Sunday Reading
Posted by Steffen Böddeker
I’m still digesting my New York Times reading of last week, where Roberta Smith published an exceptionally frank article about the obligations - and recent failures - of New York museums and their contemporary art curators. She deplores recent solo exhibitions at the major museums as “dispiritingly one-note,” and reminds that “the goal in organizing museum exhibitions, as in … being an artist, should be individuation and difference, finding a voice of your own.”
“[The curators] have a responsibility to their public and to history to be more ecumenical, to do things that seem to come from left field.”
Not having seen most of the recent shows Smith references in person, I am mulling over the relevance her observations have to the online world of museums. And here - although I am nowhere near dispirited - her words resonate somehow. Much of the field is too homogenized, with museums mimicking each other in appearance, approach, and ambition. While there is a fair amount of innovation, most activity seems focused on catching up with new media or platforms: signing the museum up on Facebook at last, assigning someone to tweet something with some regularity, setting up and keeping up a blog, filming and posting lectures, creating a collection database with user tags, etc. Appropriating Smith’s words, I ask myself how many institutions are finding an individual approach to using these new media? How many are coming from left field online?
In a recent post (here), I called for museums to copy LACMA’s Reading Room. This may seem contradictory to what I am saying now, but it is not. What I encourage is that museums copy the effort of making available more archival material that is specific to the institution - not the particular curatorial approach or interface design seen in the Reading Room.
Smith closes with this call to action: “Message to curators: Whatever you’re doing right now, do something else next.” (A message I imagine addressed not only to curators but also to museum web teams, and myself for that matter.)
In this sense the article reminds me of a short talk by Derek Sivers recently posted on TED. At under 3-minutes it is worth watching as a quick reminder that all assumptions are worth questioning. In planning online efforts, consider all possibilities - including the value found in the exact opposite of what you may think is best.
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