Another story from the “Could This Be The Wave of The Future?” file, (and the “Don’t Dismiss It Until You Ponder It” subfolder), NPR had a story yesterday about museum collections going online. The story starts out talking about how many smaller museums with interesting collections have had to either scaleback activities or close their bricks and mortar presences due to lack of funding. Now the only way to view the collections of some of these museums are online.
There is, in fact, a website called MoOM–the Museum of Online Museums which lists all these collections. They range from noted museums like the Smithsonian, MoMA and The Art Institute of Chicago to more obscure and interesting sites like The Gallery of International Cigarette Pack Graphics and The Grocery List Collection which boasts the largest collection of found grocery lists.
Now if you are asking how some of these sites qualify as museums and if images existing only as 1s and 0s in the ether of the internet can be considered a collection, you aren’t alone. (After all, everyone could boast they had the Mona Lisa in their museum with a little work.) The NPR story tackles the debate about what constitutes a museum and what it means to curate a collection.
The guys who run MoOM absolutely believe that seeing art in a physical museum is often a necessity and can be a transforming experience. But they also believe there are a lot of interesting collections of material out there that people should see, but that they wouldn’t necessarily ever want to drive to. They also point out that one would never have the time to visit all the bricks and mortar museums out there either so having the art online provides welcome and needed access.
But does a cool webpage of scanned skatepark passes deserve the appellation “museum”? NPR quotes Wilson O’Donnell, director of the museology program at the University of Washington in Seattle as saying no. His analogy that an online museum is no more a museum than Wikipedia a valid source of information is a little out of touch (Peer review of articles by the journal Nature found it as accurate as Brittanica.), and his reasoning quoted by NPR isn’t completely compelling.
My blog and others have countless examples of how being well trained doesn’t necessarily ensure the production of a quality product. I think the same could reasonably be said of a curator at a prestigious bricks and mortar institution. The inclusion in the story of a professor of Native American Indian studies saying that mainstream museums haven’t done a good job representing Native American cultural groups futher clouds the concept of who is qualified to assemble a collection. (Additionally, the professor is quoted as saying most tribal groups resist the term museum in favor of cultural center because it connotes something that is old and dull.)
If you really start trying to identify the elements that separate a museum from a really neat collection, I suspect you will eventually get frustrated and be reduced to paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it.” It is no easier to do than making a similar list comparing a bench and a coffee table. Is the collection of magazine covers featuring the US Flag from one month 1942 more valid than the site featuring steel and coal magazine ads from all of 1966 simply because the former is on the Smithsonian site?
This story encapulates the whole dilemmia of technology and art. In some ways, technology throws open the doors to opportunity enabling possibilities and a reach previously unattainable. Concurrently, technology threatens to dilute or isolate us from the potency and relevance of works.
But damned if you can definitively say where the line between the two is.