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No Detail Goes Unnoticed When Art Is a Click Away

January 29, 2015 | In the Press

From The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/arts/design/art-museums-are-increasingly-adding-their-collections-online.html?_r=0)

The construction of new art museum buildings like that of the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan’s meatpacking district naturally receives a lot of attention. But there’s another kind of construction going on that tells more about where museums are at and where they are going than any shiny new edifice: their websites. That might sound surprising to anyone not professionally involved in museum work, but if you want to know how museums are changing their philosophies and programs in a time of increasing financial pressure and the continuing rise of private museums likeEli Broad’s in Los Angeles, websites are the most visible and informative places to look.

With their constantly evolving capabilities for representing art and effecting communication, websites are actually driving forces in how museums are adapting to changing times. In 2013, the excellent site of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis posted a white paper by Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, summing up discussions about the future of museums by art museum directors. In it he wrote, “The external force of the Internet and social media — combined with museums’ own efforts to create more interactive educational and exhibition programs — leave no doubt that the two way relationship between the museum and its audience has the potential to reshape the future of art museums in ways not yet envisioned.”

One thing you can say for sure about museum websites is that they’ve become much more useful. Many museums have put their entire collections online, and many more, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, are in the process of doing so. Recently the Whitney Museum of American Art put itscollection of more than 21,000 objects by more than 3,000 artists online in an exceptionally easy-to-use format, with pages of thumbnails in alphabetical order. It’s fun to scroll through to see who the favorites have been and to discover artists you have never heard of and wonder whatever became of them. Some sites, like the one for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, also provide essays on particular pieces, like Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “The Harvesters” (1565). The Met has the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, too, which offers more than 900 scholarly, thematic essays on just about every aspect of world art, illustrated with nearly 7,000 objects from the museum’s collection. Regularly supplemented and updated, it makes art history textbooks like Janson’s nearly obsolete.

Museum websites go beyond just words and images. They have videos of artists, curators and scholars discussing works. On the Whitney’s site Jeff Koons expounds on his sculpture “Play-Doh” in a video. On the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Multimedia page Hans Haacke discusses art and politics in his work.

Websites are great for people who can’t travel or who might happen to be snowed in. The Louvre’s has an exceptionally informative feature on the“Mona Lisa.” Accompanied by audio commentary, it shows details you wouldn’t be able to see in person — including the back of the painting. The Vatican’s site has a truly amazing means of studying the Sistine Chapel from every angle.

A relatively new development is the publication of online exhibition catalogs. Last year the Art Institute of Chicago published online “James Ensor: The Temptation of Saint Anthony” (1887), which examines a complex drawing of about 70 inches by 60 inches rendered on 51 glued-together sheets of paper. It has the usual scholarly essays, but also, most remarkably, a high-resolution image of the drawing that reveals details that otherwise would elude naked-eye observation of the real thing.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington has “Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century,” in which each of more than 120 paintings in the museum’s collection is pictured, with a zoom function for the images along with a short essay by Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. It also features numerous videos, including a fascinating, five-part film on Vermeer with commentary by Mr. Wheelock and narration by Meryl Streep.

The online catalog got a big push from a Getty Foundation program calledOnline Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, or OSCI, which, in 2009, awarded grants to eight art museums to create catalogs. Online collections for exhibitions and permanent holdings are bound to become standard for museums big and small.

A future that is arriving now is the crosscurrent exchange between museums. A page at the National Gallery of Art’s site about Rogier van der Weyden’s “Portrait of a Lady” (circa 1460) has an extensive discussion of the painting, as you might expect. But at the end, under the heading “Related Resources,” is something surprising: a link to an essay in the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, “Burgundian Netherlands: Court Life and Patronage.”

Sooner or later, all museum websites will be interconnected, so that any museum might take advantage of scholarship produced by any other. There’s no reason, after all, that the Museum of Modern Art shouldn’t link its Jackson Pollock page to Pollock pages of museums throughout the world.

Museums are further trying to expand and deepen audience engagement with blogs and other socially interactive programs. The Met’s blogs heading on its home page offers entries on a number of topics written by Met staff members. There’s also a blog for teenagers, where a recent post, “The Rebels in the Met,” offered a brief discussion of the current exhibition “Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection” by a member of the museum’s Teen Advisory Group. Where is all this going? The British Museum has a succinct answer in the concluding sentence of its About Us page: “The website is not merely a source of information about the collection and the museum, but a natural extension of its core purpose to be a laboratory of comparative cultural investigation.”

In London, the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, predicted in 2009 that while museums may be rooted in the buildings they occupy, they “will address audiences across the world — a place where people across the world will have a conversation. Those institutions which take up this notion fastest and furthest will be the ones which have the authority in the future.”

In the report “Tate Digital Strategy 2013-15: Digital as a Dimension of Everything” the document’s author, John Stack, the head of digital transformation at the Tate, also noted that “digital publications are expected to become a significant revenue stream in the future,” which could concern those who have been enjoying free online catalogs.

We’ve come a long way from the model of the museum as a sanctuary and repository of great artworks, where the main activity for visitors is quiet contemplation. You might begin to wonder, is the tail wagging the dog? As the demand for digital relevance permeates the museum, how does that influence the ways art is seen, thought about and valued? Do some kinds of art lend themselves more generously to digital representation and to “comparative cultural investigation” than others and therefore come to be preferred? Will global interconnectivity promote homogeneity and less idiosyncrasy?

And what about its effect on curators? Is the idea of the curator as a caretaker of objects, and as someone who expresses ideas by bringing together objects in galleries, outdated? Certainly, technocratic expertise will be required.

For museum visitors, what expectations do these developments arouse? It’s hard to argue against education, access and engagement by any means possible, but something is in danger of being lost in the flood of technologically mediated information: the idea of coming to the work of art naked, disarmed and open to whatever it expresses in its actual, nonvirtual being.

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