Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

On Friday, June 6, the IMA will start its 33rd season of the Summer Nights Film Series. For more than 3 decades the IMA’s outdoor film series has been a fan favorite. Every Friday night from June through August, crowds have brought picnic blankets and coolers and filled the IMA’s outdoor terrace to see classic movies like Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz, modern hits like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Princess Bride, and offbeat cult films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Shaft.

The tradition continues in 2008 with one twist. This summer we want your help in choosing the films. 3 of the 13 films screened for Summer Nights will be selected based on an audience vote.* That’s right, we’re doing this American Idol style, and we need your help…

Below are four categories of films with 5 choices each. Vote for your favorite film in each of the categories. Vote once, vote daily, vote hourly, it’s up to you. In the IMA’s version of American Idol, not only do you get to vote, but you also get to be Simon, Paula or Randy (but not William Hung). Feeling like you can diss it Simon Cowell style? Leave a response to this blog entry. Tell us what film you voted for and why. (If you need to learn more about the films listed below, I suggest visiting my favorite online film resource imdb.com.)

Oh, and to make this even more official, the polls will close at midnight eastern standard time on February 8. You’ve got 10 days to make your voice heard.

America, the choice is yours! Liffick out.

VOTING IS NOW CLOSED. RESULTS WILL BE ANNOUNCED AT THE END OF FEBRUARY. STAY TUNED!

*Licensing fees and restrictions may prohibit certain selections from being screened. However, the IMA will do all that is possible to secure and show all winning films.

I’ve got audio, not video on my mind, which is an oddity. We have a whopping one audio guide online but over 50 videos available. Recent events however, suddenly presented several audio experiences, highlighted emerging projects, revealed new music and provoked thought on this forgotten subject. This might surprise you, because we have don’t typically dabble with audio content and we are such a video-centric new media department. That’s about to change though. Charge your iPods.

(struggling for an image, I decided to show my favorite Pioneer HDJ-1000 headphones…courtesy of pioneerelectronics.com) Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I was invited to speak to a group of students at IUPUI about young audience development. The main focus of my presentation was the Arts Council of Indianapolis’ 2006 report on “Developing Next Generation Arts Audiences.” As I prepared for the class yesterday, I realized just how far the Indianapolis arts community has come in such a short time.

Above: “20 -40 Somethings” play X-Box at an IMA opening.

In a nutshell the “Next Generation” report was a study of the “20-40 something” arts participation in Indianapolis. With the help of Next Generation Consulting, the Arts Council prepared a report on how young audiences find out about arts events and their motivations for attending arts events. This study was done in order to build a more robust participation in the arts among young professionals in order to build (and in some cases, replace) the current aging audience.

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One of the hardest parts of my job (and newest) is trying to figure out how you will want to interact with IMA on social networking sites like Facebook. And the weight of that responsibility does not fall solely on my shoulders. There is a team of us, each trying to keep up with our own social networking activities while trying hard to make something that represents IMA, looks good and actually offers something worthwhile.

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With the launch of the new IMA Blog, there will be more authors contributing posts, and I am among them. You should expect to find a lot of opinions, a touch (okay, a lot) of sarcasm and the occassional soap box to provoke your witty and well-written comments. Struggling to find a compelling topic for my inaugural post, I have searched long and hard and decided to pontificate on the expansive YouTube-iverse.

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