Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Technology

Freer-Sackler Digitization Project: A Modest Suggestion

The other day, the Freer and Sackler Galleries of the Smithsonian announced that it had digitized its entire collection and was putting it all online for all to see and use–with more than 90 percent of the images in high-definition resolution and without copyright restrictions for noncommercial uses–as of Jan. 1, 2015. This is good news, and I applaud the initiative.

TextileCapture-1But another sentence in the press release stopped me: “The vast majority of the 40,000 artworks have never before been seen by the public…”

Now, I know full well that many museums own works whose quality isn’t up to par–and they should not displace better works, just to be shown. I am also fully aware that some museums keep works for study–and the Freer-Sackler is one of them. The release says there are more than 10,000 items in the Freer Stufy Collection, including multiple pages of certain manuscripts, textile fragments and the like. This collection is “used by scholars around the world for scientific research and reference.” I tend to like the open storage areas some museums are using for some collections, though I have no information about what the public thinks about them.

But I think museum should make use of some items they “never” show. Are any lendable to smaller museums? Could any be pulled into a small touring exhibition? If so, museums should do these things.

And if not, why not devote a small area–even one case or one small wall–for a rotating showing of artworks that are “never” shown? Maybe these items could be paired with something similar that is worthy of hanging in the galleries. Would that help teach the public some connoisseurship?  It might even prove enlightening about deaccessioning.

Museums have become so creative at trying new things, they seem to say to us. How about trying something with works in their storeroom? Maybe they would even turn up some wonderful. There’ve been a lot of cases like that in recent years.

Photo Credit: Hutomo Wicaksono /Freer and Sackler Galleries

No Other Word For It: Fundraising Failure

The Phillips Collection crowdsourcing effort, an attempt to raise $45,000 in a month to support a website abut Jacob Lawrence, has failed miserably. When the drive ended on Dec. 10, only $2,988–a mere 7 percent of the goal–had been pledged. And that took 41 supporters, for an average contribution of about $73.

logo_color_lockedupAll of the background is here, in my previous post on the subject.

Why would this campaign fail? I can think of several possibilities, or a combination of some of them:

–Not enough visibility for the campaign. I checked the Phillips’s Facebook page and saw just three posts about the campaign. Now, I’m guessing there were emails to supporters, perhaps a little local press, maybe some Tweets? Whatever it was, it was likely not enough.

–An over-ambitious goal. Raising $45,000 in a month from the grass roots is hard and time. Raising it for a future website, which can’t/won’t be seen for months, is harder. And there was some skepticism about the full, $125,000 cost of the website–why so much?

–An artist whose name isn’t that well known in the public. Sad, but true.

–In the visual arts, crowdfunding is less than it’s cracked up to be, most of the time. Previously, we know that the Hirshhorn failed in its attempt to crowdfund an Ai Weiwei work: it raised $555 of a $35,000 goal. The Freer-Sackler tried it for its Yoga exhibition, but few of the links then in use work now. This one does work–it shows support from 616 donors, but no total donated. This article, however, says the Freer-Sackler raised $174,000 for the show, including $70,000 from Whole Foods.

Yoga has a vast following, though, and I’ll bet the Whole Foods connection helped, too.

I’m thinking that crowdfunding is a gimmick, and one that, most of the time, requires another gimmick to make it work.

That’s the new Phillips logo above, btw. I think I like it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Phillips Collection 

NPG Effort Raises Good Question Re: Crowdsourcing

About six weeks ago–and I missed it–the National Portrait Gallery started a crowd-sourcing initiative called Recognize that pitted three works in the collection against one another and asked the public to choose one. The other day, the Washington Post raised questions about it–appropriately, I think. The whole exercise seemed, my words not the Post’s, like a stunt in search of a mission.

Let’s  begin with the NPG’s description:

This November, the National Portrait Gallery will unveil a special crowdsourced wall in our galleries, called “Recognize,” as a place to highlight an important person in our collection. Every few months we will announce a new lineup of candidates for consideration and invite the public to vote on which one will be featured on the “Recognize” wall.

The first three choices:

James Meredith became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. His admission to “Ole Miss” in 1962 was a flashpoint in the civil rights movement.

Georgia O’Keeffe became one of the most dynamic and compelling artists of the twentieth century, known for both her large-scale paintings of detailed, magnified flowers and her kinetic cityscapes.

Bette Midler has earned many accolades for her various musical, theatrical, film, and television performances, including three Grammy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, three Emmy Awards, a special Tony Award, and two Academy Award nominations.

npg-collage-update.jpg__800x600_q85_cropOn what criteria were people to be voting? “Who will be recognized at the National Portrait Gallery for his or her contributions to American culture?’ And mention about the merits of the twp photographs and one poster in contention? Nope.

And, asked the Post, “Why these three seemingly disparate images?”

Interestingly, the blog post announcing the “contest” did not evoke a single comment. Two weeks later, in another blog post, the NPG announced the “winner.”

Of these three outstanding contenders, Georgia O’Keeffe received 43 percent of the votes, and so Arnold Newman’s portrait of her will appear on the Recognizewall in early November! The installation will be announced here.

The NPG did not say how many voted, but nevertheless declared the experiment a success (the Post said 3,829 votes were cast). As to the Post’s question about why these three images were chosen, the NPG offered “connective tissue” that was “Kleenex thin”:

Each had an anniversary during the time of the project, although none is a milestone. O’Keeffe’s 127th birthday would have been Nov. 15 (she was born in 1887) and Midler turns 69 on Dec. 1. Meredith became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi — a significant event in the civil rights movement — on Oct. 1, 1962, 52 years ago.

There’s no real harm in doing this kind of thing (except for the opportunity costs), but it just seems like a real stretch, a cheap stunt to “engage” more people. But the NPG’s answers to the these questions make it look rather desperate for “engagement.” Nothing drives people away more than desperation.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Does Crowdfunding Work? Not So Far

Back on Nov. 6, the Phillips Collection sent me an email about a worthy effort: it had started a crowd-funding campaign for a micro-website about Jacob Lawrence. It would feature “unpublished interviews between the artist and museum curators in 1992 and 2000, including one conducted just prior to the artist’s death.” The point, obviously, was to engage people in learning about Lawrence, particularly because the Phillips plans to present the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series (one image at left) in fall, 2016, following its presence at the Museum of Modern Art next spring.

JLMigrationThe site will have high-resolution images of the 60 panels in the series–which depicts the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World War I and World War II–with text explaining each work. It will also present archival photographs, sound clips and videos of musical and theatrical performances, plus historical events, illustrating “the life and times of Lawrence,”  and a lot about Lawrence’s life.

But the Phillips needed $125,000 for the sight, and decided to launch a month-long, grass-roots campaign for the $45,000 it had not raised privately. It started the campaign on Nov. 10 on the crowd-funding site Indiegogo.

It’s not going well. With 15 days left, it has raised only $1,675–or 4 percent of its goal. That came from 34 funders.

Now, it may true that crowd-funders wait till the last minute, the way auction bidders do. But the Phillips has a long way to go here. What went wrong? Perhaps the name is not “popular” enough.

The Phillips has a long tradition with Lawrence:

In 1942, museum founder Duncan Phillips expressed great enthusiasm for Lawrence’s Migration Series upon seeing it at the Downtown Gallery. That year, Phillips gave Lawrence his first solo museum exhibition, and soon after purchased the odd numbered panels. The Phillips has remained deeply committed to sharing and expanding Lawrence’s legacy and achievements with broad and diverse audiences.

  • In the 1990s, the Phillips organized an eight-city national tour of the complete Migrations Series. It also led a major study of Lawrence’s life through symposia, conferences, and interdisciplinary panels.

  • In 2000, Lawrence personally selected the Phillips to organize his retrospective. The highly-acclaimed exhibition premiered at the Phillips and traveled to five other major cities.

  • In 2007–08, the Phillips launched a five-venue NEA American Masterpieces touring exhibition featuring selections from the series. The tour brought Lawrence’s masterpiece to underserved communities throughout the US and was accompanied by a major educational outreach program.

I hope it does not end up with egg on its face with this campaign.

Museums “Adapt To the Digital Age” But…

All in all, I thought the lead article in Sunday’s NYTimes special section on the visual arts–Museums Morph Digitally–was good (it was written by my friend, Steve Lohr), though I wasn’t crazy about the line that “ museum curators and administrators …talk of …the importance of a social media strategy and a “digital first” mind-set.” Maybe digital is second, but surely not first, except perhaps to promote their actual collections.

Whitney-KoonsPlus, the whole article did not once use the word “selfie,” a bane of museums, imho. Except at the Whitney.

According to an article in last week’s Observer, The Whitney Begged Teens to Take Jeff Koons Selfies in Pro-Selfie Propaganda. 

As writer and artist Aaron Krach revealed via Twitter (right, right) the Whitney had been passing out pamphlets through its Youth Insights propaganda arm that instruct teens exactly how to share their love of the Whitney with the world. “KOONS IS GREAT FOR SELFIES” the bolded message reads. The museum goes on to do away with any respectability. “Take a selfie and post it on Instagram! Use: @whitneymuseum and #Koons #ArtSelfie”

Boldface mine. But when a paper like the Observer, which aims to be hip, mocks you, isn’t it time to rethink your actions?

Anyway, back to the Times article:

The museum of the future will come in evolutionary steps. But some steps are already being taken. Digital technologies being deployed or developed include: augmented reality, a sort of smart assistant software that delivers supplemental information or images related to an artwork to a smartphone; high-definition projections of an artwork, a landscape or night sky that offer an immersive experience; and 3-D measurement and printing technology that lets people reproduce, hold and feel an accurate replica of an object.

None of that threatens the purpose of museums, though attempts might suffer from poor execution, which would. But you can’t blame technology–not even for making selfies possible!

What I liked about the article in particular was the tone–there was none of the “rah, rah, technology rules” mindset. In one section, Colleen Stockmann, assistant curator for special projects at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, talks about augmented reality technology. The point, she said, “is to ‘give you more points of access into the artwork, so that it keeps you in the moment of looking, almost as if someone is guiding you through the painting or sculpture.’ ” That’s great.

You can read other examples in the story.

I’m going to give the last word here to Carrie Rebora Barratt, deputy director for collections and administration at the Met, which has had it rah-rah moments and its misfires in technology use, as well as successes. She said,

…there should be a range of viewing choices, guided by the principle…of “letting the content determine what we do, instead of letting the technology and devices lead the way.” Those experiences, she said, will run from “no tech” to “high tech.”

Agreed.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Observer