huffington praised LACMA’s “reading room” and the Metropolitan Museum’s timeline of art history, among other tech initiatives. Then she said:

But if museums forget their DNA and get their heads turned by every new tech hottie that shimmies by they will undercut the point of their existence. Too much of the wrong kind of connection can actually disconnect us from an aesthetic experience.

I agree, and I hope museums approach technology not necessarily cautiously — for we are all allowed to make mistakes, so long as we are prepared to admit them and reverse them — but very thoughtfully, not willy-nilly.

Huffington made two other comments which I applaud. She very carefully phrased her description of museums as “institutions dedicated to what is often seen as elitist high art.” That indicates that she does not see “high” art as elitist, and neither do I.

Second, she talked about the “fourth” human instinct, beyond survival, sex and power, as one that “drives us to art and religion. That instinct is just as vital as the other three but we rarely give it the same kind of attention.”

Yes. That’s the instinct art museums should attempt not only to satisfy but also to highlight.

Here’s the link to Huffington’s post, which has more about her thinking.

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