Although I was expecting some pushback when I published my Wall Street Journal review of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s technological transformation, I’ve been taken aback at how my Twitter “Notifications” feed has been flooded with reactions (way beyond what I posted in my Storify of the first tweets) from SFMOMA’s digital team, not to mention numerous other members of the tech tribe (including those at other museums).
Although relentless, the barrage has been, for the most part, civil. Reasonable people can (vehemently) disagree.
At this point, I’m not eager to add more grist to the Twitter mill. I had been planning to compose a second post about SFMOMA’s app and other technology, elaborating on the features that I liked (which I described briefly in my limited WSJ space). At this point, I need to allow everyone (myself included) to simmer down. (Maybe I’ll revisit this, after a grace period.)
For now, I’ll just mention that this Interpretive Gallery, enriching one’s understanding of the artists and works in the permanent collection, was a hit with me, and it was with younger visitors:
I particularly savored the video in which curator Walter Hopps dispelled Robert Rauschenberg‘s confusion over why Duchamp would have made knockoffs of “Fountain,” his iconic urinal readymade.
The reason, Hopps explained, was that Duchamp, near the end of his life, wanted to give his widow a means of financial support—works that she could sell.
In the interest of even-handedness, let’s give the other side in the app flap its say: I yield to Chad Coerver, SFMOMA’s chief content officer, and Keir Winesmith, head of web and digital platforms, both of whom generously devoted 90 minutes to discussing their work with me.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
Here, without comment, are excerpts from what they told me:
COERVER: Traditionally, museums have made the mistake of wanting to give you the story about an artwork, when all they really need to do is give you a story. We began saying, “These are seductions. They are nothing but the beginning of a relationship between the visitor and the artwork.” We were placing so much weight on the idea that we had to deluge them with all this information, when all we had to do is get them in the game with us….
We began engaging folks who had expertise but didn’t necessarily have expertise in art history. 99% of the people who come to the art museum don’t have a degree in art history. They’re never going to be familiar with the jargon.
But at the same time, in San Francisco everyone’s smart; everyone’s over-educated; everybody likes to geek out on things. So it was about: How can we offer a way that responded to that situation and broadened the set of voices that we were bringing to them in the museum?
WINESMITH: We’re trying not to alienate our traditional art audience. We don’t want them to have a bad experience, feeling that they’re being dumbed down or talked to in a way that’s disrespectful, so we needed to provide people a way to guide themselves.
COERVER: We kept using the metaphor: “Weekend NPR.” It’s smart, entertaining, doesn’t underestimate your intelligence, and most of all it wants to tell you a story that you’re going to get wrapped up into….
The goals are modest. The gigantic picture here is that museums have had to move from sites of authority to sites of experience: The exact same thing has happened to lectures in academia: Kids just don’t want to take them any more. They want a conversation; they want a seminar; they want experiential learning. This is what folks want in museums now too.
The thing many museums are afraid of is that if you’ve surrendered your authority, then you’ve somehow surrendered your expertise or your curatorial role in selecting, interpreting and bringing these things to the public.
For me, the difference between authority and expertise is: If you’re an authority, people must listen: “I am the voice of God; I am disembodied and this knowledge will come down to you.” Museums specialized in that. If you shift to expertise, it’s: “I know a lot about this, and I’m super-excited about this and I want to tell you about it.”
WINESMITH: That it [the app] actually functions is worth celebrating. We built technology: Whole suites of it didn’t exist before. There are a number of things that are behind the scenes in the app that have only just become possible in the last year. If we tried to do this project two years ago, we couldn’t have. It only runs on the latest version of the Apple operating system, because all the ones in the past don’t have the location accuracy for those immersive stories to work.
Our dream at the beginning of app was to record hundreds of navigation cues that would self-assemble. We couldn’t get there. The next generation [of the app] will do that….
We have a thing we’re really proud of, but it’s just the beginning.
COERVER: Will there be another solution in a year that we’ll look at because we’ve been leapfrogged by something else? Undoubtedly. You just have to accept your fate in the tech world….
Down the line, the holy grail for every museum will be to link up certain kinds of behavioral information that can translate into revenue streams. This is where the world of big data is going. For the museum, if that data, down the line, allows us to make sure you know about things that we think you’re going to be deeply interested in, then of course we want to be able to provide that.
As each generation passes, the level of freaked-outness [concerns about invasions of privacy] goes down considerably. A lot of this is just waiting, to be honest, for the generations that have already come to terms with what this means for them.
99.9% have already given away privacy, whether they know it or not.