In a gathering that could ostensibly have been about how technology and social media have changed the landscape of museum practice, I was so thrilled to find that almost all of our discussion focused on how museums and libraries can make significant and lasting changes in our local communities. Working in a museum, I’ve taken that as my context, but many of these issues have important corollaries in libraries as well.

Perhaps the most useful change in my own thinking is an understanding that the era of participatory culture is not a new thing, but rather – enhanced by recent trends in technology – one that has its roots in the very reasons why museums exist in the first place.  While technology, social media, and mobile adoption influence the ways that we engage museum audiences and the expectations they bring into the museum, an attitude that invites participation has the potential to transform individual and community experiences that enhance the public value of the work we do.

Why is your community better off because it has a museum?

I’m challenged by the courage and convictions of colleagues I met in Salzburg, who take a commitment to their local community very seriously. Whether helping neighbors recover from devastating storms in the Philippines, reaching out to the homeless and poor communities in Sao Paulo, or bringing libraries to rural Kenya on the backs of camels, I found myself inspired to think about how a museum in Indianapolis can learn from such tangible demonstrations of public value.

In his book “Making Museums Matter,” Stephen Weil talked about a mandate for museums to demonstrate real value within our communities:

“Why is your community better off because it has a museum? [The answer] must necessarily be something more than, because otherwise it wouldn’t. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide the communities they serve something of value beyond their own mere existence.”

The Occupy Museums protests demonstrate a growing frustration with the way museums see their role in today's society

This topic surfaced repeatedly during the conversations about participatory culture in Salzburg. The consensus among the group coalesced in an assertion that museums have an inherent mission to deliver public value driven by a universal right to cultural access.

It is clear to me that although museums have long enjoyed a privileged place in the public’s confidence, societal and economic changes, as well as the public’s expectation of museums, have significantly augmented the landscape of public value.  New questions about what constitutes public value and who sees the benefits of that value need to be considered seriously by those museums that want to see real impact from their effort. Lest we think that the value of museums is secure, the nascent ”occupy museums” movement reminds us that a growing frustration exists with the way museums think about their role in society.

The real test for public value is not what the museum says it is, but rather the value attributed to us by our communities and stakeholders. Simply declaring that the museum is valuable isn’t a substitute for actually demonstrating that value on a consistent basis.

At the heart of the issue is the museum community’s willingness to take a harsh look in the mirror and ask hard questions about whether or not we actually do a good job of bringing value to our constituents. In my opinion, a more wholehearted embrace of participatory culture may be the tonic we need to really delve into the ways that museums can change their current practice.  To realize the benefits of participatory culture will require an openness to welcome new opinions about the museum.

Serhan Ada, from Istanbul Bilgi University had a wonderful way of framing the difference. He notes that, “Participation occurs when someone welcomed as a guest feels as though they have become a host.” Are visitors to your museum truly guests in this sense? Perhaps the benefits of participatory culture are most easily witnessed with such a shared sense of ownership.

Access is about more than just digitization

When museums talk about access, we typically mean one of two kinds of accessibility: 1) The digital availability of collection objects with correct metadata and quality digital imaging, and 2) a set of provisions to accessing collections for those with physical or cognitive disabilities. Throughout the conversation in Salzburg, I was repeatedly struck by the fact that my own ideas about access are too small.

As we developed the concept more completely, it was clear to me that a truly accessible museum will provide appropriate and comprehensive support to the physical, intellectual, and attitudinal facets of a museum visit that allows guests to engage most successfully. Of these facets, the attitudinal changes in museums seem to be the most challenging. As we discussed in the previous blog posts, are museums really ready to embrace and value the inclusion of all audiences?

In Brazil, Gabriela Aidar works with the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo in the museum’s department of social inclusion. Rather than focusing only on those audiences the museum is already successful at reaching, Gabriela decided to pursue so-called “non-audiences” who are typically marginalized by museums and therefore miss out on the rich cultural offerings contained there. During her presentation in Salzburg, Gabriela highlighted a number of quotes that really piqued my thinking. First, from Annamari Laaksonen of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies:

“Participation in cultural activities, together with access to them, forms the backbone of human rights pertaining to culture. Access is a precondition for participation and participation is indispensable to ensure the exercising of human rights.”
Laaksonen, Annamari, Revista Observatório Itaú Cultural, n.11 (jan./apr.2011). São Paulo, SP: Itaú Cultural, 2011, pg. 50.

“… any organization that is not working to break down barriers to access is actively maintaining them. Neutrality is not possible.”(p. 34)

“If social inclusion means anything, it means actively seeking out and removing barriers, of acknowledging that people who have been left out for generations need additional support in a whole variety of ways to enable them to exercise their rights to participate in many of the facilities that the better off and better educated take for granted.”(p. 37)
O’Neill, Mark, “The good enough visitor”. In: Sandell, Richard (ed.) Museums, society, inequality. London & New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 37.

These points have really challenged my own thinking about how museums seek and pursue our local audiences. I think it’s true that there are whole segments of individuals that don’t feel the same right to access the museum as those of us among the “better off and better educated.” There’s frequent coverage in the press about the consequences of a widening “technology gap,” but is there also a corresponding “culture gap” that carries many of the same consequences? Much of the beauty and power of museums lies in their ability to level the playing fields of society and to offer a place for discourse and exchange with diverse audiences. Sadly, much of this potential beauty is latent and waiting to be activated by museums with a vision to change the status quo.

The changing role of Authority

All this talk about participatory culture eventually ends up begging an important question about how the changes we are witnessing will eventually impact the role and authority of museums. The care and creation of knowledge has always been an important part of the mission of museums, and continues to be so.  However, with today’s ubiquitous access to information that is afforded by the web, museums are keenly aware that we are not the only producers of content related to our own collections, and many times not even the best source of content. Perhaps this has always been true, but technical advances are only highlighting a reality that has long been hidden.  In any case, museums are struggling to understand their relationship to an ecosystem of information that sometimes defies categorization and authority.

While discrete sources of information seem to be ever expanding, it’s reasonable to assert that unique and high-quality sources are becoming relatively more scarce. In an information landscape that privileges the popular over the credible, low-circulation-high-quality results can be easily lost.  Couple this idea with what’s been written about the state of digital media literacy and critical thinking skills among the general public and you quickly see the problem.  While it’s never been easier to discover a diverse variety of information about virtually any topic, discriminating quality between those sources is becoming more and more difficult.

This is – in my opinion – is where content specialists in museums can play an important part. Reference librarians are specifically trained in how to support researchers and scholars who dig through a litany of resources to find the information they need.  These skills transfer directly into a similar role for information-seeking on the internet.  The principles and practice remain the same, even though some of the tools may be different.  Museums would be well served to include their library staff as consultants to efforts of web design and information delivery both online and in the galleries, as they are perhaps better equipped than most staff to make sense of such a diversity of source material.

Secondly, as the true content experts in the museum, curators have an incredibly significant role to play in connecting both scholars and the general audience with the important concepts, facts, and narratives that drive the mission of the museum. With their knowledge of primary sources and their expertise with the museum’s collection, curators can be an incredible facilitator for the audience, especially when well supported by an enthusiastic staff of educators.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem terribly different than the standard operating procedure for museums. The difference, however, lies in an attitudinal shift among museum staff concerning an approach to authority as it relates to participatory culture. An authoritarian approach requires the museum to assert its authority by definition and then leaves us scratching our heads when the crowd of followers starts to thin. Conversely, an authoritative approach demonstrates the expertise of the museum’s staff in a participatory context that recognizes the museum’s role in facilitating access to cultural objects and information. The difference between authoritarian and authoritative is subtle, but crucial. In the latter case, authority is ascribed to the museum by the audience, and not the other way around. You may notice that this is similar to the earlier assertions about public value. In both cases, the audience is the central determiner of value, but the museum is responsible for building an appreciation for cultural access and preservation.

 Final thoughts

The shifts in our culture that result from a technology and information surge are pervasive and persistent. A rise in participatory expectations among communities around the world offers a variety of opportunities and challenges for museums to deal with. I’m hopeful that the conversations spurred by the Salzburg Global Seminar and the online conversations concerning these issues will prove as challenging for you as they have for me. Museums and libraries are home to the best stories the world has to offer, how we determine to manage, share, and cultivate those stories will determine the relevance and value we bring to the public in years to come.

With the Indianapolis Colts going to the Super Bowl and the Vancouver Olympics this month, I have been all about sports lately. I type this while watching Lindsey Vonn ski perfectly and gloriously to the first U.S. gold medal in the Alpine event. A few weeks ago, while our beloved Colts were preparing for the big game, the Indianapolis Museum of Art was all atwitter over a bet developing between our fearless leader, Max Anderson, and the New Orleans Museum of Art’s John Bullard. You know how the story ends: we lost the game, and now the IMA prepares to ship off our beautiful Turner to NOMA. You can read the whole story as described by the instigator Tyler Green.

But why was it such a surprise to everyone (ESPN, bloggers, sports fans) that museum folk are sports fans, too? Sports are generally seen as incongruous with arts, even by me, but a tweet by my former professor Jenny Mikulay got me thinking about sports in a different light.

“I don’t understand it when people think sports/games and art/culture are unrelated–they are the same.” -JGMikulay

This is such a wise statement, albeit one which might be difficult to agree with when standing in the midst of a beer-soaked, blue-clad screaming throng. Yes, inebriated with culture!  But why do we apportion sports within culture in this way? Games, a natural occurrence in most children’s lives, are an excellent way to learn about relationships and strategy and can develop over hundreds of years or be invented spontaneously. They are a physical manifestation of artistic communication.

Hundreds of years ago, the influence of sports and games on the visual arts was a little more traditional:

This 1565 painting, Winter by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which resides at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, displays curling in the background. Curling is now an Olympic Sport.

Movement in dance, theatre or martial arts has long been considered an art form. Now, the lines are blurring between sports and games experiences, performance arts and visual art. The artist duo Type A immediately comes to mind (the IMA is heavily involved with these guys, currently producing a documentary and installing their work in 100 Acres) as a contemporary artist pushing the boundaries of what art is and how it is interpreted. We have had very memorable experiences with Type A here at the IMA.

The work Push, by Type A, explored games and the meanings of masculinity and physical relationships.

I asked some of my fellow IMA bloggers about sports vs. art and got a wide range of answers:

I grew up with a stream behind my parents house, and when it got cold enough we would play hockey on the ice. Looking back probably not the safest idea, but we all survived. All it took was a few neighbors, rocks substituted for hockey pucks, and rogue sticks found in the nearby woods. For the goals we’d shoot for a hole in the ice!
When you mentioned art in sports marbles came to mind. My grandparents had a stash of old beautiful marbles. Of course, I had my favorites because all of the marbles were different. Looking at them was just as fun as playing the game. Not so sure you can consider the game of “marbles” a sport, but then again… curling. -Matt

Roller derby! I’m not a ‘traditional’ sports fan… I love being a part of and watching grass-roots, d.i.y. sports… there’s a lot of passion and hard work that go in to it. -Kate

Nothing really comes to mind other than how much I loved attending IU basketball games when I went to school down there.  Assembly Hall is very small and very vertical for a stadium and sometimes I feared it would collapse when people started cheering and stomping and clapping.  It was such a crazy environment (college basketball as a whole, and Assembly Hall specifically) that I haven’t seen matched in any other sport (I have been to lots of NBA, NFL, MLB games, and even a few soccer games including a Real Madrid game with Daniel..and nothing comes close to crazy college basketball). -Dan

This may be too marketing-esque, but did you know that Shaun White has a couple snowboarding games for the Wii that are pretty sweet? The first one is, at least… I haven’t picked up the second yet (came out this past Nov). Shaun had some ridiculous runs last night, didn’t he? -Ed

I also got a few really interesting links about great sports places here in Indy. Richard sent me info on the US Track and Field HQs and NCAA Hall of Fame. Rob noted the National Art Museum of Sport, located right at my school (!), which I intend to check out as soon as possible. Looks like they have a GREAT collection!

Skiier, by Bernard Fuchs, at the National Art Museum of Sport.

So, how do you see sports and culture? I’ll consider this more, as well, while I watch Lindsey rack up some more medals. Go Team USA!

My first Pecha Kucha night, enjoyed from the squishy goodness of a giant red comfy sack in The Toby, was  like no other PowerPoint presentation I’ve been to. I left feeling inspired and liberated (since profanities could be shouted or whispered freely at any point). I’m definitely experiencing culture these days, maybe due to a motivating post by Meg. It’s true–as a marketer, and as a resident of Indy–we should all be experiencing the amazing galleries, games, plays, concerts, trails, architecture and exhibits offered by our friends. But why not also ask ourselves how as individuals we can create culture?

Matthew Hale, life-long resident of Indianapolis and graduate of Herron School of Art & Design, pitched his idea to make Indy a cultural landmark at the recent Pecha Kucha Night. “Letteracks: A 3D map for Indianapolis” is a coordinated system of 26 giant letter bikeracks, one for each letter of the alphabet, designed for the regional center of Indianapolis. The options for the use of these letteracks are endless–from field trip and jogging destinations to wayfinding and photo ops. Letteracks would add a unique system of nationally recognized landmarks to our city and increase the cultural language so-to-speak of the people in our city.

"Letteracks: A 3D map for Indianapolis"

While Matt didn’t win the $10k PK prize (in my opinion, he should have), his idea speaks to the idea of creating culture on a large scale. On a much smaller scale, as a child, I was a ballet dancer, I painted Tiger Lillies by the mailbox, I played the piano, I wrote poems and stories, I sang “Billy Boy” on the swing set, I planted mounds of pumpkin seeds and sunflowers in my garden, I took portfolios of pictures after a heavy snowfall, I read. Today, I rarely make time for these renewing acts or share them. What would Indy be like, if we each brought our own light and talents to our family, neighbors and city? What if we didn’t passively absorb culture, but actively created and shared it?

I heard an artist speak on the topic about a year ago in a sun-drenched gym on the Old Northside. “Do you have a picture to paint? A book to write? A dance class to take? Are you needed by someone?”

We should all have our day in the comfy sack, but I’m going try to make more time to create, converse and inspire.

Wilber in his comfy sack

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/11/18/creating-culture/feed/ 4 PK Letteracks IMG_2382_new http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/11/17/transparency-and-museums-part-3-institutional-culture/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2009/11/17/transparency-and-museums-part-3-institutional-culture/#comments Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:34:41 +0000 Rob Stein http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=9602 Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the 2009 Museum Computer Network Conference in Portland, OR.  While Portland was rainy and cold all week, I found the conference to be both engaging and thought provoking.  While the sessions were great, the thing that keeps me coming back for more is the community.

Community – the culture of this gathering – is where the real diffusion and impact occur.  Although the speakers and panelists were great and a good trigger for conversation, the value really took hold in the hallways over coffee or in some of Portland’s great pubs over a beer.

In thinking about this next post on transparency, it struck me that the same is true about our own museums as well.  The culture of our institution – the hallway and cafe conversations that happen between colleagues – is where much of the success and innovation will come from.

At the MCN conference we heard some great conversations about strategy and innovation.  But I think all would realize, the harder part of strategy is finding a way for it to take hold and become REAL.

As a final salvo offering reasons why your museum should adopt open and transparent practices around institutional performance, let’s talk a bit more about the impact this choice can have on the culture of your museum.

If you’re just joining the conversation, here are links to parts 1 and 2 of this series. (Part 1 – Walking the Talk) (Part 2 – Reasons for Transparency)  Please join the conversation in the comments and tell us what you think! A little virtual water cooler would help us all.

Reasons For Transparency: Impact on Institutional Culture

“The organizations that will be truly successful in this environment are those that have integrated Transparency as part of their organizational culture and not just their communications strategy. To the extent that the two are inter-related, the communications strategist has a substantial role to play here.”

-Mark Hannah, “Transparency as a Principle not a Tactic”, PBS.org, January 7, 2009

The infusion of an attitude of Transparency and an institutional understanding of strategy will allow our museums to continue to mature steadily and continuously over time, but these goals require a cultural shift for our staff. One organization which understands the impact of Transparency and the role of company culture is the internet shoe company, Zappos (recently acquired by Amazon). As illustrated by Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh,

“It’s a very different world today. With the Internet connecting everyone together, companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. An unhappy customer or a disgruntled employee can blog about a bad experience with a company, and the story can spread like wildfire by email or with tools like Twitter.

The good news is that the reverse is true as well. A great experience with a company can be read by millions of people almost instantaneously as well.

The fundamental problem is that you can’t possibly anticipate every possible touch-point that could influence the perception of your company’s brand.”

-Tony Hsieh, “Your Culture is Your Brand”, Zappos CEO Blog, January 3, 2009

Hsieh makes an important point that museums should observe as well. In order to remain culturally relevant, museums must address this inevitable and global cultural shift towards ubiquitous information and user experience or risk being sidelined both online as well as in our communities.

Putting Transparency into practice in an institution has a number of consequences which can offer significant benefits to museums. The act of publishing information for public scrutiny always elevates the attention that is given to that effort.  Whereas staff members may have been apt to forget about tracking performance in a key area, a commitment to publish that information pushes professional staff members to pay more attention regarding how that information will be perceived outside the walls of the museum.  Ideally these are features museums want and need to be tracking anyway, but the reality is that when no one is looking, it’s easy to pay less attention. Transparency then, is an effective mechanism for generating this external motivation which can result in measurable improvements for the museum.

When these key metrics are tracked, organizations will be able to easily identify and develop trends and forecasts for these mission critical pieces of information. Since institutions are committed to a timely publishing of this information they will also benefit from more timely and accurate disclosure of problem areas not only to the public but also to internal constituencies. Indicators of success and poor performance can help management teams identify areas which need more attention or resources without simply sweeping the problem under the carpet.  Measuring which areas are succeeding can help museums better optimize how much effort is required to continue performing well in that area.  Perhaps staff can spend half as much time or money and achieve the same results?  Mission-critical information such as this is a crucial underpinning that will allow management teams to execute good decision-making based on fact and not opinion.  These steps can facilitate not only cost savings, but time savings over the long term as well.

Next week, we’ll begin to look more practically at how the Indianapolis Museum of Art put some of these theories into practice and what kind of impact / experience we’ve seen since doing so.  Again, I’ve really enjoyed some of the comments offered to these posts… but understand that there are several shy ones among you!  Don’t Fear!  Pipe up with your thoughts… I’ve generally found our little blog community to be very open to opinions of all different stripes!  -Rob

Every good rally has a chant, right? There’s the infamous “Hell no, we won’t go!” Or how about, “Say it aint’ so, Joe.”

Although the Indy Culture Matters Rally in downtown Indianapolis Monday didn’t have a memorable chant, it had music, influential speakers and a crowd of about 2,000 with a whole lot of heart. I only wish IMA Director Max Anderson would’ve emailed us his post-rally thoughts earlier to use as a pre-rally chant – “Culture counts and we need to be counted!”

How this Movement got off the Ground
Here are the basics: A movement started with conversations among leaders of cultural organizations throughout Central Indiana. Not long after, the movement started popping up on the Web via Twitter, Facebook, eblasts and on the newly created Web site indyculturematters.org. A logo was designed and t-shirts were ordered (IMA members got one free). The rally on Monument Circle was an opportunity for Central Indiana’s cultural institutions, and anyone who believes that Indy culture matters, to make some noise! We demonstrated that Indy Culture matters in our lives, our economy and to the future of Indianapolis.

Speakers at the rally included:

• Superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools Dr. Eugene White
• Community member Pam Davidson
• CEO of Central Indiana Corporate Partnership Mark Miles
• President and CEO of WellPoint, Inc. Angela Braly
• CEO of Indianapolis Convention and Visitors Association Don Welsh
• Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard
• Arts Patron Frank Basile

How do we keep the momentum of this movement?
Here’s what you can you do to demonstrate that Indy Culture Matters:

1. Visit our cultural destinations
2. Introduce new audiences to Indy Culture
3. Tell your elected representatives that Indy Culture Matters
4. Join the Facebook group and upload your own images from the rally!
5. Check indyculturematters.org for updated information and stats

Being part of a rally was a first in my lifetime, and to speak on behalf of all the IMA staff, we’re proud to be part of Indy culture with so many other amazing cultural organizations. Everywhere I looked, I knew the friendly, talented and richly-spirited faces in the crowd. The only disappointment of the day was that most of us didn’t bike there because of pre-rally rain and cold. Regardless…

“Hell no, Indy culture won’t go unnoticed!”

[Submit your best Indy culture rally chant or tell us why Indy culture matters to you below.]

“This is really cool,” he said timidly, referring to the space. Daniel showed him the new animated trailer for ArtBabble, to which he replied, “That was not cool…I mean that was not long enough.” 

Another visitor asked if he could take a nap in the corner because he found the furniture and atmosphere so relaxing. It was a pleasure to watch kids, teens, parents and docents use the computers and ArtBabble video Web site as tools for learning and for fun.

This leads me to a larger question I’ve been asking myself (and some of you): What are the pros and cons of interactive games in art museums, and how far should we go with the concept? The Davis LAB doesn’t include games per se, but getting on a computer and exploring ArtBabble is, like a game, a lot of fun. For the purpose of this post, I’ll classify interactivity as anything from paper scavenger hunts to computer kiosks in the galleries. All these activities turn upside down the traditional museum experience of walking through galleries and looking at the art on the walls with an element of relational interactivity between the visitor and the art.

NPR recently explored the topic in a piece called “Interactive Games Make Museums a Play to Play”, by Elizabeth Blair, which highlighted the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Luce Foundation Center for an alternative reality game they created. A teacher I know testified that interactive games in museums prompted her students to look more closely at the artwork. NPR noted happiness, clear instructions, feedback, shared experience and being part of something bigger as benefits to interactivity.

I wonder if some museum visitors find interactive games disruptive or cause them to focus less on the physical art as they attempt to check off a work they just found through the interactive game and rush off to the next masterpiece. Should museums use interactive technology like video or audio tours as a revenue generator at the risk of taking attention away from the physical piece of art? Or is it our duty as museum professionals to ensure that the technology only enhances the connection? Are games a marketing tool to woo new audiences to art, or are they the future of art? I have heard the argument that “high brow” art clashes with “low brow” games. Do we need to be entertained at an art museum by something else, or do we go to let the art entertain us?

The book Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thorton is another excellent find. “A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton’s entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture,” according to the book’s publisher. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s at the top of my wish-list. Read a review from The Washington Post.

Those are my two finds. I’m leaving the rest up to you. Your prime shopping date: Friday, December 5 – “First Friday” offers your best bet to buy art at the local galleries. Share your finds below…

In introducing the evening’s program, Mr. Lin noted Tan Dun’s frequent mention of shamanism when discussing his work. Theater historian David Goodman has written about the ancient roots of theater art in ritual performances at shrines. During such sacred performances, the audience witnessed a transformation of one or more of the characters on stage. Goodman argues that this element – the witnessing of a transformation – remains at the core of many theater traditions. When the audience watches as the performer changes, the people experience a kind of sacred catharsis. An audience member cannot transform into a ghostly spirit, or become the essence of unbridled rage or grotesque regret – but the actor can. In this sense the shaman and the actor are one in the same. Both have the ability to journey to painful and dangerous spiritual places, and to return to the ordinary human world we recognize as “reality.” Though Goodman writes specifically about Japanese theater, last night’s performance with Chinese cultural references brought his ideas to mind. Ghost Opera is a daring expression of the composer’s understanding of the shamanistic function of the performing art.

And then there was the sound! An exquisitely sad violin solo interrupted by a rude, unexpected squeak. Hisses, whispers, the clack of stones, a shifty sound of paper rubbed or crumpled. As the Ghost Opera unfolded, I began to think that I – and perhaps all humans – continually listen for the sound that signals a crack in the veneer of ordinary reality. On some deep level, perhaps our ear is always cocked for it, vigilant even though not consciously aware of the anticipation. Has a small sound, significant only because it does not make sense, ever caused you to startle? To snap to conscious presence in the instant? Are such sensations harbingers of mental illness? Or are they a neurological symptom? I guess either of these is possible; but last night such eerie sounds came from musicians who transformed, before our very eyes, into shamans who could speak to the spirit world.

One more feature of the evening was notable for me. As I sat in the balcony savoring the visual beauty of the stage design and Tan Dun’s astonishingly post-cultural soundscape, I sensed a strange collapsing of history and time. “Neo-cultural” isn’t a term I’ve heard, but I’ll improvise here and try using it to describe a sense of something human in a primal, ancient sense, but at the same time, something of a future that is just beginning to enter our consciousness. On the one hand “Neo” evokes the term Neolithic, the period when humans moved from hunting/gathering into the life of village farmers. Not that humans didn’t have culture as they wandered for Paleolithic millennia. However, that way of living lightly on the earth has been almost completely erased from the memory of modern humans. We are today the cultural descendants of our Neolithic ancestors. On the other hand, “Neo,” as I’m using it, also represents the sense of glimpsing something new, beyond the multi-cultural phase of human societies today. Tan Dun’s work somehow manages to touch something very ancient in the audience, while at the same time opening a new possibility for being connected with fire, water, stones, and air – with the earth itself.

I am grateful to Glen Kwok, executive director of the International Violin Competition of Indianapolis, for helping the IMA bring such an extraordinary performance – an performers – to the new theater! May this be the first of many provocative and beautiful artistic events in The Toby!

It’s simple advice and a tip not to be forgotten when exploring unfamiliar cities and towns across the globe: Walk downtown. And while you’re out, scope out the city’s local art museum, no matter its size or popularity.

When traveling to Asheville, NC, last week for a family getaway, neither a stroll downtown nor the art museum were tops on the resort’s list of local attractions. The Biltmore Estate was actually at the top, but we opted not to splurge on the $50 tickets. After a few days of hiking, tennis and movies at the resort, my curiosity motivated me to find out about the history and culture of the area.

First stop, the Asheville Art Museum located in the heart of the downtown. With a population of more than 72,000, Asheville feels like a city but not a big one. The museum reflects just that. Three floors display a permanent collection of 20th and 21st century American art, as well as important works to Western North Carolina’s cultural heritage. Through special exhibitions featuring regional artists and local collectors, such as Let It Pour: Contemporary Craft Pitchers from the James Goode Collection, it was easy to see the importance of specific crafts in the local culture. Contemporary artists exploring issues of time, place and transformation were also on view in an exhibition on contemporary landscape art. Several large scale photographs captured harrowing environmental issues. This gave me a sense that Asheville not only holds a rich history but is also modern and willing to tackle important issues of the age. Large quotes on the wall also created a sense of place.

A walk around downtown Asheville revealed a vibrant, eclectic mix of old and new with a historic general store, folksy art shops, sleek modern galleries, homey used book stores and a plethora of cozy cafes, street musicians and jazzy restaurants. There was also a great mix of public art such as the parking lot mural above.

Perhaps this excerpt from Wikipedia better sums up Asheville: “AmericanStyle magazine called it one of ‘America’s Top 25 Arts Destinations,’ Self magazine labeled it the ‘Happiest City for Women,’ and was proclaimed the ‘New Freak Capital of the U.S.’ by Rolling Stone. Asheville has also been called ‘a New Age Mecca’ by CBS News’ Eye On America, and named the “most vegetarian-friendly” small city in America by PETA.” A few inconsistencies? You bet!

In all, Asheville was a breath of fresh mountain air, even on the downtown city streets. Where ever you find yourself on your next adventure, walk downtown to get a real feel for the place and the people.