Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

What’s working for the @NatHistoryWhale that makes me want to visit the American Museum of Natural History?

I have the distinct pleasure of being in Daniel’s class this fall, Museums and Technology.  While it is surprising for my classmates that I would take a class about something I do already, I am excited for the opportunity to explore more thoroughly the meaning of technology for the museum experience and how the visitor is affected by these changes. I see continual parallels between issues encountered with visitors in physical space and issues we are encountering all over again in our digital spaces. I’ve talked about Twitter before and I have been thinking about how it is harnessed by museums and where we are going wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

At a recent dinner party, a friend expressed his fascination with provenance (Defined: the history of ownership of a valued object or work of art). He was astonished that if he bought something as a bona fide purchaser, or in good faith, that he may someday be required to return it without compensation if it was found to be a valuable cultural relic that was stolen, looted or untrue in record of ownership. I, on the other hand, was astonished that this concept seemed so unfamiliar to him.

And perhaps this is why we began a series of articles in the IMA’s magazine on the provenance of important works in the Museum’s collection, written by Annette Schlagenhauff. As the IMA’s Associate Curator for Research, Annette has spent years tracing the paths of works of art from the artists’ hands to the walls of the IMA. The stories are fascinating and not without moral ambiguities and missing pieces. Read the rest of this entry »

To my great surprise, I frequently meet people in Indianapolis who ask where the Indianapolis Museum of Art is. I have always been a museophile, so it shocks me when people say they haven’t been to the art museum in their own home town. Wait, what else do you do on weekends?

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Social Media brings the visitors to our virtual door. What have we gotten ourselves into?

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I spent my weekend stumbling around. Instead of writing a blog post, I decided to play with StumbleUpon — since I’m convinced I don’t know enough about all the Internet communities out there using social networking tools such as Delicious, Digg, Twitter and Mixx. Unfortunately, I didn’t come to any groundbreaking conclusions using StumbleUpon. We haven’t discussed StumbleUpon on the IMA Blog yet, but now is as good of time as any. The Wikepedia definition is helpful if you are unfamiliar with this technology and want to learn about its history, how it works and its line of owners. “Stumble Upon is an Internet community that allows its users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos. It is a personalized recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles.” (Of note — In May 2007, eBay acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million from the original post-graduate school developers but has hired Deutsche Bank to try to sell it again.)

My first impression of StumbleUpon was that it is a fun tool. Before I had it figured out, (you do literally stumble around for awhile), I spent at least an hour in MoJoe’s looking at animals in love, making snowflakes, gawking at street installations in Washington, D.C., and oohing and awwing over some human creative painting. Most of the reviewed and rated sites are novel — odd and wacky, interactive or display amazing talent. Read the rest of this entry »