museum as platform; curator as champion

Museum as Platform; Curator as Champion

Nancy Proctor, Smithsonian American Art Museum

ProctorN@si.edu 7 November 2009

Learning to sing in the age of social media

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Event Culture:

The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art

Copenhagen Doctoral School

of Cultural Studies

Department of Arts and Cultural Studies

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

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Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

United States

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Dr Ralph Stanley: Curator of the Song

http://drshow.org http://drralphstanley.comNancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu 3

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Are museums a fad?

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What is the Museum…in this Web 2.0 world of information on demand?

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• From presentation to performance

• From permanent to temporary

• From knowledge to events

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The American Art Museum

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The Museums…

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Photo by Mike Lee, 2007; from SAAM Flickr Group

Our audiences now access American Art through a wide range of platforms

beyond the museum’s walls and website

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The Museum has become a Distributed Network

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The Museum is transforming from Acropolis…

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… into Agora

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In & Out

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Out In

Stability/stodginess Change

Curators as experts Curators as collaborators & brokers

Monographs Stories

Control Collaboration

Web 1.0 Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0

– Curator David Allison, Chair of Information Technology & Communication, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

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Your museum is social media

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Tate Britain, 2007: How We Are: Photographing Britain

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Brooklyn Museum, 2008: Click! A Crowd-Curated Exhibition

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Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2009: Fill the Gap!

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Milwaukee Art Museum, 2009: American Furniture, Googled

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Torrance Art Museum, 2009: On Gonzo Curating

To engage others, to become more collaborative and interactive with outside curators and professionals worldwide, to see our programming develop more hand-in-hand with a global enquiry and with curators in different contexts with different aims and agendas, alongside fulfilling our obligation to visually and intellectually engage a myriad of different types of visitor….

http://www.torranceartmuseum.com/gonzocurating.php

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Who is a curator?

http://smithsonian20.si.edu/schedule_webcast2.htmlNancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu 19

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Powerhouse Museum: original online record, incomplete

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Powerhouse Museum: 1 week later…

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=248651Nancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu 21

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“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14-year-olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

– Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” 2009.

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And we need curation– but who is a curator?

While scholars and museum visitors contribute to the enrichment of curatorial practice through a social media dialogue, I do not share the view that using social media makes everyone a curator. Curators are the most trusted art experts, whose aggregated knowledge, critical thinking abilities, and aesthetic observations define the meaning and value of art.

– Neal Stimler, Metropolitan Museum of Art

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7 November 2009Nancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu 9 December 2008

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• Inspire us with their passion;Inspire us with their passion;

• Identify, research & preserve our Identify, research & preserve our cultural treasures…cultural treasures…

• And make them relevant to our And make them relevant to our lives;lives;

In the Agora, we need curators who:

7 November 2009Nancy Proctor, ProctorN@si.edu 9 December 2008

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• Help us see, read & think critically;Help us see, read & think critically;

• Curate the conversation;Curate the conversation;

• Take us from “Take us from “we we do the talking” do the talking” to “we help to “we help you you do the talking”.do the talking”.

In the Agora, we need curators who:

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Lining the song

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