I love it! It’s very much about his experience of standing in front of the church and entering it – and he speaks directly to us – trying to share that experience with us. He translates the name of the Church for us and explains why it has attracted worshipers for centuries (no, not Moses, but St. Peter’s chains). He talks about the lights going on and off and he shows all the tourists taking pictures. Now I’ve taught Michelangelo’s Moses for many years and never showed the outside of this church. In fact, I’ve never translated the name of the Church and explained the relic that is there. I teach Moses in the context of Michelangelo’s oeuvre and the patronage of Pope Julius II, as I imagine most art historians do. I talk about Julius II’s vision for Rome, for the Papacy and for himself. I show Michelangelo’s ambitious sketches for the tomb of Pope Julius II, and I show what the tomb looks like today – usually with an image like this one – tourist free of course. I talk about the High Renaissance approach to the body – as a vehicle for expressing the spiritual and emotional.

Went I was in Rome visiting San Pietro in Vincoli,  I was surprised by how the exterior of the church looked and by the pannini/snack cart permanently parked outside it to serve the throngs of tourists who came to see this Michelangelo masterpiece. I didn’t know where to find the monument within the church. I shot one video to show tourists, and a couple more of the outside of the church, and another one of entering the church and approaching the Tomb – will post those soon, though this one is up now on Smarthistory.  Perhaps what I like about zThirdTry’s video is that it shows me a different perspective – a tourist perspective, a tourist who is very interested in art – but who is also a religious person. I think that’s what is missing from the art history textbook – those different perspectives. So, I guess the questions are – do we agree those are important, and if so, what’s the best way to bring those in?

Here is her most recent dispatch:

Nothing I learned in graduate school or during years of study and teaching prepared me for Santa Maria del Popolo and the Caravaggios in the Cerasi Chapel. Nothing prepared me for the way the church is situated in an inconspicuous corner of the enormous Piazza del Popolo, or the woman begging on the steps, or the swirling frisbee-like souvenirs that light up when they are tossed high in the air that are being sold in the Piazza, or the traffic that streams by the church and its very worn steps and narrow door, or the people praying close to the altar, or the lights that go on and off in the chapel as tourists contribute Euros, or the way each chapel in the church looks so very different, or the way this particular chapel is just beside the altar, or how works of art from different periods combine in this one church, or the colors of the marble surrounding the paintings, or the way the paintings’ meaning is affected because they face each other in a narrow chapel—Paul blinded and chosen, Peter crucified.

Nothing I have seen in Rome has looked or felt the way I imagined it would. Flickr images of the church and Square and YouTube videos of the interior of the church help, sure—but not a lot. I’m a well-trained art historian. I understand the importance of looking at objects in the location they were made for. I value historical context. I appreciate the tools of visual analysis art history has given me. But Steven and I wonder if there is a way to teach these objects while still allowing them to be living objects in the world.

The following was co-written by us both:

Should we have been better prepared for Santa Maria del Popolo or the numerous other similar encounters throughout the city? What is art history’s responsibility to us and to its students in this regard? Should our discipline offer a more comprehensive and current context for the objects we study? In class, we often show paintings such as Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter—isolated, against a black background, as an object of empirical analysis—and too often as an example of a “style.” The caption in the book, or the entry on an image list we hand to our students does little or nothing to even suggest the range of factors that will affect our viewing experience in person.

Edward Said argued that the West depicted the “Orient” removed from history thus creating a timeless world—and by so doing, creating the comforting distance the West needed to compare itself and feel superior and justified. Perhaps it’s time to ask what it is that we that gain when we photograph frescoes from impossible angles, and without the worshipers, tourists, lights and noise that embed the work of art in a living city.

Art history’s form and methods were largely established in response to 18th and 19th century needs and interests. Many of these driving forces remain of course; there is still a thriving art market hungry for authenticity and other narratives that create value. As in centuries past, art’s history is still prized as an extraordinarily rich cultural strand and perhaps most importantly, our discipline has created a language and experience of seeing that is deeply enriching. However, our success has also lead to our failure. The nineteenth century empiricism that structured the discipline removes the experience—the emotion of the tourist and art history student (not to mention the pious then and now) and the sensual environment of many of these objects. As we all know, the discipline is no longer the sanctuary of an elite minority. Twenty-first century art history is taught to secondary and college students as a matter of course. It is no longer unusual for community college students to be asked to differentiate the work of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, ambitious high school students regularly enroll in advance placement art history classes, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the most-visited tourist attraction in New York. All of this suggests to us that perhaps it is time to re-examine the assumptions and conceits built into the art history survey and its methods of instruction. We know that thousands throng to visit works of art in situ the way the pious once made pilgrimage—so why not acknowledge this reality more openly in our survey classes and texts?

The ideological battles of the 1970s and 80s opened our discipline to numerous theoretical models and far broader historical contexts but our experience tells us that we have not gone far enough—especially in the classroom. We teach taxonomies infused with study of the period in which the artist created and rarely (if the circumstances are dramatic enough) we may discuss the later life of the object. For example, when the painting by Caravaggio, The Conversion of Paul is taught, its formal elements, available biographical information about the artist, patronage, and the broader context of Counter-Reformation Rome are all treated. In essence, we teach what we can of the meanings we believe this painting had at the start of the seventeenth century when it was produced. But what we don’t do is explicitly acknowledge to our students that the painting continues to accrue meaning and in fact exists in our present not simply as a canonical support of our construction of the Early Italian Baroque but as a real object, deeply embedded in the fabric of a living city and tourist industry now.

Can we develop a survey that treats art in its historical context while also situating it in our contemporary experience? What would that look like for the Caravaggio? In addition to primary source materials and art historical analysis, perhaps we should make room for urban historians and environmental psychologists, for those who regularly worship in Santa Maria del Popolo, and the tourists who visit. We might include curated Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and details from Google Earth. Understanding the ways a painting is understood now, wouldn’t diminish Caravaggio’s achievement, but might provide a means for students and visitors to engage the art more deeply and personally. We understand the enormous importance of seeing works of art first-hand, but some of our students may never have that opportunity, can we give them some sense of the reality of the current life of the work we ask them to study?

The Cornaro Chapel was very different from the way I imagined it. No matter how many photos I have seen– nothing prepared me for the experience in person. The chapel itself was very shallow – I had always imagined one could enter it, and should enter it to experience it. But that’s not the case. In fact, it seemed that the ideal viewing location was from outside the space of the chapel proper. The images of the Cornaro family on either side reminded me of images of patrons on wings of altarpieces (ie. the Merode Altarpiece) – an association I had never had. The illusion of the clouds beneath Theresa was so much more real than I imagined. I felt like teaching this without seeing it first hand was far less than ideal. I was reminded of the obvious – of how works of art are so very singular, so very unique. Loving a work of art from afar, from reproductions – one can fall in love that way, but it’s a little like falling in love with something that’s at least partly a lie. The tragedy of loving works of art. The terrible need to see in person what you have fallen in love with, and the difficulty of managing that always. And the pressing absence always of what hasn’t been seen.

We pointed out that since the 1970s, colleges and universities have produced far more Ph.Ds than the academy could possibly absorb and that because of the greater reliance on adjunct faculty, this trend has continued. In the days since the conference, and quite independently, a discussion thread has developed on the listserv, Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians (CAAH) titled, “On the joys and desperation of art history.” It has been heartrending to hear the struggles of young academics and older, now wiser adjuncts that never did land a tenure-track job. One issue that both the listserv thread and our conference paper have in common are the implications of “Plan B;” the alternate career paths taken out of necessity.

These highly trained professionals have taken jobs in libraries, museums, and other centers of learning beyond the university. At the same time, Web 2.0 technology has created the opportunity for publishing, learning and collaboration anywhere and has empowered these wayward academics. The demographic force of these Ph.D.s coupled with technology, and other pressures is enough to ensure change. Perhaps academia has assured its own creative destruction. Here is my contribution to CAAH:

As nearly everyone has acknowledged, the implications of the trends we are discussing in “On the joys and desperation of art history” are extremely important to the future of our discipline and the humanities as a whole. I want to ask these questions in a slightly different way. What are the implications of a generation of Ph.D.s that find alternate careers in libraries, museums, and other, non-traditional research and teaching environments? Many of the highly trained art historians who work outside of the university will find ways to join together their training and their new careers and they will “teach” and “research” in ways that may not have developed within the academy. We see the education departments of museums now hiring Ph.D.s and being quickly transformed and we see libraries taking on increasingly public roles in research and education (all of this aided by advances in technology). Maybe we should not mourn the loss of the academy of the 20th century but rather focus our collective attention on embracing and supporting this broader universe of scholars.

Perhaps this is too optimistic, but we worry that simply chasing the jobs of the last century will not allow our discipline to survive the next.

Here is the slide show from the conference:

Its been about a year since we launched the latest iteration of Smarthistory.org and I thought I’d post some of the usage statistics gathered via Google Analytics. Over the past year there have been 426,135 visits to Smarthistory with 993,419 page views from 196 countries and territories. We know that our users are students, teachers, museum visitors, creative professionals, travelers, and other informal learners.

Here are the top 25 college and university users based on institutional network visits (most frequent first):
1. Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY
2. Harvard University
3. Columbia University
4. University of Florida
5. New York University
6. University of Wisconsin
7. Savannah College of Art and Design
8. University of Georgia
9. University of Rhode Island
10. University of California at Berkeley
11. California State University Network
12. University of Bristol
13. Brigham Young University
14. Rochester Institute of Technology
15. Northern Arizona University
16. Yale University
17. Syracuse University
18. Rutgers University
19. Pratt Institute
20. University of California Los Angeles
21. University of Texas at Austin
22. Art Institutes International
23. University of Missouri-Columbia
24. Penn State
25. University of Colorado

Thank you so much for your interest and support. If you haven’t done so already, please take our very brief survey and help us make Smarthistory.org better.

* Makes use of the web – hyperlinks, multimedia, commenting, etc.
* Demonstrates an affordable development model
* Offers a reusable template for the humanities
* Demonstrates how to easily create multimedia
* Has an intuitive navigation – offering multiple paths for learners
* Teachers can link to pieces of content or download content
* Demonstrates how to create accessible, engaging content
* Modles effective image-based learning

See the image larger here

[Link here to the slides]

But to underscore that the technology is but a vehicle for the content, I couldn’t resist talking a bit about interpretation and different approaches to audio content design as well. We looked at scripted content, which should be more like blog posts written for the ear than recorded versions of object labels; interviews with experts such as artists or curators – always a favorite with audiences; and ‘vox pops’ that incorporate visitors’ opinions, for example, as is common in SFMOMA’s Artcasts; and conversations about art, like SmartHistory.org’s.

To illustrate the conversational approach, I played Beth and Steven’s podcast about American artist Mary Cassatt’s 1894 Breakfast in Bed in the Huntington Library in California, and we talked about how the informal dialectic space models learning, inviting the listener to join the conversation and develop his or her own views of the artwork. Even the speakers’ early disagreement in the podcast about which town they were in serves to reinforce this useful information about the Huntington, while lightening the tone and lending the podcast an approachable atmosphere.

We also looked at the context in which listeners experience the audio content: are they moving through the museum, sitting in the classroom, or on a bus? Are they looking at an artwork or a high-quality image of it online, or is this mainly an audio experience? And is the best vehicle for the podcaster’s message a traditional audio tour ‘stop’ or ‘soundbite’, that focuses on a given artwork in-depth, or is it an overview of a gallery (like this one Beth & I experimented with at the IMA), exhibition or theme that immerses the listener in a ‘soundtrack’ to provide a higher level guide or general tools for understanding an artist, a collection, a period?

Whatever their tack, I recommended that the teachers start with the questions that come immediately to mind for their students when they confront the art under consideration. These will range from the empirical ‘what is this?’ to the philosophical ‘why is it important?’ questions, and will be inflected by the specific content and context of the art. Here are some we collected from visitors to the folk art section of our Luce Foundation Center, an open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects in a compact space over three floors of the Museum’s west wing, where we are in the final stages of creating a cross-platform audio tour:

1. What makes folk art, ‘art’? How is folk art different from fine art? Why is it in museums?
2. Who makes folk art? What were the people who made it like?
3. What do the symbols mean?
4. Where does all this stuff come from?
5. What is it made of?
6. Why are fishing lures considered art?
7. What is up with the penguins?
8. Where did all these fish come from? One person or lots of people?
9. I’d like more information about the “memory” idea about the ceramics that have the stones and other objects. Could you give an example from one of these pieces?

The ‘leading with questions’ methodology could come straight out of a market research or customer service manual. By responding to what your listeners have foremost in their minds, you engage them in a mental dialogue that then opens up a space where other ‘key messages’ can be more easily received as well. You validate their questions and interests, so they are more likely to want to listen to what else you have to offer.

Of course the best way to learn is to teach, so another interesting use of audio in the classroom is having students create their own podcasts. The Education Department of the American Art Museum has a very popular student podcast program, in which high school students record their reflections on selected artworks in the collection. Through the process of creating a script about an artwork and listening to their own words, the students’ writing skills improve immeasurably, in addition to their visual arts literacy.

I am now relishing the vision of podcasting and the SmartHistory.org conversational technique being refined throughout American classrooms and engaging future generations more deeply with art through the students that the Clarice Smith teachers will touch. I hope they’ll be as generous in sharing their tips and best practice with the community of art educators as Steven and Beth have been with me!

About Nancy Proctor
Formerly Head of New Product Development at Antenna Audio, Nancy Proctor is now Head of New Media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She also manages MuseumMobile.info and its wiki and podcast series on mobile interpretation content and technology for cultural sites. Nancy was recently appointed Digital Editor of Curator: The Museum Journal.

Édouard Manet’s The Railway, oil on canvas, 1872-73 (National Gallery of Art)

Gov. Schwarzenegger Launches First-in-Nation Initiative to Develop Free Digital Textbooks for High School Students

Schools may copy Arnold Schwarzenegger and junk their textbooks

Courtesy Steffenz

A couple of years ago, Peter Samis (museum interpretor par excellence at SFMoMA) coined the term “visual velcro” to describe the goal of museum interpretation:

The work of interpretation…is to give cognitive hooks to the hookless, and assure that these hooks are sufficiently varied so that they can successfully land in the mental fabric of a broad array of visitors. Once visitors have a framework, all kinds of sensory impressions, emotions and reflections can weave themselves into the fabric of perception. In fact, the more you know about a subject, the more you can learn about it (presuming the mental model you are working with accommodates the new information).

But in the last week or two I started wondering, just what is visual velcro? How do you identify it while you’re creating interpretive materials?

I found myself thinking about this question in the last week. I volunteered to do an “alternative” audio-guide for Barbara London’s upcoming exhibition, Looking at Music Side 2. Barbara organized three conversations — each with two artists in the exhibition. I recorded the audio and Barbara and I both prompted our guests with questions. But since this was my first time doing this, I had no structure to offer as “best practices” — so it was pretty free-form. Each conversation lasted about an hour. I thought they would be shorter, but when you get people talking and reminiscing (especially people who haven’t seen each other in a while), it’s hard to cut them off sooner than that, and anyway, their conversations were fun and enlightening.

I started editing last week. Needless to say, editing one hour down to 3 minutes is a lot of work, but what I found myself most aware of was the choices I was making about what to select and what to omit. In the first conversation we did, James Nares talked about his short film (made with Seth Tillett), Game, which shows a grid on the floor (tiles), and two sets of hands on either side — like players on opposite sides of a chess board — taking turns moving rocks back and forth repetitively across the grid. When Barbara told me about the film it seemed strange to me, what could this be about? and I immediately imagined my students saying “this is not about anything” and “this is boring” and “why is the artist being difficult?” Indeed, I found myself wondering what that kind of repetitive motion had to do with art in NYC in the 1970s.

During the conversation, James talked about Game, and explained that a significant aspect of the film for him was the rhythm that emerged from the placing of the rocks, and he talked about how a kind of raw music scene seemed to express the desperate feeling of living in a bankrupt New York City in the 1970s better than anything else. Ok, that helped a lot. That felt like velcro – historical context almost always does. But what felt MOST like visual velcro was when Colleen Fitzgibbon talked about how repetition was important in her work as well, and for other artists from the period too. And she explained that during that time there was a feeling of being bombarded with messages from broadcast media — much of which was delivering messages that seemed, well, just wrong in terms of politics.

And there was the velcro!

For me, the loop that attached was to something that was already on my mind – I had been thinking about the one way delivery of content that was the broadcast TV of my childhood compared with the two-way conversations that are possible with new media, with the read-write web (or even the choices that are possible in terms of media now, with rss, TiVo and fast forwarding and time shifting). When Colleen said what she did, I remembered how repetitive and monolithic broadcast media felt then. Suddenly I could put that repetition into the context of my own childhood – in the hours I spent watching reruns of I Love Lucy and other sitcoms, remembering how powerless I felt before the 7 or so channels there were to watch.

Courtesy Andy Connelly

So these are the sections that I kept in the audio. And I hope that they work as velcro for others, but what are the chances of that? Maybe other people’s velcro will be very different from what worked for me (though I feel like decades of teaching has made me attuned to what works for students). But I also wonder if this connection, the story that I tell in the audio, needs to be spelled out more explicitly? The audio now feels somewhat incomplete… we need a website, a place for hyperlinks and tags, a place where people can talk about what repetition meant to them in the 1970s, about what it was like to live in New York city at one of its lowest moments, about what it meant to be an artist then, about the special power music had at that moment in time, a place where we can expand the possibilities for velcro, so that there is something that attaches for everyone who comes to the exhibition. Peter Samis has written about these possibilities here.

Thanks to Barbara London for giving me this opportunity, and for her openness and collegiality, and thanks too, to Sara Bodinson and Nancy Proctor for their help and support in creating my first MoMA audioguide.

In this video, Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs, and Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator, talk about Useful Art #5: The Western Hotel, 1992 by Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz.

WOW! Discovered at nearly midnight last night:

http://www.discoverpentimento.com/

I am so impressed – the interface is beautiful, and presents so many possibilities for interpretation. It’s offline. It’s free. Objects are available via themes, or an image gallery or item list. Audio, zooming… gorgeous!

WOW!

More later…

Mt. Rainier is currently on our right as we fly back to NYC from Portland by way of Seattle. We were privileged to spend the last few days at the Portland Art Museum with a group of dedicated educators, docents and curators. Our visit was the brainchild of Tina Olsen, the Director of Education and Programs, who thought there might be value in creating Smarthistory-style conversations for the museum—and wanted to test out her theory. We in turn, saw this as an opportunity to bridge the gap that exists between art historians in higher education and those in the museum world. Thanks to a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, we worked closely with Tina to design and execute an intensive two-day workshop to help educators, curators and docents develop the skills needed to create and produce interpretive content in the form of conversation that focused on their rich permanent collection.

Our goals included working across museum departments (with expert and non-expert voices) and opening up interpretation to emotion and opinion—in essence modeling thoughtful and exploratory conversations to invite museum visitors to discover collection objects on their own. While we have a clear sense that Smarthistory videos are engaging and helpful for art history students and informal learners, we had no real sense of how and if they would be successful in a museum context or how they might be transformed by other museum professionals. We were also excited to have two non-Western curators amongst the participants; we have been very curious to understand how our conversations would play out with art that was not part of the Western tradition.

So, this was an experiment—for both Smarthistory and for the Portland Art Museum—and no one was quite sure where it would leave us. We have already begun evaluating how successfully we achieved our goals and will continue in follow-up surveys and interviews. We’ll make sure to post all results here, and plan to develop a related “How-To” section on the Smarthistory site this summer for museums that might want to replicate what we did, though it became very clear to us that having experienced facilitators from the outside was extremely valuable.

Since this was new territory for all of us; we prepared carefully and even assigned preparatory “homework”—articles by Rika Burnham (Frick Collection) and Peter Samis (SFMoMA). The homework focused on museum interpretation and included audios and videos from the Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smarthistory and covered a wide range of styles. Some were long, some short, some were conversations while others were lectures and interviews. For our icebreaker we asked each workshop participant to bring in a reproduction of an object that had personal meaning to them—these also formed the basis of the first audio recording.

Over the course of the two days, each participant had four opportunities to create recordings in the galleries followed by time to listen, reflect and discuss. We experimented with different pairings—curator/curator, curator/educator, educator/educator, educator/docent, and docent/docent. In some pairings an object would be intimately familiar to one of the speakers, while in others, the object was less familiar to both. We also took turns in the mix.

What we didn’t anticipate was how much fun everyone would have. Taking time from busy schedules, going out into the galleries, talking to colleagues about beautiful and interesting objects that they feel a strong sense of attachment to, and creating and editing video that would live on the website—proved a surprisingly pleasurable experience. Several participants described the workshop as therapeutic and restorative.

In our discussions, we explored the following questions –

• Where should the media we created reside—on the website and/or in the galleries? How would it be accessed it the galleries?
• What formats (audio or video, long or short) would be best for those different settings?
• What style was best—an exploratory conversation or a relaxed interview? Is style tied to the purpose of the recording (a gallery overview, to model discovery, or an in-depth explication)?
• Does the conversation’s style depend on the speakers’ roles (docents, curators, educators—or a combination of those) and/or their familiarity and expertise with the object that was discussed?
• What visual material is most useful in the gallery versus on the website? Should visual material be offered in the gallery? If so, what kind of material would be best? Should we use a combination of photos of the image and video of the speakers?

We recognize that museum professionals in both education and curatorial departments don’t have the time and perhaps the confidence to learn new technologies unless they see first hand a substantial benefit. We were able to demonstrate strategies for creating engaging interpretive content as well as how to publish high quality video for in-gallery and web distribution. Video and audio production is still veiled in jargon and is viewed as an extremely expensive undertaking that is best left to IT departments and outside consultants.

We took a different approach. Our workshop sought to empower the curatorial and education departments with conversational strategies and inexpensive easy-to-use equipment and software. Very quickly, curators were planning future recordings while after the first brief lesson, two educators were confidently editing audio while zooming and panning across still images.

Please let us know if you have questions about the workshop, or if you are interested in running one at your institution.

Warm thanks to Christina Olsen, Bruce Guenther, Gerri Hayes, Kate Burns, Stephanie Parrish, Floyd Sklaver, Jillian Punska, Amy Gray, Maribeth Graybill, & Anna Strankman.

Ramesses II, Egypt, Herakleopolis
(Temple of Harsaphes), ca. 1250 BCE

Great Lyre from the “King’s Grave,” ca. 2650-2550 B.C., Gold, silver, lapis lazuli, shell, bitumen and wood (University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)

For some time now, we have been publicly questioning the division that exists between two professional groups tasked with educating the public about art: those in museums (curators and educators) and those in the academy (art historians). These two communities share expertise that is sought by the museum visitor and the student, yet they rarely meet, too often do not attend the same conferences, and almost never collaborate.

Teachers in the art history classroom regularly rely on museum resources (the fabulous Vermeer videos for example, created by the National Gallery, or the Eastman House videos to name two of our favorites). Exhibition subsites are also often very useful—but they are expensive to produce. The learning materials developed by professors for their students often reside behind the locked gates of learning management systems, so they are not available to the wider public (open courseware is, of course, the lovely exception). Interestingly, it is usually only via iTunesU that we are able to aggregate content created by these two different communities.

Our overarching point is that these two communities really ought to collaborate because the benefits to those we serve could be enormous. And we have two notions about how we might do that:

Notion 1
Inspired by Koven Smith’s recent paper (given just a couple of weeks ago at Museums and the Web) on the Future of Mobile Interpretation we thought of one way to bring the museum and the academy together. Koven draws attention to the disjunction between the more open and personalized online museum experience—which often allows visitors to browse most (if not all) of the museum’s collection, and even create personal collections of their own—and the experience of the on-site mobile device which contains only limited “stops” and focuses on special exhibitions and highlights from the permanent collection. Koven’s answer to mobile interpretation: make the entire collection available on mobile devices—with the textual accompaniment one finds on the website. And we would add more to that—make it available with interpretation that is conversational, open, personal, opinionated—AND offers expertise.

In a recent blog post Nina Simon noted the disjunction between the on-site experiences and the web experiences even of the same museum, “You may be able to engage a thriving community online, but if their experience with the institution is fundamentally different from the onsite one, they will remain online-only visitors.”

As we discussed with Nancy Proctor and Deb Howes, what if artists and art historians—those with significant expertise in looking at and thinking about art—could be called on to create multimedia (and even text-based) content for the works of art in a museum’s permanent collection? Museums could provide guidelines about what they are looking for, vet the content, and publish to the website and mobile devices only that content that aligned with the institution’s needs. In this way, the museum can begin to move toward becoming a platform and not just a provider.

Notion 2
The Smarthistory Lab
Susan Chun is one of those people for whom great ideas are a dime a dozen. There was one she tossed out over drinks recently that fit perfectly with two strands of thinking we have been grappling with at Smarthistory. On the one hand, we have sought ways to create a community of Smarthistory users and to include and highlight their voices (we are creating comments capability in the newest version) but we had also begun to discuss creating a sandbox, tentatively named the Smarthistory Lab, a neutral ground beyond the cloistered walls of the academy and the fortress-like facades of our museums where experts from across our disciplines can explore collaborative projects. So into this mire, Susan mentions that she had been working on an article that focused on the museum label. We were both instantly focused. There is likely no aspect of museum convention more fraught then the tiny real estate given over to the label. Here, on a small bit of cardboard beside the original object, is a set of abbreviated choices that likely express far more about the current state of museological and art historical thinking than it reveals about the object it is appended to.

The Label Project
An original impetus for Smarthistory was to enrich the museum visitors’ experience. At the museum we too often see visitors focused on the scant data offered by the label and not the object, hungry for keys to the work of art in front of them. And too often we offer them only the merest sustenance, the basic stats of an artist’s birth and death, material, perplexing acquisition and provenance notations, and perhaps a brief formal reading or quote. How stingy this seems compared to the riches potentially available. Can the tired modernist fiction that the direct experience of the object must remain unencumbered by the frame of context really still be operative? Do we actually believe that the experience of seeing the objects that we display is so tentative, and so easily overwhelmed?

Our first project for the Smarthistory Lab will be a wiki for writing museum labels, framed by the aforementioned article (by Susan Chun) and a discussion on the museum label. Our questions: How can we reinvent the museum label? What should it include? Can it be digital and multi-layered so that summary can lead to in-depth resources if the visitor wants more? Could the wiki label project be a forum where scholars from museums and from universities collaborate to provide a multiplicity of voices that inform and challenge and can this be the point where the online museum intersects with the experience of the physical visitor?

Please look for the Smarthistory Lab initiative by the end of June.

– Beth Harris & Steven Zucker

Unknown, Mixing Vessel with Odysseus Escaping from the Cyclops’s Cave, 550-500 B.C.E.