Museum 2.0: Brooklyn and Beyond

I went to the Brooklyn Museum over the weekend to see Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, newly installed in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. It was impressive and beautiful, as I had imagined it would be.

In the helpful little booklet that described each place setting and the woman to whom it was dedicated were the codes for the cell phone audio content. After dialing the gallery telephone number, the code provides access to audio that further explains each setting with comments by the artist, or a curator from the museum.

Cell phone tours are a fairly new concept, although the underlying purpose is nothing particularly different from traditional audio tours. But what is new is that visitors can also leave comments for each piece, and the museum plans to incorporate in some way these comments into future broadcasts.

This makes me wonder: where does the museum stand in the web 2.0 world of user-designed content? Can we (should we) take this idea further? Where is the appropriate place for a "playlist" or "rate this work"? Users who like Richard Diebenkorn also chose Mark Rothko..... Based on your artists' ratings, we recommend the work of Helen Frankenthaler.... In what ways can this approach be helpful?

CAA and Digital Images

At CAA in NYC a few weeks back, I attended a panel sponsored by the Visual Resources Association entitled "Practical Tips for the Classroom Instructor: Get What You Want from Digital Tools." It was a wonderful panel. The presentations were provocative and full of useful information, but what was perhaps most interesting was the reaction from the audience in attendance. It was glaringly obvious from the question and answer session how unprepared teachers seem for the digital revolution. There was a string of discussion-stopping questions like, "so if I want to digitize my slides where do I begin?"

Christine Sundt, a visual resource consultant on the panel, seemed to be speaking directly to this disconnect between those who are deep in the water and those still left standing on the shore when she said, "teachers should consider leaving the acquiring and manipulating of digital images to professionals." This is a striking comment. Does it represnt a new elitism or rather it is an honest appeal to the need to establish a standard of quality in digital images?

Of course, the question hangs like fire, where will the images come from? Are we to return to the publishing companies who are of late offering high quality images with new textbooks or pushed to licensing deals with the likes of Saskia?

in and out of the classroom

All this digital technology also enables us to teach/reach our students outside the classroom. They can watch an enhanced podcast on their iPods, or get daily emails with art history news. And these art history learners might not even be our own students. Christopher Witcombe, who has mainted the Art History Resources on the Web site for years, has begun a series of "Art History in Just a Minute" video podcasts. The Last Supper episode has been downloaded more that 20,000 since December 2006, and the Mona Lisa episode was viewed 300 times in the first 30 minutes it was available. How far can we reach?

Pixel Power: Has Anything Really Changed?

I love it all -- podcasts, rss, digital slides -- never met a wiki I didn't like. But do these things change the way we teach? Should they? I really value my interactions with my students, and I don't want any jpegs or gigabytes getting between us. What I think digital technology can do -- and what it is best at -- is to change the way our students learn.

Still a Place for Slide???

Along with the ongoing discussion of the logistics of transferring images to databases (an issue that is striking hard at all colleges and universities in the US and the world), I also wonder about the persistence of the slide as a necessity. Should they be kept? Should they be whittled down to a smaller, more imperative collection? Will they, and should they, ever be completely discarded?

I must admit to being somewhat old fashioned in respect to this, firmly believing that we should, for the foreseeable future, have at least a small, essential collection of slides on hand. While the availability of the digital image grows, it is still currently on shaky footing. The issue of copyright notwithstanding, there are the issues of collecting images, quality control of images, and consistent upgrading that must be done. While we are certainly witnessing the end of slide use as many of us knew it, I'm not sure that the time has come to completely abandon the slide as a backup to technology!

What's a Slide Projector Anyhow?

Teaching the Arts has changed forever in this digital age. This will be a space to discuss fresh ideas for the use of digital images and technology primarily in the classroom. We intend to discern a path forward to a new standard for the projection of digital images, presentations, and any other technological marvel that can improve our abiltiy to communicate to students in the classroom - and have fun doing it.
Welcome change. Join us as we go dithering about...