Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

It is an introspective sort of day. I am wrapping up an art appreciation class tomorrow with a final exam and am busy trying to get a grasp on everything happening in IMA’s Nugget Factory. It is so easy to get all wrapped up in the day-to-day hustle and bustle that I forget why I began doing this in the first place.

I love art.

I am a person typically defined by what I hate….I hate reading, I hate obnoxious people, I hate Jessica Alba (not for the reason you would think), (most) chick flicks, social inequality, people who ignore problems instead of solve them, etc. I am all over the place. From the trivial to social issues, I ALWAYS have an opinion. For better or worse. So how could I love something as big and varied as art?

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So, there are a lot of people out there in the world telling you to vote these days. Voting is important, many argue it is a civic responsibility. I am writing today in support of that point of view. But not in that other big race. This one is pretty local.

A couple weeks ago, Daniel gave you a prompt to submit ideas for a new IMA Blog t-shirt slogan. We had a couple dozen contributors, many of which are IMA employees. So before you get all worked up about the unfairness of our contest, we decided to go ahead and be the good guys and give every person who submitted a comment(by April 15th) a free t-shirt with the winning slogan.

That being said, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try harder next time. I mean, c’mon, 3 out of 5 of the best slogans were submitted by IMA employees, and 2 of them were mine! To be fair, we might have chosen some of the other submissions if we could have reconciled the concerns surrounding them. An IMA favorite was “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days,” submitted by Ben, but we figured there was no truth in that advertising. Another fan favorite mentioned some names in a certain CEO’s title. We feared this might leave those outside the IMA circle clueless and that we might have some explaining to do if we selected that one.

I expect that you are reading this post and thinking, “My submission was SO much better than what they picked!” and that is okay. You can disagree, but we just want you to know that we took this assignment really seriously, and had an hour-long meeting to argue about which slogans should be selected as finalists. So, without further ado, please have at it. Vote for your favorite slogan and we’ll make a t-shirt with the winning phrase.

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The poll closes on May 5. You can only vote once (sorry, but it is the only fair way!).

We’ll be in touch soon to collect info to distribute free shirts.

We have a bit of celebratory news today! The IMA has recently picked up several distinctions worth mentioning.

A group of IMA staff (myself not included) attended the Museums and the Web conference in Montreal last week. This conference is an annual gathering for the ever-growing crowd of technology-focused staff in museums around the world. They also host the “Best of the Web” Awards. IMA’s project, Roman Art Webisodes, was picked last week as “Best Podcast.” IMA’s Dashboard picked up an Honourable Mention in the “Professional” category. We are excited that our work has been so well received by our peers.

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Well it has been quite a week! Since my last post there has been all kinds of attention being paid to IMA technology efforts. Richard is still flying high on the blogosphere success of his Wikipedia hijinks, journalists have been in touch with us and Daniel and I even passed on our sage wisdom to a group of IUPUI Museum Studies students last Thursday night. All in all, it feels great to be in conversation with a variety of different audiences and honestly, it feels good to have fans! Though, we have really only just begun.

I think it should be a Nugget Factory goal to someday inspire the same fervent fandom that generated the film project Fanboys.

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Well, that went off with a resounding and hushed thud. I was sure my last blog entry would garner heaps of new Wikipedia entries, a personal lunch celebration from the IMA’s Director, and an interview on the Today Show; but instead I got some publicity from other bloggers.

Though I appreciate the pub, I would have preferred people take me up on the idea of creating Wikipedia entries about IMA outdoor sculptures. And, no, I’m not crazy enough to think we would have an IMA wikimarathon to rival the art wikimarathon, but I really thought my post would have generated at least one entry by now.

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