Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Technology

Here’s What Art Museums Need: A Selfie Ban

That’s not my idea, just in case you were rolling your eyes. It’s the brainstorm of U.K. Arts Council chairman Sir Peter Bazalgette; my only concern is the limit he placed on it — one hour a day.  Just kidding. 

LouvreBut Bazalgette has a point. Neither he nor I are against photography in museums; I take my own photos all the time in museums. Most of the time, what other people are doing doesn’t bother me a whit. But you see those photos of the Mona Lisa gallery at the Louvre (as at left), with some people riding piggyback on others to get a better view, it makes one wonder about how far people will go.

Hence Bazalgette’s comparison of a one-hour ban to the quiet car of a train. It’s not perfect analogy, obviously. I may not be able to go to a museum during the one-hour ban, but there’s a quite car on most trains nowadays. But it’s worth thinking about. Here’s what else he said, as reported by The Telegraph:

Clarifying it would rely on members of staff policing the galleries and reminding people, he added: “But at least people would understand there’s a rule. On the whole, I’m in favour of sharing it as widely as possible.”

Speaking on LBC radio, to presenter James O’Brien, he said galleries and museums had adapted to the ubiquity of technology.

“Their poor curators and people standing there in uniform have had this rule and they tell people not to take photos and they’re fighting a losing battle and they’ve just given in,” Sir Peter said.

“There are some issues, I believe, about flashes and the quality of prints and things, but that’s a relatively minor issue. Do you know something? I’m completely in favour.”

 

 

Take Control of The Tate, With A Robot, After Dark

If an interactive experience with art is all the rage these days — and to some people it is — the latest project (I don’t know what else to call it) at the Tate in London is both in vogue and new. I think — at least I’ve not heard of anything like this.

TateAfterDarkRobotIt’s called After Dark and it just won the inaugural IK Prize, which is going to be awarded annually by the Tate to a project that “celebrates digital creativity and seeks to widen access to art through the application of digital technology.” (That’s per the press release.)

After Dark actually has an interesting, worthy goal: it attempts, using robots and the computer screen, to “re-create the experience of being alone in the gallery after dark.” Anyone who has had the privilege of a quiet, after-hour experience in a museum would want to do that. So:

This online experience invites people all over the world to view Tate Britain’s galleries online at night through four camera-equipped robots roaming the gallery spaces, connecting audiences with art in the BP Walk Through British Art. Live online for five consecutive nights from 13 August, the project will allow the public to view the robots on their journey through the artworks and a number of visitors will be able to remotely control their movements. A first-person, real-time video feed and live commentary will be streamed to all visitors on the After Dark website. This is the first project of its kind in a museum or gallery setting.

I tuned in for a short time tonight tapping the four video feeds to “watch live,” and listened to not-very-interesting chatter, only to have “them” (whoever they were) take a break. (I later learned that the project is live only from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. UK time.)

The project invites anyone, anywhere to take control of one of the robots — by filling in a form (saying why you want to do it) on the website, you might be selected “at random intervals.”  After Dark warns:

The robots are choosy about their controllers. For your best chance to be picked you should:

– Avoid typing in an obscene name
– Have a good internet connection and a permissive network
– Use the latest version of the Chrome browser
– Let them know the name of your current location

A design studio called The Workers (Tommaso Lanza, Ross Cairns and David Di Duca) came up with this project. They created the robots, which come with lights, a camera, sensors and motors, with space engineers.

As kind of a demo, they enlisted Colonel Chris Hadfield, a former commander of the International Space Station, to be the first commander of the robots. They captured that, with some explanation of the project, and put it up online here on YouTube. If you stick around to the end, you might be pleased by the final comment.

But I was rather disappointed by my time “watching live.” Maybe it will get better as more people learn how to best use this device.

You have a few nights to try it.

 

 

The Future Of Art Book Publishing Is Here

Wow! Today I had a look at the first digital-only publication of the Museum of Modern Art,* and I can really see — even after only a short time of experimentation — how much digital technology can do for art books.

PicassoCubism_cover-300x400The book, Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912-1914, comes in iPad or PDF form. Here’s the official description, from the press release:

Edited by Anne Umland, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Blair Hartzell, independent art historian and curator, it embraces the innovative features and infinite real estate of the digital format in order to present new scholarship on a breakthrough moment in the history of Cubism and twentieth-century art. [This] …cross-disciplinary project…presents in-depth studies of 15 objects made by Picasso between 1912 and 1914….

So how is it different? For a start, there’s an easy jump from text to source. Footnote numbers appear in red, click on it, and you go right to the footnote. The trip back to the text is not as simple. it’s manual, but I suspect that will be fixed in future digital books.

UPDATE: MoMA tells me that ” if you click on the red numbers again while you’re in the footnotes, it’ll take you back to the page you were on.” Good — but that was not intuitive.

Better are the thumbnail images in the margins. Click on them and they popup as enlargements.

For each work of art, here’s a description of how the book “works”:

Each of this publication’s fifteen chapters is devoted to a single object created by Picasso between 1912 and 1914. Each chapter has six components: Portfolio of Images, Essay, Conservation Notes, Provenance, Selected Exhibitions, and Selected References, accessible through the persistent navigation bar running along the bottom of each page. The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of the artwork discussed and can be paged through in sequence, from beginning to end. Alternatively, chapters (along with front and back matter) can be accessed through the Table of Contents. Tapping or clicking a comparative figure brings up a full-page view of that image, with caption. Selected artworks (the artist’s
Guitar constructions) may be “rotated,” or viewed in the round.

All true, as I was beginning to discover with Picasso’s Guitar on a Table, from 1912. It was fun to click on the nav bar, going from “recto” to “verso” to “raking” to “UV” to “Reflected IR” to”Transmitted Ir” to “X-ray.” Then I had to leave my office and go home.

MoMA had warned me that “it has to be read with Adobe Reader or Adobe Pro in order for all the features to work.” I do have Adobe at home — not X, not XI, which is apparently what I need. Many features, like the flipping I described above, didn’t work in Adobe X.

I know that I could just download that, and get back to my exploration. But not tonight, as I write this. Suffice to say, this is a very interesting development in art books, the beginning of a new future in art books.

Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912-1914 sells for $24.99. For the iPad app, go to the App Store. For the enhanced PDF version, which can be read on a laptop or desktop, go to MoMA’s online store. It’s a big file — almost 348 MB. It took a few minutes to download. On first glance, it’s worth it.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of MoMA 

*I consult to a foundation that supports MoMA

Try This NYT Web App To Track Art Coverage Trends

Who is mentioned more often in pages of The New York Times from its start in the 1850s through 2011?

  • Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci?
  • Van Gogh, Degas or Gauguin?
  • Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois or Mary Cassatt?
  • Impressionism or Modernism?
  • Monet or Manet?

You can see for yourself how the Times chronicled art trends — or any other trends — with a new web app called Chronicle. It allows you and me to tap into “Visualizing language usage in New York Times news coverage throughout its history” to discern trends.

chronicle-logo

 

 

 

 

Big hat-tip to Hyperallergic, which did a few tests (not those above, which are mine) several days back, testing things like “contemporary” versus “modernism” and groups of contemporary artists. See them here.

The answers to the questions I posed were not so predictable:

  • Michelangelo
  • Van Gogh, then Degas
  • Louise Bourgeois, then Mary Cassatt
  • Modernism
  • Manet

I’d have thought that Monet would have beaten Manet, but this one test has a flaw. I used Claude Monet as the search term because there was once a big jewelry brand named Monet. But I am not sure that the Times consistently used Manet’s first name in English or French… a quandary.

You can also click on a year to see articles from that year.

This doesn’t prove anything, of course. But it’s an indicator of what the general public, in the East, at least (and in years past maybe more broadly, given the New York Times syndicate distribution, which I’m guessing has decreased in total circulation distribution, but maybe not).

 

Museum-Going: Getting Even More Virtual

Last fall, I made a note to myself about an app made for the landmark exhibition at Houghton Hall in England, country home of Sir Robert Walpole (1676-1745), which brought back about 60 paintings from the Hermitage and elsewhere — they’d been sold, but were reunited for the first time in more than 200 years. The full story is here.

789071edbf77686eeb8062dd50a61d50The app is relevant again because soon the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will open a national tour here of  Houghton Hall: Portrait of an English Country House — it’s not the same as the real thing, but this exhibit:

…assembles more than 100 objects in settings that combine paintings, porcelain, sculpture, costume, metalwork, and furniture to evoke the stunning rooms at Houghton Hall. Among the highlights are great family portraits by William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, and John Singer Sargent; several dozen pieces of Sèvres porcelain; rare R. J. & S. Garrard silver objects; and unique furniture by William Kent. Following the Houston presentation, the exhibition travels to cities including San Francisco and Nashville.

So now those who get to Houston for that, and anyone, really, can sample the app, made by Wide Eyed Vision, and see how they compare. There’s a scene from the app here.

Tudor Jenkins, who founded Wide Eyed Vision in 2007, was interviewed about the app by Culture24, and said “…that, thanks to lighting and high quality shoot, his app “sometimes makes it easier to see artefacts than actually in the room.” Culture24 concluded:

This is borne out by my own explorations on an iPad. The app is engrossing, immersive and loaded up with curatorial info. You could spend as long here as you might do in the Hall itself. The playability of Jenkins’ product reflects his belief that the technical side, “should be unnoticeable and an app should reflect the quality of the exhibit and the exhibition.”

Later, the piece said that “Clearly app consumers are paying for a keepsake as well as a guide. But Jenkins is quick to point out that apps like his are only ever complements to an exhibition catalogue. ‘They offer a different functionality; the catalogue will be consumed in different ways.’ ” I’m glad he said that, and wodner if he would add they are also only complements to visiting the real thing (for those who can).

The app is free in the Apple store, though when I checked today, there were no product reviews. It does not seem there were many takers, at least in the U.K. Let’s see if Americans take it up.

My own feeling is that I don’t think seeing this on an iPhone is much use, though perhaps the larger-screen iPad is.

Photo Credit: The Stone Hall at HH, courtesy of MFAH