Is the increasing digital reality of museums any more real now that the New York Times has picked it up twice in a week?
Growing up in the DC area with New-York-born parents it was easy to think that nothing really existed until it was reported in the New York Times, or, in a stretch, Time magazine. (Yes, Millennials, it was once important.) Working in the New York museum world for the past [mumble-mumble] years only reinforced that, and maybe added “written about in The New Yorker” and “spoken about on NPR.”
So it was exciting to see that the Met, which sometimes gets the reputation of a limestone edifice, has been in the New York Times a few times recently for its ongoing digital transformation, whatever that might mean.
One story, “Museums Morph Digitally,” mentions the Met among other institutions—MoMA, the soon-to-be-reopening Cooper Hewitt and its amazing pen, the greater Smithsonian presence in DC. The article also discusses art-focused augmented-reality projects at Stanford University. There’s even a mention of Watson, the IBM computer that did really well at “Jeopardy!” (That sound you hear is a million curators rolling their eyes.) What exactly does it mean for a museum to morph?
What’s interesting is that the article cites the Met’s deputy director for collections and administration Carrie Rebora Barratt emphasizing that digital hasn’t hurt attendance or the museum experience, which can encompass those who want to use their devices and those who just want to wander through galleries. That of course is good news, though the question is, just who is that supposed to be reassuring—Luddite members or museum administrators and trustees?
The other Times story was a follow-up by the same writer, Steve Lohr, entitled “Digital Lessons from the Museum and Art World.” As if nodding extra-hard to digi-skeptics, he says, “As in most overview articles, some people interviewed were quoted in the piece and other voices were left out. The usual reason is for space and the related reason of sticking closely to the story line.”
Let’s get meta! His digital extension of a print-ish article includes two digital “voices,” those of the director of astro-visualization at the American Museum of Natural History, describing the very, very cool Digital Universe project, which uses big data to fill in a map of that biggest of data sets, the universe. (Okay, I guess the multi-verse is bigger. “It’s data all the way down,” to paraphrase.) The project was also the centerpiece of a very cool “Hack the Universe” event at AMNH last weekend (check out the hack-a-thon’s twitter feed at #hacktheuniverse). The other additional voice comes from Google’s data arts team, with a link to its Johnny Cash project. (Sounds like a good time to be a “project manager”.)
The point here isn’t that museums are doing great digital stuff (you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t believe it). It’s that perhaps this trend, years old, is finally reaching the most mainstream of the writing about the arts. The existence of tablets doesn’t scare the readers of print any longer. How many of us still provide long-distance tech support to parents trying to program their VCRs?
That this all is coming from the Times is slightly ironic, considering the role digital has had in its recent staff shakeups, including the firing/departure of executive editor Jill Abramson back in May. The “leaked” internal report on the need to improve the paper’s adoption of digital in the newsroom itself became required reading.
Museums know they’ve gone digital. What’s important to remember is that they haven’t stopped being analog. If the Times can find the point of digital among all the physical art, then we may be doing something right. If the Times acknowledges that it still has a ways to go to make digital work for something as fleeting as news, then we know we have a ways to go as well.
PS: Hope to see you all at the Museum Computer Network in Dallas next week. I’ll be on two panels, and Beyond the Printed Page’s Greg Albers will be on one. Check it out!