Working at the IMA for the past few weeks has only seemed to heighten this nagging observation I noticed years ago. There are two types of people when it comes to any, but especially, an art museum visit: those willing visitors and those who would simply rather not. Each side is a simple preference, like cats over dogs, or vanilla over chocolate, Cubs or Cardinals. The preference exists in our families and friends, each side representing itself at one time or another. But this ‘preference’ to go or not go visit an art museum, seems to be a bit of an annoying, elusive thing to solve or make sense of. I have rarely heard of a middle ground on the subject, nor experienced it, and it always seems to be people either do or do not want to go to an art museum. In a recent 4th of July adventure to St. Louis I experienced the two-sided argument once again.

As it was in Indianapolis, St. Louis’s July 4th was plagued with rain. I was visiting a close friend. As a good hostess, and to silence my references to the fact neither of us had been to the Saint Louis Art Museum, my friend allowed me to drag her to the museum to enjoy the soggy morning indoors. Needless to say my friend, a nursing major, is one person that definitely falls into the category of individuals who simply tolerates a trip to the art museum. But I wouldn’t classify a high risk cardio floor as my cup of tea either.

Anyway, as my friend zipped through the Impressionist galleries, I couldn’t help but notice a little girl, maybe five or six, whining about being wet and bored. (I can’t blame her; it was, after all, the 4th of July.) In her damp pink sweatshirt she miserably meandered around, until she spotted the three foot Degas bronze sculpture of a ballerina. She was instantly dragging her mother to the piece and slowly circling it, completely blank faced with awe and deeply fascinated with the work. At the back of the statue, she grinned and as she played with her own curls, quietly pointed out that the ballerina had a satin bow in her ponytail. After that she was nothing but cooperative smiles and continued her admiration of the works in the area. I expect she now will likely fall into the category of ‘willing visitor’ to art museums.

Edgar Degas, French, 1834–1917; Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, c.1880, cast c.1920; bronze, gauze, and satin; 38 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 13 3/4 in. (97.8 x 41.3 x 34.9 cm); Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Mrs. Mark C. Steinberg 135:1956

So, what is it that makes people love or dislike the art museum experience? It’s a difficult question, seeing that everyone has their own preferences, and most are probably informed ones. For the little girl in St. Louis and me, it was a single piece of art that kept us coming back. Perhaps it is an engaging docent who can personalize the experience, making it a true learning and discussion process, or the use of something familiar during the experience, say technology for the younger generations.

The issue of engagement with these two types of preferences has made my internship so interesting. With the IMA’s vast offerings that combine history, design, art and nature, how can the experience on our campus continue to be defined as something beyond that of the average art museum? The idea of participation makes the art museum much more exciting, and one the IMA has, in the past, been challenged on. Art itself can speak, but how many people can hear it, understand it, or even find the right path to relate to it? The options to engage and encourage participation are going to distinguish the boring museum of the ‘I’d simply rather nots’ with the art museum of our contemporary society. People want things tailored to them, whether that means they’re spoilt and lazy, or simply need to be taught how to understand. The IMA should continue to develop our options and teach how to employ them, in order to achieve this understanding and connection to the preferences on each side. The many things available should ensure a participatory, enlightening experience on our campus, ones that are to focus on the viewer’s eye and the teaching moment of the 500 year old painting. To connect with art and the IMA there are many available options, but the new challenge is going to be developing these as preferences.

What most disturbs me about Nina’s argument is the clear lack of background work she put into crafting what amounts to a pretty scathing opinion of the IMA.  It seems from Nina’s comments that she is basing her views on a single visit to our galleries during a conference reception. I have no way of knowing how many of those 3 hours Nina spent in our exhibitions and galleries, but it seems that she didn’t bother to ask any staff members of the IMA about efforts we might be making to engage our visitors on-site and around the city.  Aside from a brief two minute encounter in the conference hall after her comments, Nina failed to probe in any depth about what (if any) strategy their might be behind our efforts on-site.

Experience and Engagement

In case you haven’t noticed, Art Museums are frequently considered to be the “stuffier”, less “engaging” older brothers to our sibling science, technology, and “experience” museums.  Nina draws at least some of her professional experience from this field, so perhaps we should cut her a little slack for missing a crucial challenge faced by art museums.

Here's one kiosk I'd love to see in our Museum

Many experiences in art museums can tend to be more subjective… more personal… deeply moving but indeed sometimes less factual than in other types of museums.  This isn’t denying that an understanding of the underlying contexts and histories of these works is important.  Just that this knowledge is a means to an end. Facilitating and encouraging these types of experiences is a primary challenge in creating engaging experiences inside art museums.  Balancing engaging exhibits with a gallery aesthetic which still supports and encourages individual interpretation is not an easy problem to solve.

Perhaps the lack of 10 year old kiosks and flashy interpretive signage makes it appear that we are not attempting to engage our audiences?

There still remains an outstanding debate in my mind regarding whether or not even well designed “experiences” in art museums offer an appreciably better connection to works of art than more unobtrusive offerings of information which allow audiences to pick-and-choose their own experiences with works of art.  Apart from leading audiences by a nose-ring through what they should think/experience there must be a place for a clean, open and personal interpretation of our collections.  These are questions we’re wrestling with here at the IMA as I’m sure many of you are in your own institutions.  Why rush to an answer before we’ve studied our own audiences and local needs?

Missing the Mark

Maybe Nina missed the chance to talk to Tiffany Leason – who was also at the conference reception – about the Viewing Project .  A three year grant funded initiative, the Viewing Project is designed to experiment with ways of engaging visitors with works from the IMA’s permanent collection.  In addition, this project seeks to measure and evaluate this visitor engagement in ways that can lead to concrete answers about these issues.  Rather than guessing haphazardly about what kinds of exhibits might make a difference, we’re attempting to really study our particular circumstance and unique audience here in Indianapolis.

The Viewing Project in-gallery interface

I would have loved to point Nina towards some of our New Media team (most of whom are named Daniel) who could share about some pretty innovative ways we are engaging audiences in ways that allow them to self select their participation.

One of the Dans could have shared about project we did in association with an Egyptian Art exhibit which made use of Flickr both in the galleries and on the streets of Indy.  The project, called “Your Afterlife”, asked scads of people from around the museum and city about what they would take with them into the happily-ever-after which resulted in some really funny, interesting, and touching results.

What would you take with you into the Afterlife?

Or Dan might have shared some of the work we did creating visualizations from CAT scan data of one of the mummies in the show. Visitors could take a peak under the wraps both in the galleries near the display or online at home.

Meet Demetrious the Mummy

Yet another Dan might have talk to Nina about “Project IMA” a project we hosted featuring 16 local designers, which engaged the designers and the community in fashion designs presented in conjunction with an exhibition called “Breaking The Mode”.  The project culminated in a runway show inside the museum and some awesome video which is still really popular on ArtBabble.

Our last Dan may have taken Nina over to the Davis LAB where for over three years now we’ve been experimenting with bringing our online-efforts into the galleries for guests to experience and engage with.  Sponsored by several donors who really care about how technology can be used to enhance the museum experience, the Davis LAB has hosted a wide array of experiences.  In 2006, I built a multi-user physical interface for visitors to explore the IMA’s collection using camera tracking and advanced computer graphics algorithms.  This experience ran in the space for over two years and we tracked hundreds of thousands of users using  the interface to explore art from our collection.

ETX - Multi-User Collection Browsing with Physical User Interface

The LAB has also hosted virtual reality displays, a variety of interactive kiosks, a recreation of ancient Rome which allowed users to navigate through a unique system of interlinked panoramas in addition to many other efforts.  All of these experiences are always available to visitors in the museum and online and are designed to leverage their experiences here at the IMA.

Explore Virtual Rome through Linked Panoramas

Now the Davis LAB plays host to ArtBabble and encourages connections with the IMA’s blogs and online communities.  We find that users engage with the content in new and different ways in the galleries and that we receive a large number of comments from physical visitors from within the space.  Mind you, we are encouraging this online/onsite engagement while preserving – for the moment – an open, clean interpretive experience in many of the galleries.

Visitor Experiences in the Davis LAB

I do think that mobile content deployments offer some intriguing options for user experiences in our galleries.  These platforms can preserve an aesthetic which supports personal connection, while offering unobtrusive ways for visitors to explore deeper connections to works of art on their own devices and at their own pace.  As such, we’ve started work on a new software system for mobile tours which can connect to our back-end content management practices and drive experiences on multiple content platforms including kiosks, phones, and web-browsers.

The project is called TAP and you can expect to see it “in the wild” sometime this fall in connection with our Sacred Spain exhibition.  Beyond serving just ourselves in this endeavor, we’ve been working with a collaboration of like-minded folks on some possible meta-data standards for mobile tours and platform architectures that can work for lots of different museums.  An early version of this spec (TourML – pronounced turmoil) can be seen in action in the Dallas Museum of Art’s new mobile tour.  You can read more about our progress on the Museum Mobile Wiki,  follow the effort on twitter (#mtogo) or watch this space for more info.

Innovation

It’s worth taking a bit of time to talk about how innovation happens within museums.  This is a question I get asked a lot these days and, as such, I’ve thought a good bit about it.  I think it’s fair to say that we all seek after innovation in what we do.  At times it seems to be ephemeral… a gossamer to be grasped at.  Other times, you find yourself standing right in the middle of it without knowing how you arrived.  I can honestly say that during the last three years, the IMA has truly been the most innovative organization I’ve ever been a part of.  (This includes several major research universities, and the supercomputing center that invented the first web browser.)  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about innovation, it’s that it never occurs in a vacuum.  Certainly Max Anderson’s strong leadership and risk-tolerant style play a significant role here, and I’d like to think that our web team has had some pretty interesting ideas over the years.  The truth, however, is that the innovation others have identified in the IMA’s technology and online efforts is only a leading indicator of true institutional innovation and change happening just under the surface.

Those of you working in larger organizations know how difficult it is to push forward initiatives without comprehensive and wide ranging support from your colleagues.  Likewise, almost everything you see online has its roots in the support, efforts and beliefs of dozens of professionals from every department around the IMA.  Who is it, do you think, that populates the Dashboard with statistics?  Who’s responsible for the underpinnings of deaccessioning on the web?  Who is it that co-creates, consults, connects and supports the videos on ArtBabble?  Many of these folks have worked in art museums for decades and have devoted significant portions of their careers to advancing the arts in a non-profit setting.  To have their support and collaboration has truly been one of the great honors of coming to the IMA.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that the first-fruits of innovation can most easily be seen online.  Bricks, mortar and people’s opinions take significantly longer to change than our websites do.  We plan our exhibitions years into the future. Planning for a building expansion can approach the decade mark. Even our educational programs are planned at least a year out.

There are very few efforts in museums which move at the pace and timescale of the internet and social media. But like the buds on a tree, the innovation you see online is propped up by an ecosystem of support throughout the IMA which allows it to succeed at all.  I wish each of you could take the time to understand the institutional change we have been experiencing here at the IMA.  As it stands however, the most evident and easily accessible proof of this transformation is visible online.  Over the coming years, I’m extremely confident that this change will pay ongoing dividends for our visitors.

In Conclusion

Finally, I don’t mean to be overly harsh with Nina.  She is a brilliant professional who brings a lot of value to our profession in her writing and contributions to the field.  I do take exception, in this case, to a poorly informed series of articles.

Nina says on her blog that, “I believe that every museum can grow its audience as long as it is willing to grow with that audience by taking risks, trying new things, and communicating openly.”  In my opinion, I think that the IMA has been an example of these very things over the past few years and has contributed significantly to the community of museums.  I’m not asking for any special treatment or exemption from criticism.  On the contrary, what I’d like most is the chance for a little conversation on the topic.  So… if something we’re doing strikes you wrong or seems out of place…  all you’ve got to do is ask a few questions.  You can find me most easily here on the blog, or on twitter (@rjstein)

Thanks,

Rob