Real Clear Arts

Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Technology

Museum Websites Are Getting Better, But I Have Two Pet Peeves

While I was checking around on museum websites the other day to see which ones would be open on Jan. 1 and which would not, I noticed that many museums have updated their websites in recent months, mostly for the good.  Some have been radically redesigned and show off their art handsomely. A few look a tad corporate to me. And everyone’s got moving images (which is bad news only if they take a long time to load).

Websites2But I noticed two big deficiencies. On some, it’s actually hard to find out visiting hours and, worse, admission fees. In a few cases, to find hours, I had to click three or four times to get to the page with information. For admission fees, some museum make visitors to their website go to the “Buy Tickets” section even before they disclose the cost of admission. That’s inexcusable, and I’d bet those museums have people turning away before they get there to find out the number.

This isn’t just my feeling: though I could not find a study of museum patrons, I did see a recent longitudinal study of the “mobile preferences” of arts patrons (admittedly, phones are not the only way people access museum websites, but it is one big way) by an arts consultant called Group of Minds, which appears to have focused on performing arts groups (it’s unclear). Group of Minds contacted 45,000 patrons of half-price/discounted ticket email lists in six cities. The survey received a response rate of 4.3%.

Group of Minds discovered that “Seventy percent of respondents said they would use their phone to look up arts events if given the opportunity, up from 45% in 2009.” And what the respondents wanted most was logistical information: address and directions to the event, parking information, and the like. You can read the whole survey here.

I can’t think of why it would be different for museums — people need easy access to logistical information.

My second beef is personal: it’s about the press links. Many don’t have a press office listed on the home page, where it belongs. Some museums do not disclose the names or phone numbers of their press representatives. There may be a general phone number, which inevitably leads to voicemail, and a general info@… or pressoffice@… email contact. Sometimes not even that.

Past press releases — forget about it. There might be the last half-dozen, say, but when I need to check something that happened a few years ago… no dice.

I find this lack of access hard to believe. I know press offices get nuisance calls from people who are not in the media. Guess what? So do reporters and people in other occupations.

Time was when reporters could put in a call or send an email and wait for an answer from someone… anyone. That’s over. Chances are, if I can’t get a name and contact point on your website, I’m moving on to the next museum, unless I absolutely need to start searching on the web for an old contact name. I don’t think I’m alone. If you want press — and the number of emails I receive suggests that you do — try to be a little more open with what you put online, please. Thank you.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Nitin360

 

Jim Cuno Takes On The Art History World

I’d never heard of an online publication called The Daily Dot until it was called to my attention yesterday because, of all things, the president of the Getty Trust — Jim Cuno — had written an op-ed piece for the site.  And in what seems strange to me, his piece has more Facebook likes (262 at this writing) than any other op-ed on the new opinion page – weird considering the esoteric subject.

But maybe, perhaps, not quite so weird because Cuno chastises art historians for being behind when it comes to digital technology, and the site is for web communities. His piece is headlined How Art History is Failing at the Internet. He writes:

…Of course we have technology in our galleries and classrooms and information on the Web; of course we are exploiting social media to reach and grow our audiences, by tweeting about our books, our articles, including links to our career accomplishments on Facebook and chatting with our students online.

But we aren’t conducting art historical research differently. We aren’t working collaboratively and experimentally. As art historians we are still, for the most part, solo practitioners working alone in our studies and publishing in print and online as single authors and only when the work is fully baked. We are still proprietary when it comes to our knowledge. We want sole credit for what we write.

Cuno then goes on to compare the ethos of conservation scientists versus that of art historians — citing the Getty’s Closer to Van Eyck project on the Ghent altarpiece.

In short, humanists largely work alone and on timelines with long horizons. Scientists work together, experimentally, and publish quickly.

Rather, he writes:

…we should be experimenting with ways of compiling archives of formal and iconographic incidents across hundreds and thousands of images and then organizing and reorganizing them in ways that ask new questions and suggest new answers from cross-disciplinary and international perspectives.

To a certain extent, what Cuno writes is self-serving. To a certain extent, he’s also right, I think. Even if he’s mostly wrong, he’s taken up a worthy subject, though I think he could have found a better forum for it than he did. It’s a speech made for the College Art Association.

Photo Credit: Mel Melcon, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times

 

Now, From Google, A New Cultural Institute

Google, always after new content, continues to experiment with museums and other cultural institutions. Earlier this month, in a move that didn’t get much press, the Freer-Sackler at the Smithsonian became one of 17 partners collaborating with Google in a venture called the “Google Cultural Institute.” Billed as an initiative to “promote history, culture and art online,” the site offers a window on the contents of largely unseen archives — letters, photos, videos, manuscripts and the like.

In a way, it complements the Google Art Project (which was expanded last spring), except it’s about history,  not art. At the moment, there are 42 online historical exhibitions. Initially, at least, these focus on 20th century events. This doesn’t leave much room for art museums, but historical museums that also collect art could conceivably have a place on this project. The partners, according to Google, put the exhibitions — the “stories” — together for the site. Here’s Google’s explanation of  this project.

Of the 17 partners, the Freer-Sackler is the only art museum. Among the others are Getty Images, the Imperial War Museums, the LIFE Photo Collection, the Anne Frank House, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, and the Polish History Museum. They are listed on the site — click on Explore — though, personally, I found the whole thing a little hard to navigate (except for the listings of decades — that was easy and good).

Why the Freer-Sackler? Drawing on its archive of photographs from William Howard Taft’s “Mission to Asia” in 1905, it has crafted an inaugural offering called Imperial Portraits – the first in a series highlighting that Taft trip, “a three-month diplomatic trip led by Secretary of War William Howard Taft to China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines.” According to the Freer-Sackler, the mission “transformed the United States’ diplomatic and military presence in Asia.” The exhibition consists of “photographic portraits given to tour-member Alice Roosevelt, the eldest daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, by Asian heads of state who sought to sway global events through personal diplomatic exchange.” Here’s the link to it. It’s kind of fun, actually — short and sweet — but I could not copy any of the material to show you.

A few more details from the press release:

The Freer and Sackler Archives contributed approximately 74 historical items from a collection of photography given to the archives in 2010 by the granddaughter of Alice Roosevelt, Joanna Sturm. The online platform allows users to see the metadata accompanying each image and the ability to see rich details with deep-zoom technology.

I have a deep interest in archives, and I know there is more in them than one might suppose. For example, this Google project might dip into archives from museums, like the Metropolitan, the MFA-Boston, and others, that took part in archaeological expeditions in Egypt and the Middle East in the early 20th Century. They could use digitizing.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Freer-Sackler

Bernini: Sculpting In Clay — So Good I Want More, And Different

First, the good part: Bernini: Sculpting in Clay, which opens officially tomorrow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,* is a beautiful and very satisfying exhibition. It helps answer the question that comes naturally about masters and masterpieces: how did the artist do that? By bringing together about 40 of Bernini’s “clay sketches” and about 30 of the drawings Bernini made for some of his most famous works — the Four Rivers Fountain in the Piazza Navonna in Rome, the angels on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo there, among others – visitors will gain a window on how this genious transformed his ideas into reality.

These terracotta models have never been shown, the Met says in its press release, which is a mystery. They are wonderfully expressive; it’s a good thing they are in vitrines, because they cry out to be touched. They deserve to be seen.

Here’s another mystery: some 15 of them, if my memory serves, were borrowed from the Harvard Art Museums — all acquired in 1937. The Harvard museum’s online collections database lists 25 of the 28 Bernini pieces in its collection as being acquired that same year — with the notation “Alpheus Hyatt Purchasing and Friends of the Fogg Art Museum Funds.” Hyatt, a paleontology professor at Harvard, died in 1902; he must have left a bequest. That’s a guess.

I asked a couple people at the opening reception, and a few guessed that the legendary Paul Sachs was behind the purchase; he was, a search discovered, the associate director of the Fogg at the time. It could have been. Whoever it was made a great decision.

The Met, which installed this Bernini exhibition in the Lehman wing, also created exemplary educational materials to accompany the show. One large wall is covered with an explanation of using clay and modeling — it even tells us that terracotta clay is 14% water, but it never dumbs down; the text is illustrated with several photos, showing the tools Bernini would have used, the marking he made and how he used those points to create the correct dimensions for his sculptures, and so on.

Which brings me to my criticism: it’s hard to take in all the works and the information (especially when a reception in the Petrie Court upstairs is beckoning), and so today I went online hoping to review some of the didactic material from the show. But — so far at least — there’s nothing on the Met website from that great explanatory wall.

The website does offer the show’s video, “Bernini’s Transformation of Rome,” but it seems to me that the Met has missed an opportunity here. How much effort would it be to take the same info that’s on the walls and put it up on the web? Today, I couldn’t even check whether that 14% figure is correct, let alone spend more time digesting all one could learn about terracotta sculptures.

Maybe that’s coming.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Met

*I consult to a foundation that supports the Met

 

 

Is That A Strand of Hair In My Painting? Technology And Fakes

Don’t laugh if it is, and least not if we’re talking about Still Life with Peonies, a painting (left) that looks something like a van Gogh, but… no one is sure.  

Now, using technology that analyzes DNA, a conservator named Ester Monnik plans to assess a three-inch strand of red hair that she extracted from the painting, drawn from deep in the paint (!). She’ll compare it with DNA taken from van Gogh’s descendants.

All this is at the behest of Markus Roubrocks, a resident of Cologne, who is said to be a multi-millionaire art collector. He says he inherited the  painting from his father, and that it was found in Belgium in 1977 — “in an attic,” according to the Daily Telegraph. Roubrocks has shown the work before, getting validation from two “independent” art experts but a nay from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which the article says believes “the brush strokes are inconsistent with Van Gogh’s style, and therefore the painting is nothing more than an expert piece of forgery.”

I have not a clue as to whether or not this painting is real. It certainly has a crazy backstory, but so have other real paintings. I’m more interested in the techology and its implications. While developments like this suggest that we might solve more art-world mysteries in the future, they may also bring forward a lot of fancy fakes. Technology can make copying easier.

And, to hear some stories, it’s not that difficult now. Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a review of Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of An American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi. Perenyi — for three decades — “duped auction houses, dealers and collectors in the United States and Britain with hundreds of forged paintings by his own hand, ranging from pseudo 17th-century Dutch landscapes to watercolors mimicking those of Alexander Calder,” Jonathan Lopez wrote in his review. “…anybody with the slightest interest in painting or deception will find “Caveat Emptor” an engrossing read. ”

Lopez ought to know. He wrote The Man Who Made Vermeers, a biography of the art forger Han van Meegeren.

As it happens, the BBC is about to start a new series called “Fake or Fortune” in September, according to Art Fix Daily. In three episodes, Philip Mould uses forensic evidence to examine “paintings that may or may not be by Degas, Turner and Van Dyck.” Perhaps PBS will once again lean on the better art offerings of the BBC and bring the series here.