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Category :Art News |
Written by: Silvia Bosi
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The New Anti-Crisis Strategies Of American Museums
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Tuesday 21 April 2009
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No fear for the museums in crisis. On rainy days even the roles of places of art and of who attends them can be reviewed and inverted: according to the New York Times, this is what many American museums are proposing. If visitors, thirsty for knowledge, used to hunt exhibitions, now museums have to go after and try to catch tourists – and not only – proposing new extravagant activities to who, clearly, no longer makes do with mere cultural satisfaction. The recession has heavily hit even museums, which compared to the past have to deal with a discontinuous flow of takings, smaller donations and often they are forced to make cuts, even to the staff. However, some people, rather than commiserating themselves and turning to extreme remedies, have preferred to roll up their sleeves and react positively to this shock, doing their utmost to propose new attractions.
Recently, on one Saturday morning, the hall on the second floor of New York’s Moma was crowded with about 150 yoga fanatics who, mats in hand, went there to take part in the initiative “Put the oM in MoMA” (an original play on words). The group, neatly arranged, had a 75-minute lesson doing the suggested yoga positions, surrounded by suggestive moving images on the walls of huge tulips, flowered meadows and a crawling worm, of the monumental installation “Pour Out Your Body” by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. The initiative was so appreciated that there are already plans for another one among the sculptures of the museum garden. Glenn D. Lowry, the museum manager, stated: “We want to tread as many paths as possible. We are doing all we can to tune in with the public”.
Last 16th April in Los Angeles, artist Lisa Anne Auerbach organised in the Hammer Museum – University of California – a night-time bicycle trip, allowing cyclers to roam around the yard on two wheels. The museum manager, Ann Philbin, found the initiative excellent given that, at a time like this, in Los Angeles people are looking for moments of aggregation without spending too much. The alternative proposed at the Hammer Museum revealed to be truly amusing and well-organised, complete with attended bike parking, cocktail and the projection of the film “Breaking Away”.
If the yoga class or a bike ride in a museum do not seem very orthodox, other museums have set up more conventional creative strategies, aiming at the reorganisation of their presence on the web and at a renewed commercialisation with onsite and online activities. On the whole, rather than being static visiting places museums must become cultural centres of entertainment and interaction, where activities go beyond the observation and admiration of what is on view. Clearly, if the best is offered in the public service people cannot remain indifferent, they feel involved and, for valuable initiatives, they are even willing to pay. Therefore, the museum can also become an auditorium for conferences, to listen to poems or see films. Some advertising campaigns of relevant exhibition poles, like the Moma and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, are specifically studied to attract a young and bubbly public: a playbill near Times Square shows a couple kissing opposite Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “Eternal Spring”, bearing the phrase “It’s Time We Met”. This is only one of the images used for the Metropolitan Museum’s marketing campaign, selected among many shots realised by the Met’s visitors and shared on the website Flickr. Each photo used bears the author’s name and the date and time when it was taken, and it can make the lucky photographer earn 250 dollars and a year as a member of the museum. The manager of the Met, Thomas P. Campbell, made the following consideration: “in the 19th century people would do sketches in museums. Now they take photos and share them”. The campaign immediately went beyond the museum ambit to reach the urban context on buses, on the underground, in train stations and even on the web. The MoMa has plastered the underground station in Brooklyn with 58 reproductions of works from the permanent collection, at the Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street station reproductions of Warhol, Monet and Duchamp are impressed on tiles, walls, pillars and rotating gates, being exposed every day to about 50,000 people. The Moma has also decided to pander to those who work and have little time, extending its opening times on some days of the month, inviting even the busiest people for a visit.
The Art Institute of Chicago is getting ready for the inauguration, to be held on 16th May, of its modern wing, planned by Renzo Piano. Exhibitions and conferences will benefit from the involvement of local partners like the Goodman Theatre and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
The Walker Art Center of Minneapolis is not only planning a frequent rotation of its collections, but it is also enhancing its presence on the web: the itinerant exhibition “Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes” has its own website, complete with a glossary of terms relative to the suburban reality and it allows visitors to add their own terms and send their personal suburban stories to YouTube, 16 of which were included in the exhibition when it was as the Walker last summer. Facebook, Flickr and Twitter are some of the most used websites by museums and galleries to reach the young public.
In our opinion, if art and culture can benefit from them, these are all very good initiatives which prove how not always it is necessary to approach culture in a boring way. On the contrary, through entertainment the assimilation of information can be a more pleasant and probably more memorable experience; indeed, a less measured and less staid approach does not necessarily correspond to not being serious, as long as there is a respectful and well-mannered behaviour.
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Topics about American-art » Blog Archive » THE NEW ANTI-CRISIS STRATEGIES OF AMERICAN MUSEUMS | Arcadja Art …
Wednesday 22 April 2009
[...] Silvia Bosi added an interesting post on THE NEW ANTI-CRISIS STRATEGIES OF AMERICAN MUSEUMS | Arcadja Art …Here’s a small excerptOn rainy days even the roles of places of art and of who attends them can be reviewed and inverted: according to the New York Times, this is what many American museums are proposing. If visitors, thirsty for knowledge, … [...]