Museum blogging is rapidly growing, but you’d hardly know it reading the New York Times‘ article on web use in the special Museums section today: the only blog listed is the Walker’s. No reBlog or Eye Level, Pulitzer Contemporary or the Katzen, or any of the handful of other art museums that are testing bloggy waters. But the article does reiterate what I think is an important point for all museums considering launching blogs–make an effort to resist the impulse to micromanage blog content. Aside from some common-sense blog rules–don’t bash other institutions, minimize expletive use, resist gossiping about co-workers, f.ex.–we at the Walker are given fairly wide berth to use blogs for what they are, an informal, human medium. And, thankfully, it comes straight from the top (Kathy Halbreich tells me this democratic approach is the lasting legacy of former New Media Director Steve Dietz). From the Times:
“We had to learn to relinquish our curatorial authority, to get noninstitutional voices,” said Kathy Halbreich, the director of the Walker. “The blog gives us a multiplicity of voices.”
Robin Dowden, who runs the Walker site, said that in addition to being educational, it helps promote a community. “In the beginning we were a bit afraid,” she said. “But one thing we realized is that our audiences are smart and they want to be engaged.” As a result, the Walker does not edit what bloggers contribute.
For more, check out Eric’s series The State of Museum Blogs or conference notes by Eric, Brent and Nate from Museums & the Web last week.
The Regional Archaeological Museum in Agrigento, Italy, is enlisting a robot to lead visitors on tours of the facility. Outfitted with wheels, a keyboard, a monitor, video camera and sensors, Cicerobot will help visitors navigate the museum and provide information on the exhibits:
Harris Dindo, part of the science team at Palermo University that developed the robot, said: “It uses the technique of latent semantic analysis, which means it can answer many of the questions tourists throw at it and have intelligent interaction with them.”
ZDNet has more. Via SmartMobs.
Here’s an interesting bit of art technology: Japanese Art Scene Monitor reports that one of Japan’s largest printing companies is releasing a slideshow of art by Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Homma, Kenji Yanobe, and others for viewing on iPods. The Artstar project comes on CD and includes on music track plus 175 images, from drawings to photographs. Or in some cases, meta-photographs: “[Takashi] Homma has taken photographs of his photographs, creating 167 deliberately low-fi images, perhaps in a humorous acknowledgement of the iPod’s limitations as a visual media.”
Above: works by Yoshitomo Nara. (Thanks, Lynn.)
Artnet invited curators and artists to list their predictions for the new year. The list runs from the cryptically grim (Maurizio Cattelan: “Things can only get better.”) to the absurd (Aura Rosenberg, who references the recent Walker gig Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30: “The producers of Sesame Street will approach Dan Graham about directing a new puppet segment called “Wild on Sesame Street.”). But one item, from frequent Artnet contributor Charlie Finch, stands out.
Glenn Lowry will head the Metropolitan Museum, Kathy Halbreich will head MoMA, and Gary Garrels will head the Walker Art Center.
Does he know something we don’t?
According to SmartMobs, SFMOMA is offering a $2 admission discount to museum visitors who present an mp3 player loaded with their Artcast files. They’re also hosting an “Artcast Invitational,” in which artists and wannabe curators can submit their own podcasts. Winning recordings will win a membership and get a slot in SFMOMA’s podcast rotation.
Here at the Walker, Art on Call is going strong. Filmmakers in the Women with Vision festival will be using the system–which is a cellphone-based audio guide that can also be downloaded as a podcast on the Walker site–to share their musings during the 13th annual edition in March. And commentary from architects featured in our exhibition Some Assembly Required: Contemporary Prefabricated Houses are now available as mp3s, podcasts and via cellphone.
Walker on Wheels, a mobile art lab designed by Atelier van Lieshout, brought artmaking activities to local neighborhoods, but the Netherlands’ Pleinmuseum takes the idea to a new level: it’s a transportable art center that can be plopped down in the center of a city. Designed by René van Engelenburg, it was created to open up to the life of the city--literally:
During daytime, the pavilion remains closed and as such symbolically refers to the ‘white cube’, the paradigmatic model of the modernist museum. After sunset, the cube opens itself hydraulically and forms a dynamic architectural installation that embraces space. The white walls become projection screens that continually take on new appearances, like the skin of a chameleon. In this manner, Pleinmuseum becomes a temporary stage for visual communication; a platform through which artists and designers can communicate with a broad audience.
As We-Make-Money-Not-Art reports, the museum toured to cities in the Netherlands and Belgium last summer, and a European tour is in the works.
With Ang Lee discussing Brokeback Mountain here tonight and a Warhol show in the galleries, this seems particularly apropos: The Smoking Gun posts FBI documents from 1968 in which they were investigating whether Andy Warhol was involved with the interstate transportation of obscene material. The offending film, scoped out by two agents at a San Francisco festival, was a gay cowboy saga called Lonesome Cowboy. As TSG writes, “Though not as polished as Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert, the agents still get two thumbs up for delivering this marvelously entertaining report.”
From January 19 through 26, the Walker hosts “Factory Films,” a series of Warhol’s early films. Alas, Lonesome Cowboy won’t be screened.
