Innovation and the Irish museum

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The weekend Irish Times carried an interesting article by Brian O’Connell on the slow pace of innovation at Irish museums– perhaps not a surprising conclusion to anyone who’s crossed their thresholds recently. With the Galway City Museum singled out for particular criticism, the article finds that despite some improvements, Irish museums lag pretty far behind their American and British cousins:

So, how do Ireland’s institutions compare with their international counterparts? Academic Pat Cooke admits there are challenges for Ireland’s museums, but says that some have already been quick to adapt and innovate in line with visitor expectations. “In general, the changes required have to do with museums consulting better with the public, finding out what people are genuinely interested in and putting on exhibitions that mean something to people,” he says.

Cooke highlights the Foynes Flying Boat Museum and the GAA Museum at Croke Park as examples of how Ireland’s museum sector has got it right. Others, he feels, are still too loyal to their archeological collections – with case after case of axes and flintheads doing little to inspire a new generation of visitors.

“The archeological mindset is the hardest one to crack,” says Cooke. “Like it or not, 90 per cent of people couldn’t care less about axeheads. Museums need other types of mindsets, other than purely archeological, to enable people connect on various levels.”

Lack of funding, of course, is the perennial scapegoat– yet it’s questionable whether such stagnation is solely the consequence of small budgets. Though it may be a controversial assertion, the leadership of our national institutions is not what it could be: saddled with a bureaucratic legacy and offering little in the way of fresh leadership perspectives, our museums have been sluggish in adopting new technologies and approaches now commonplace at other institutions. One look at the websites of the national institutions is very revealing… Flash? Podcasts? Interactivity? The room for improvement is tremendous…

Annaghmakerrig gets wired: ArtLog at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre

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The Irish Times reports today on an unusual new initiative to be launched at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monagahan. ‘ArtLog’– developed at the Digital Media Centre at Dublin Institute of Technology–has been designed to record information about artists who visit the retreat centre, forming a kind of ‘personal archive’ of their activity during their stay.

Every artist who checks in at the centre will be asked to supply basic biographical information for the central database. After that, participation in the digital archive will be optional – artists who elect to participate will also be able to choose whether to record their thoughts, ideas and methodology in a blog-style journal, an audio recording or a video diary.

Director Pat Donlon views the project as simply an updated version of the artist’s note or sketchbook– another means of capturing what is otherwise often ephemeral material:

“This is the age of the finished product,” she says. “We see paintings appear in galleries as if they just leapt on to the canvas fully formed; books appear, but the author’s draft versions of the manuscripts simply disappear. It’s becoming more and more difficult to capture the process of creativity. Nobody writes letters any more. They write e-mails, but nobody archives their e-mails. What will be left for scholars who come along in 20, 23, 40 years time, wanting to inquire into the thought processes of a particular writer or visual artist? Nothing.”

“You know how upset we get when somebody close to us loses their memory, gets Alzheimer’s? The pain and grief around that is enormous,” she says. “Well, we’re talking about our cultural memory here. If Irish art is a mosaic of little pieces, we have to keep all those pieces. And the tiny pieces are as important as the big ones because they hold the whole thing together.”

Sounds intriguing, but I’m less convinced by the argument that artists’ processes are less documented today than they have been in the past! If anything, we live in an age of paranoia about the loss of memory and information, paradoxically at a time when more of it is available than ever before. In any case it will interesting to see whether the new technology is taken up by the Centre’s resident artists and writers, and if anything useful will emerge.

New Director for the Met?

The arts wires are buzzing with speculation on who will succeed the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art… The Wall Street Journal carried an interesting article on the unusually high number of U.S. museums currently hunting directors (21), and the seismic shift in the role of the position since de Montebello took up his post in 1977. According to the WSJ:

Mr. Montebello’s decision comes at a time when the once-tweedy position of museum director is growing increasingly complicated. The industry as a whole is grappling with reduced federal and corporate funding of the arts, along with several years of flat attendance.

Museum directors have responded by boosting their fund-raising efforts and adding a slew of audience-friendly offerings like museum cafés, gift shops and curator-led vacations. But museum experts say the daunting job description — a mix of executive, lawyer and diplomat — has spooked some curators from signing up to direct; others have left for higher-paying jobs at auction houses.

Still, with the current director salary at $4.7 million and the kudos that comes with heading up one of the world’s finest art museums, there’s bound to be some interest! More also on this from the New York Magazine and an opinion from the WSJ…

End of a legacy

monte190.jpgThe New York Times today announced the impending retirement of Philippe de Montebello from the directorship of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a post he’s held to great acclaim for over thirty years:

A patrician figure whose mellifluous multilingual voice on the museum’s audio guides is known to millions of visitors around the world, he is the eighth and longest-serving director in the institution’s 138-year history.

Mr. de Montebello, 71, has more than doubled the museum’s physical size during his tenure, carving out majestic new galleries suited to the Met’s encyclopedic holdings. Today it is the city’s biggest tourist attraction, with millions of visitors a year.

In its own way, his retirement marks the end of an era in the art museum world, where the aristocratic image of a museum director has become somewhat of an anachronism. As an intern at the Met a decade ago I met de Montebello, and recall the odd contrast between the interns’ casual (even grubby) cheerfulness and the director’s rounded tones! Nevertheless, not all is change within the museum world: it’s striking to note the complete absence of women in the NY Times’ list of possible successors to de Montebello, especially given the extreme gender imbalance in most art history and arts management university programmes today…

A new paradigm for donating art?

broad190.jpgThe Los Angeles County Museum of Art is putting a brave face on what must be a crushing blow for their acquisition hopes:

Eli Broad, the billionaire financier and philanthropist whose private collection of some 2,000 works of Modern and contemporary art is one of the most sought-after by museums nationwide, has decided to retain permanent control of his works in an independent foundation that makes loans to museums rather than give any of the art away. (more…)

Increasingly major art collectors seem dissatisfied with the restrictions and limitations slapped on to works once they’ve been given to museums, particularly the inability of museums to exhibit only a fraction of the works in their collection. The solution? Start your own museum, or in Broad’s case, devise an alternative model. From Broad’s point of view, the move ensures maximum exposure for his carefully assembled collection, as the foundation will be able to make loans to other institutions more flexibly and frequently than any single museum would. Yet moving control of artworks from public institutions to private foundations potentially carries serious long-term consequences, especially as the number of new privately-funded museums multiplies. One of the strengths of the museum setting is the ability to study and see works in context with one another, to create relationships through display and exhibition– goals that can also be reached through Broad’s model, but one wonders about the fundamental distance (practical and in principle) between works held in the public trust and those which remain stubbornly part of a single individual’s legacy…

Update: Read on for reaction from Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times, whose opinion on the move is summarised by his quote from Richard Lacayo’s Time Magazine blog: “LACMA got screwed.”