When I published today’s Wall Street Journal piece on the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s technological transformation—Golden Gate Gigabytes (this hardcopy headline is much catchier than the online one)—I knew from the heated tweets inspired by my previous WSJ tech piece that I’d better duck.
I’ll have more to say about what I admired most about SFMOMA’s eclectic tech innovations in a subsequent post. I briefly alluded to some of that in my WSJ piece, but there was only so much I could squeeze into 860 words. (I focused chiefly on the eccentric “immersive tours,” since those were the most transgressive and talked-about.)
As you may remember, I highly praised the app’s location-aware “Nearby Audio” feature for individual works, quoting from curator Gary Garrel‘s rhapsodic riff on SFMOMA’s Rothko, “No. 14, 1960.”
Here’s the photo I took of that Rothko, using SFMOMA’s app, which creates a timeline that you can access later of where you’ve been, what you’ve seen and (for you fitness freaks) how much distance you’ve traveled:
For now, here’s a compilation of the flurry of putdowns and pushbacks that my piece provoked on Twitter. (My apologies for the duplications of some tweets: That happened when I transferred them from the now-defunct Storify platform the wakelet.)