Art Brings People Together: Measuring the Power of Social Bridging

Earlier this fall, I read this headline: "Stanford study: Participation in a cultural activity may reduce prejudice." I eagerly read about a new social psychology research study in which whites, Asians, and Latinos engaged in a simple collaborative activity--making a music video together. When the music video was focused on Mexican culture, the researchers found that the white and Asian participants demonstrated a decrease in prejudice against Latinos, both immediately after the activity and six months later. When the music video was not focused on Mexican culture, no such change occurred.

I wanted to know more. So I called one of the researchers, Tiffany Brannon. I talked with Tiffany, and also with Hazel Markus and Alanna Connor, Stanford social psychologists who recently co-authored a pretty fascinating pop-science book about understanding cultural difference. And then I started talking with Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, a UC Berkeley psychologist who blogs under the title Are We Born Racist?. The book of the same title that he edited is rocking my world, both as a museum professional who cares about inclusion and as a new mother.

It's impossible to process everything I am learning from these four psychologists in just one blog post. I am just starting to dive into the science of intergroup relations (psychology-speak for social bridging), and I greatly appreciate these individuals who are working to popularize and open up what could otherwise be esoteric research. So consider this just the first of many posts related to issues of cultural inclusion, evaluation, and impact. I realize that I may sound like a college freshman who just discovered Psych 101, but heck. This blog is about shared learning, and I went to engineering school.

My biggest question for these social psychologists is this: how do we apply their lessons to our work? At my museum, we pride ourselves on developing programming in a collaborative way that emphasizes diversity and intentionally encourages social bridging by bringing people together from different walks of life around cultural experience. We have witnessed and experienced incredible moments of transformation: homeless people and history buffs working together on historic restoration, graffiti artists and knitters collaborating on new artistic projects, visitors from different backgrounds making collages, or sculptures, or dance performances together. Our theory of change posits that when we develop projects that bridge “unexpected connections” between diverse people and ideas, people build understanding and social capital with community members from different cultures, generations, and backgrounds. But how do we know whether these efforts are working? Are we building social capital or just accumulating feel-good anecdotes?

Some irrational part of me hoped these social psychologists would whip out a magic list of prescriptions for successful social bridging or a checklist of indicators of its incidence. That didn't happen. But each of these studies yields another useful nugget. In the case of the Stanford study, I was fascinated to learn that the content of the music video was significant in terms of signaling change in prejudice. We often invite visitors to collaborate on activities comparable to making a music video--but we could be more mindful and strategic about the themes and content of these activities.

Reducing intergroup bias isn't a primary goal in all of our work, but in some projects, it's of particular interest. As we start the process at our museum of updating our permanent history gallery, one of our specific goals is to increase intergroup understanding in our community. We hope that visitors will not only learn about our diverse roots but be able to identify and transform some of the persistent challenges that divide us. We have some strategies for tackling this: convening diverse content advisors, incorporating anti-bias educational approaches in our design, developing participatory opportunities for visitors to connect past to present. But how will we know if we are actually achieving our goals? How can we assess the success of our social bridging efforts, and what can we learn from those measurements to improve our practice?

I have seen a lot of inclusion practices and policies in museums and cultural institutions, but I haven't seen many evaluations of their success. I think the general sense in our field is that it is too hard to measure these kinds of things, beyond counting the number of participants from different backgrounds.

But when I asked Tiffany Brannon how social psychologists measure something like prejudice against Latinos, she immediately brought up three different ways:

1. Non-verbal communication. You can video-record interactions among participants, and then look at various non-verbal indicators of comfort or discomfort: who do individuals stand next to, do they make eye contact, how do they position their bodies. You can measure the change in that comfort before and after the research activity. While this would be difficult to do in a museum en masse, it could certainly be done with a small representative sample of visitors.
2. Implicit Associations test. This test, which many of us have experienced in some form (perhaps at a science center), asks participants to sort words and pictures as quickly as possible. It reveals unconscious associations, for example, between skin color and criminality, or weight and intelligence. There are many forms of the test and it can be modified to target specific questions of interest. Measuring the change in implicit associations over time is a proxy for change in bias. Check out the range of demonstration studies online to see the possibilities. 
3. Direct questioning. In the music video study, Tiffany and her research partners went back to participants six months after the activity and asked a series of questions about their interest in interacting with Latinos and their perspective on immigration policy questions that significantly impact Latinos. While it is not easy to ask directly "what do you think about XX people?" and get a truthful or useful answer, it is doable to ask proxy questions that are shown to be correlated with bias against particular groups. This technique is particularly interesting to me because our county already manages a bi-annual community assessment project that asks direct questions about perception of prejudice. We might be able to tie our efforts to their research AND show that participation at the museum yields a statistically significant different result (or not). 

These techniques are not rocket science, but none of them even occurred to me prior to my conversation with Tiffany Brannon. We may not be able to do the kind of publishable research in a museum that happens in a lab, but even in a messy system we can learn a lot to improve our programming and assess impact. I hung up from our phone call feeling like something immeasurable might be measurable... and also, that there is huge potential for partnership between researchers and cultural organizations to learn more about social bridging together, using the applied world of our community programs as the basis for formal research.

Have you done research on social bridging in your cultural practice? What would you like to learn, and what have you discovered?

What Should Happen to Underperforming Nonprofit Organizations?

"I want death panels. I want to kill organizations that aren't showing their value."
--Devon Smith 

Now that's the kind of sentence that makes you put down your fork.

Last month, I had the good fortune to join a few brilliant people for a "Dinner-vention" about the future of the arts in America. In the course of the conversation, Devon Smith, a social media consultant from Threespot, started talking the problem of arts organizations that are no longer relevant or useful to their communities. [Watch the two-minute conversation between Devon and Clayton Lord starting at 14:25 in the video below.]

Devon didn't mince words. "Some organizations are going to die," she stated. "I want to incentivize them to die quicker." She argued that we need a way to correct for the fact that nonprofits don't operate in a traditional capitalist marketplace, and therefore aren't subject to the market forces that might otherwise cause them to fold when they are no longer useful. Hence, death panels.

For a long time, I agreed with this argument. Like a lot of people, I am incredibly frustrated by organizations floating on endowments that allow them to sail on regardless of impact or community relevance. I'm pissed off that well-capitalized organizations that engage a narrowing constituency can raise millions while young organizations struggle to be viable even as they produce powerful work for growing communities. I agree with Devon that more mergers and accountability would be a great thing. I wish organizations would focus more on creating amazing work than on sustaining operations.

But here I sit, the director of a museum that almost closed, squirreling away money for an operating reserve. I am part of the problem. And proud of it.

As I've watched arts organizations struggle over the past few years, I haven't thought, "gee, it's great that the market is causing these places to shut down." I haven't thought, "wow, the market is really resetting our field in a productive way." Instead, I've thought, "this is wasteful and depressing."

Consider two high-profile arts closures in 2013: that of Shakespeare Santa Cruz and the 3rd Ward. Neither of these organizations closed because of a collective decision that they had outlived their usefulness. They closed for capricious financial reasons, and they left disappointed artists and participants in their wake. Could each have offered MORE community value? Absolutely. But when market forces hit arts organizations, it doesn't necessarily mean a more useful outcome than when arts organizations are insulated from those same forces with cash reserves, endowments, and other potential hindrances to change.

And let's not delude ourselves into thinking that the market does a better job at this than nonprofits. When the dotcom crash started killing off companies in the early 2000s, my DC housemates scavenged strange gifts from vacated offices. We decorated our group house with purloined office chairs and giant motivational posters--the detritus of an industry that was massively hemorrhaging. Yes, the market corrected for the dotcom bubble. But it did so in a way that was wasteful and chaotic.

What's the alternative to this waste? We have the opportunity in nonprofits to create a MORE efficient marketplace than capitalism offers. Instead of talking about "creative destruction," I think we should focus on creative reinvention. I firmly believe that there is more value to be created, faster and more efficiently, by reinventing and transforming existing organizations than by killing them and starting again. 

Consider the museum I run. In 2011, we were on very shaky financial ground. Our cash balance was zero, but that wasn't the only asset we had. We had a gorgeous building in the middle of downtown Santa Cruz. We had an army of long-time donors, members, volunteers, and participants who invested a lot in the organization and cared about its longterm future. We had a dedicated staff that wanted to make this museum as good as it could be. We had a vision for the museum as a thriving, central gathering place in the community.

As we transformed our programming in pursuit of that vision, we were able to tap these existing assets to quickly and dramatically increase our value to the community. We were able to do that faster than we ever could have if we had started anew.

You could argue that if the museum had closed, the resources that had gone into it--money, effort, goodwill--would have been redistributed in the marketplace. But we know that's not exactly what would happen. There would be a lot of leakage. There would be a lot of waste. It would take much more energy to recapture those assets than to redirect them.

And so I issue a challenge to people who are frustrated with arts organizations and their limited relevance to your community: reinvent them. Recombine them. Reenergize them. Instead of starting your own organization, find a way to add value to one that already exists. House your program in an underutilized library. Pitch your project to a struggling symphony. Sure, some of those organizations are not going to change, or not enough, to be worth your participation. But some will.

Forget killing. Forget life support. Let's revitalize our communities, and the organizations that engage them, with the courage and creativity they deserve.

Guest Post: Restoration Artwork

This is the last of the guest posts offered during this fall season, and it dovetails with last week's post about opening up collections access nicely. George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. Elsewhere is at the top of my list of places I would most like to visit. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere, a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence. Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection.  This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art.  

Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums. In this post, I hope to bring out some of the complexities of the idea of restoration as it occurs within an experimental museum supporting both a collection and the practices of emerging artists.

Elsewhere is a living museum, set in a former thrift store once run by my grandmother, Sylvia Gray, from 1939-1997.  During this period, she amassed a vast collection of inventories, filling the three-floor store, including a former 14 room boarding house, and third floor workshop.  In 2003, collaborator Stephanie Sherman and I “re-discovered,” the former store, declared nothing for sale, and began inviting artists to create works using the set, or collection of objects.  From the outset, we imagined an infinitely re-arrangeable puzzle, a three floor installation composed and recomposed from only what was at hand.  Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.  The objects, artworks, and the traces of past experience are all part of an unfolding continuum of the living museum.  

The artwork to be restored is a piece called the Glass Forest, (2009) created by Agustina Woodgate, composed of glass and brass cabinets and mirror-etched bark patterns.  The Glass Forest was itself an act of restoration. It re-set the room’s contents of glass mirrors and significantly restored the tired tongue-and-groove floor. Curiously, Guillermo is the current studio assistant of Ms. Woodgate, and is intimately familiar with Woodgate’s work, process, and thinking.  

The proposal was as much to restore an artwork as it was to “take back” the artwork, because after 4 years of slight interventions, film shoots, and an “unsuccessful” effort to create a new work that changed the tone, composition, and material content of the piece, it was determined a restoration-reset of the Glass Forest was in order. During the proposal it was discussed that certain elements of previous works and interventions should remain in the restored Glass Forest and it was further noted that Ms. Woodgate’s work undid a previous work, Mr. Stag’s Hosiery Museum, by Lucy Steggals, a period piece of an imagined hosiery salesman. At every moment the question of restoration was countered with the preservation of traces.

The restoration, which was championed by the curatorial team, has sparked an interesting debate about the intersecting challenges of making work in and from a museum collection, and the occasional incongruity with artists’ creative needs and formal structures of residency program itself.  

Elsewhere’s residency invites artists to use the museum as site, resource, and concept to create new artworks. Artists are explicitly asked not to have proposals before they arrive, but rather immerse themselves in the museum, its community, and collection. The artists’ challenge after a short three days on the ground is to design a response to the museum, press their experimentation with materials, and transform both object and artwork. To this effect the curatorial team works closely with each artist to support the process, guide the careful use of collection, push a continual reflection on site specificity, identify past histories, and ensure a relation to the various publics that the museum serves.  

Sometimes a work just doesn’t work, or the challenges of the residency don’t connect with the artist’s practice, or the timeframe for response is too short to fully engage the complexity of the museum’s context. While there is a strong resistance toward “fixing” a work, Elsewhere’s curators are all artists and view their role as collaborators in the overall creative development of the museum-as-artwork. They maintain a creative autonomy and intimate relation with the museum and its collection that empowers them to play with and transform the visual environment. Most importantly, the conversation about restoration brought to light the contingent values that support a site-specific, museum-based, experimental practice with a collection.  

As a guardian of a collection, Elsewhere breaks a marker of tradition by allowing art and object to be transformed. However, extreme purposefulness and resourcefulness are applied to the tiniest plastic bead, antique cloth, and wood scrap left from a cut made to century old lathe. “Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Each moment of material use is collection use, and represents an ethical and aesthetic decision for resource potential and the way we advance and perpetuate Elsewhere’s meaning to its artists and publics.  

Like other museums, Elsewhere is an interpretive space, constructed to secure and invest in cultural meaning, cultural objects, and creative expression. We willingly transfer this interpretive responsibility from the institution and its curators to the artist at the artist’s most precious, fragile, and critical moment of creative process. This demands that awareness and responsiveness be deeply embedded in the artist’s practice and thought. For curators, it means they must act as guides for the artists, supportive and challenging, but willing to continually reflect on the museum’s own institutional reflexes, aesthetic tendencies, and precious instincts.  

As I write this post Guillermo’s restoration remains in mid-process. Strangely, I am the only one on the team who saw the Glass Forest in its original inception, and I’ve remained quiet about small details that are different between Guillermo’s actions and what I remember to be Agustina’s original intent. Nevertheless, in those gaps of document, memory and intervention, Elsewhere evolves. Each artist brings a restorative and disruptive process. We welcome that. They often place pieces into the puzzle that unhinge whole sections of the picture, but they also restore and evolve the visual environment and the museum’s meaning. It is a living process, a deeply artistic process, and an exciting part of the museums’ imaginary--that a restoration is always already a new work of art.

Guest Post: A New Role for Science Museums--Playground for Scientists

One of the greatest gifts of my babymoon is the opportunity to share the Museum 2.0 author's desk with brilliant colleagues who inspire me. First up is Beck Tench, a "simplifier, illustrator, story teller, and technologist" working at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham, NC. Beck is the brain behind the risk-taker/space-maker paradigm I've shared here in the past. In this post, she writes about Experimonth, an intriguing set of crowd-sourced projects that connect scientists with research participants in surprising ways. 

As a person who works for a science museum, I work in an environment that supports play. But at my museum, the support doesn't stop at our visitors.  I'm also given the space to take risks and to play as my work. It's resulted in some of my favorite work ever: games like #namethatzoom, projects like FeederSketch, adult-only Ball Pits, and most importantly, the creation of Experimonth, which is what I'd like to blog about today.

Experimonth started out as play. Back in 2008, I devised a plan to outsource my New Year's Resolutions. I tweeted and Facebooked a request for friends to suggest things I could resolve to do over the course of 2009. Once compiled, I also asked folks to vote on them, promising to do whatever the top twelve were.  I charted them across the year and pledged to try one each month, inviting others to do them with me and blog about the experience.

Thus began a year of play. That is to say, we engaged in each Experimonth for the pure enjoyment of it, rather than any real serious or practical purpose.  I met many new people and learned a lot about technology and community, but the learning wasn't the point, enjoying the resolutions was.

Fast-forward a couple of years and I'm taking a shower one morning and thinking about a talk a colleague recently gave about the placebo effect and I thought to myself, "we could probably do an Experimonth about that at the museum." I'd just met a local researcher and I thought she'd be a great person to talk to about it. I came to her with an idea I called "Gut Sense." A way to explore doing a blind study on one's self. I imagined people weighing themselves everyday without looking at the scale and then also guessing what their weight was. After a month, they'd compare the numbers to see if there were any correlations between what they sensed and what was quantifiable.

The project didn't go far due to the sensitivity most folks have around numbers and their weight, but it did launch a conversation with the researcher about mood and emotion that ended up becoming the museum's first official Experimonth, Experimonth: Mood. We recruited folks and designed software that texted them five times a day for thirty days, asking one question, "Rate your mood 1 (low) to 10 (high)."

The project blew away our expectations. We retained 96% of our participants throughout the month. They were 81% compliant with texting back their mood. And we generated over 18,000 mood data points for our researcher, Frances Ulman, Ph.D. The most surprising thing to me, however, was what she had to say about the experience:

Experimonth is like playing for scientists.  A critical part of the scientific method is the development of a hypothesis, which can then be tested with well controlled research.  The rigorous and fast paced setting of academia can rarely provide a sort of experimental scratch pad that is ultimately generative for new hypotheses and methods of inquiry. Experimonth can provide this generative experience for scientists, where the flexible interaction with participants allows for potentially new hypotheses and ideas to form.

If the lightbulb had already gone off, it certainly got brighter for me at this moment.  Experimonth had the potential to generate new scientific knowledge.  All of a sudden, I looked at my town as a place teeming with scientists in need of play.  And my museum, and this new model, as a space for them to do so.

We ran with it and have since generated data about decision-making, cooperation, competition and negotiation for scientists (and also some artists) to play with. For example:

• We worked with a local psychologist to create an implicit associations-based game called "Smart, Hot, Honest or Not?" as a part of Experimonth: Race. Using facial morphing software to change a player's avatar to a different ethnicity, we fed the game with hundreds of photos that were judged in a "hot or not" type interface and gave players a view of how intelligent, attractive, and trustworthy others perceived them to be as two different ethnicities. 
• We worked with a neuroscientist studying cooperation and competition to develop Experimonth: Frenemy, a prisoner's dilemma-based game where players decided to friend or enemy an anonymous opponent based on one piece of information.  We generated nearly 10k data points and hundreds of text-based confessionals that he's already successfully used to model cooperative behavior and is considering publishing on it.
• We worked with a social scientist studying the power of being able to walk away from an uncooperative environment to develop Experimonth: Freeloader, a public-goods game where players decide whether to invest in their group or freeload.  She'll have enough data from this that she can compare actual human behavior to what she's only been able to simulate via modeling software so far.
• We worked with an anthropologist studying the evolution of coordination to develop Experimonth: Do You Know What I Know You Know?, a game where you only get points if you choose the same thing as everyone in your group but you don't have any way of communicating with them about your decision.  He'll be able to watch how certain activities evolve into coordination and what kinds of histories the people who most easily coordinate have in common.
• We also developed Experimonths about trading objects, matchmaking and electronically racing across the country, where the data and/or purpose are less defined -- but we trust it will surely teach us something, even (or especially) if it fails.

There's something magical about the cognitive surplus most of us have at this point in time and then applying that to the challenge of doing something for 30 days.  I wholeheartedly believe it has the power to advance science (and art and cultural heritage) through the power of play. I invite you and your museum to join me as we conceive, launch and complete new Experimonths. In fact, we'll be hosting Frenemy, Freeloader, and Do You Know What I Know You Know? this fall. Sign up to indicate your interest or contact me directly to play a part.

Beck will be checking in to respond to your comments and questions here. 

Great Participatory Processes are Open, Discoverable, and Unequal

When I was in college, I spent almost all of my free time in the slam poetry scene. A few years and a few hundred open mics into that experience, it became obvious that some venues fostered amazing poetry communities, others, not so much.

One of my favorite open mics was at the Cantab in Cambridge, MA. The Cantab had a formula. Everyone got five minutes on the mic max. Slots on the list were first-come first-served, though newbies were usually placed early in the set so they would have a gentle onramp (and so seasoned poets could skip the kiddie pool if they chose to). Once the list filled, there were still shadow spots for special poets--but you had to be good to get one of those. The crowd was uniformly supportive of all, but effusive applause was meted out based strictly on quality. Experienced poets worked hard to bring their best to the stage, and they got honest feedback from a motley gang of peers and spectators. The whole experience welcomed newcomers while helping them understand what "value" constituted in that community.

Compare that with any number of lousy open mics. Some were so exclusive that it was impossible to feel welcome as a newcomer. Others lavished praise so indiscriminately that poets were never challenged to improve or bring forward new work. Some had no clear time limits or criteria for participation, and the poetry swung between brilliance and poke-your-eye-out horror.

I was reminded of these experiences when reading Dan Thompson's excellent post about what makes a good jazz jam. Dan writes about the explicit and implied "rules" of participation for musicians that create great music both onstage and for the crowd. He casts the whole idea of a great jazz jam in the context of the tragedy of the commons--like a poetry open mic, the jazz club is a community whose experience is fabulous or awful depending on the extent to the culture cultivates and enforces a healthy participatory process.

When I think about what makes for great participatory experiences in both poetry open mics and jazz jams, it comes down to three basic things:

• The process is open. There is some way for anyone to walk in the door and sign up.
• The process is discoverable. If there are implied rules or idiosyncrasies (and in the best cultures, there are), they are not completely shrouded in mystery. Repeated participation can make them knowable and understandable. 
• The process is unequal. It acknowledges differences in talent, experience, and effort, and has a system--either explicit or implicit--for rewarding greatness.

These might sound obvious, but when you think about how they relate to bad participatory processes, it becomes apparent where things can break down. Here are just three participatory processes I think are in serious need of improvement:

• Public comment at city council meetings. These suffer from an excess of equality. Have you ever stood in line for your two minutes on an issue at a government meeting? The process is incredibly open and equal. Wackos and experts all get the same amount of time. And the end result--what politicians actually decide--rarely seems meaningfully correlated with the participatory process. These systems are open, but they are also excessively equal and not discoverable. The result is that people get turned off, cynical, and leave. Only the extremists remain. And thus councilmembers have to go outside the process to get good input from community members (if at all). The process becomes even less discoverable. It gets killed by the equality of it.
• Grant application feedback. These suffer from a lack of discoverability. You spend hours agonizing over the language for a grant application. You put it in, wait a couple months, and then you get a one-page form letter informing you that you did (or more likely, didn't) receive funding. Occasionally, the funder will offer limited opportunities for feedback on the proposal. Even more rarely, you will receive panel comments directly. Grant processes are inherently unequal--the funder is trying to find the best work to support. But they are also problematically not discoverable. It's rare that you get direct feedback about your proposal without aggressively asking for it. The whole process of grant applications would be improved if providing panel comments was a matter of course. Applicants would learn what they lacked, and funders would (hopefully) receive better applications. Opaque funding decisions don't help anyone.
• Exhibition proposals. These suffer from a lack of openness. This is an issue we are actively grappling with at our museum. We receive frequent inquiries from artists and community members about how thy might submit exhibition proposals for consideration by our institution. At many museums, the curatorial process is completely closed and undiscoverable--"don't call us, we'll call you." Others have clear and open processes for submittal and proposal review. As we figure out what's right for us, I'm guided by the desire to create something open and discoverable--but not necessarily "fair" and equal.

Do these three criteria--open, discoverable, unequal--resonate for you in designing or experiencing participatory processes? 

Thinking about User Participation in Terms of Negotiated Agency

Early this month, I got the chance to hear legendary game designer Will Wright (Sim City) give a talk. I've followed Wright's work for years because of his unique perspective on the potential for game-players to be game-makers - in other words, to co-create the gaming experience.

In his talk, Wright said one thing that really stood out:

Game players have a negotiated agency that is determined by how the game is designed.

In other words, the more constrained the game environment, the less agency the player has. The more open, the more agency. Think about the difference between Pacman and Grand Theft Auto. Both games have a "gamespace" in which they are played. Both games have rules. But Grand Theft Auto invites the player to determine their own way of using the space and engaging with the rules. The player's agency is not total, but it is significant.

"Negotiated agency" strikes me as a really useful framework in which to talk about visitor/audience participation in the arts. "Negotiation" implies a respectful relationship between institution (or artist) and user. The institution initiates the negotiation with a set of opportunities and constraints. But users play a role via their own agency--both in how they engage and when they break the rules.

Sometimes the negotiation works beautifully. You offer visitors markers and tape and a wall, and they agree tacitly only to write on the tape and not on the wall itself.

Sometimes the negotiation is contested. You tell people they can't take photographs in the gallery or the performance, but the phones sneak out, covertly or defiantly, to reassert personal control of the experience. Patrons clap between movements. Visitors talk over the tour guide.

Sometimes the negotiation can be exploited for artistic means. The theater is dark and the artist breaks the fourth wall and asks for conversation. The symphony conductor asks everyone to raise their phones and join the orchestra. The museum invites art-making in the elevator. This is a kind of negotiation jui-jitsu that can create art through creative tension.

In my experience, this negotiation works best if we acknowledge people's agency and seek ways to create something surprising and high-value through it.

And so I humbly submit two questions to ask yourself when thinking about user participation:

1. What is our negotiating stance in developing this relationship with participants? How can we make it a win-win?
2. How will participants seek to assert their agency in the experience? Will we encourage these activities, denounce them, or divert them?

Into the Deep End: What's Keeping Museums from Telling Meaty, In-Depth Stories?

I just finished listening to This American Life's incredible two-part series about gun violence at Harper High School in Chicago. It does everything a great documentary story can do: it takes you into another world, introduces you to unforgettable people, defies expectations, and delivers tough realities instead of fairy tales.
 
I've been consuming a lot of documentary stories recently, primarily through Longform.org, my new favorite go-to nighttime reading source. Longform curates superlative non-fiction from a variety of sites and magazines. It has introduced me to corrupt university fundraisers, the true history of Tom Dooley, and the world's oldest marathon runner... and that's just in the last week.

All this delightful non-fiction makes me wonder: why aren't museums great at telling these same kinds of deep, intense stories? Why are exhibitions, which have huge potential as immersive, multi-platform narrative devices, so rarely used to that effect?

Yes, I know that every platform is different, and that the captive attention we afford to radio, TV, and written material doesn't map perfectly to a free-choice wander through an exhibition. But exhibitions have the potential to use all those narrative tools PLUS objects, immersive design, and interactive experiences to tell stories.

Strangely, exhibitions have become incredibly successful at creating immersive environments that tell broad conceptual stories--but not so good at telling tight, focused stories. I've experienced many excellent thematic exhibitions that gave me an overall sense of a story, but few that really dove into a particular object or incident. This seems strange given that museums are organized around objects. Think about how common it is to see an exhibition on a time period, an artistic genre, or a broad scientific discipline that uses a variety of objects and narrative devices as guideposts along a diffuse journey, and how rare it is to see an in-depth experience around just one object or set of objects, as in Peter Greenaway's extraordinary (and fictionalized) delving into Rembrandt's Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum, or Anne Frank's intimate attic hideout.

Too often we pull our punches by using the weakest storytelling techniques--broad generalizations on 50 word labels, an immersive wading pool of narrative bits. We avoid the incredible power that comes from a deep dive into one object, one story, one moment. Social object theory tells us that the most compelling stories exist around individual objects, but we weaken those stories by throwing too much in the same pot. We justify the tradeoff by arguing that we have to tell the broader story, offer more context, integrate more objects.

But tight doesn't have to mean limited. When we experience intense depth, as in the Minnesota History Center's Open House, which explores the stories of residents of one St. Paul home over time, or the Boston Museum of Science's beautiful theater experience about Nikola Tesla, or an incredible single artist show, it stands out. It's unforgettable. The individuals, the nuance, the specificity--the story tattoos itself on your memory in a way that a generalized exhibition cannot. It leads to more interesting conclusions and motivates further exploration. While the story is tighter, the impact is less prescribed, and more powerful.

One of the most surprising versions of this I have ever experienced was in a very small museum in Texas, the Brazos Valley African American Museum. They had a very simple exhibit of single-page laminated stories, transcribed from oral interviews with elders in the community. I was captivated by these first-person accounts because of their clarity and specificity. They led me to places I never would have gone otherwise. The narrative device was almost nil, and yet the content experience was better than I've had in most exhibitions.

Specificity trumps generality when it comes to creating a powerful documentary story. It's easy to imagine a hard-hitting exhibition on teens and gun violence that might tell a "broader story" than that on This American Life--more statistics, more diverse images and voices from throughout the country, more opportunities to reflect and connect. And yet it wouldn't be as powerful as an exhibition on just one story of one high school. It wouldn't be as deep. It wouldn't be as real. And ultimately (and ironically), it wouldn't have the power to expose the bigger issues in the nuanced way that a tight focus can.

When have you experienced this kind of deep dive in an exhibition? What do you think makes it possible, and what do you think makes it so rare?

Should Museum Exhibitions Be More Linear? Exploring the Power of the Forced March in Digital and Physical Environments

When I was a teenager, I was enthralled by interactive fiction. I loved the idea of the web as an infinite landscape, with stories and poems spiraling out in nonlinear directions.

Fifteen years later, the web has evolved tremendously... but hypertext-based interactive art and fiction is  still a nerdy sideline at best. A cult of linearity has dominated content on the web, with implications about how we think about effective storytelling both online and in museums.

One of the loveliest recent examples of linear multimedia storytelling is the Avalanche at Tunnel Creek story produced by the New York Times. Spend a bit of time exploring it, and you'll notice:

• Incredible pacing brings you into and out of media components to the story just when you want them. The photos, videos, and maps are not distractions; they are embedded wisely in terms of size, frequency, and length.
• It's a linear story, told top to bottom, with pagination for "chapters" of the story. You scroll down, you read, you watch, you continue on.

There are real positives to linearity in storytelling, even in an online environment freed from the page. Consider this lovely little story about past and present colliding in a Portland basement. It's a simple linear progression of text and images. The back and forth between the images and text creates a kind of dramatic tension that builds suspense and encourages a slower, more contemplative read. Slight introductions of movement, as in this Pitchfork feature on Natasha Khan, help you connect the words on the screen with the ideas they intend to animate.

And yet it surprises me that we have come this far, and linear storytelling - mostly top-to-bottom, occasionally left-to-right - is the still the best option for most content. It would have been so easy--and appealing--to read the Tunnel Creek story laid out on a giant map of the mountain, with different pockets of the story emerging in the different areas where things happened. 

The cult of linearity online isn't limited to storytelling. Continuous scroll is now a dominant design pattern across the web. Whether you are browsing through Facebook posts or Pinterest pins, you scroll from top to bottom through a never-ending march of content. Why wouldn't it be preferable to see pins in clusters based on similarity? Or to see Facebook posts grouped by geography, or proximity to me on the social graph, instead of in a long, chronological list?

My reluctant conclusion is that for now, simplicity trumps possibility when it comes to online navigation. It would take time and energy to familiarize users with new modes of navigation, and that could cause people to opt out. Ergo, Jorge Luis Borges and I will have to wait for the garden of forking paths to become a reality.

This makes me wonder: does this preference for linearity impact people when visiting museums? Are people overwhelmed or confused by the "infinite paths" that we offer through galleries, collections, and exhibitions? 

I used to work at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC, a "fixed march" museum that sends all visitors on the same linear path through the permanent exhibition. This format became increasingly popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly in history museums, where you could reasonably dictate the "right" path through chronological content. In some museums, like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the fixed march itself serves as a symbol of the content, whereas in others, it's a convenient way to manage visitor flow.

I grew to disdain the fixed march approach to exhibitions as too controlling and directed, leading to less interesting arrangements of objects than are possible in a more varied, free-choice approach. But maybe my disdain is based on the diverse and long experience I've had in museums. Maybe it is actually more comforting for visitors, more grounding, to experience most museums as linear stories. That's not to say you can't skip certain bits or linger in others--just that some expert is subtly telling you that you are on the right path, progressing through the story as it was intended to be shared. Maybe we fight our own purposes when we deliberately eschew the powerful dramatic tools available in the linear storytelling format. 

I'd love to see research on how open and closed exhibition layouts impact visitor dwell time, satisfaction, and engagement. What have you observed? 

Perhaps open floor plan museums are my dream opportunity to nerd out on forking pathways. Are museums pioneering renegades for their free-choice approach to visitor navigation and exploration of content? Or are we fools to ignore the preponderance of linearity in other forms of media?

End of Year Smatterings and Inspirations

Whether you're on vacation, making cookies with nephews, grinding out some work through the end of the year, or sitting in your kitchen drinking tea and watching the fog roll off the redwoods, it's probably a low week for blog-reading. That said, maybe you're bored or desperate for stimulation of the non-gastronomical variety. In that spirit, I offer a few things that have excited me in recent weeks:

• The MCA Denver Holiday Video is out, and it is very, very good. Way better than that video at Museum X where the director drones on about the new initiatives of the year. I have felt in the past that some of the MCA's holiday videos were a bit too pretentious, but this year's edition is full of joy and a message that really reflects what they do in Denver. 
• I LOVE the way the James Irvine Foundation presents their lessons learned from grant-making in the Arts Innovation Fund program. It is attractive, smart, and packs rich information into a navigable format that makes you want to explore and learn more. I know I have a lot to learn from the content AND the format of this report.
• This is just a super-interesting review of an exhibition of damaged art. What happens to objects when they are no longer art? How should (and do) we treat them? This article sparked some interesting discussion online with colleagues from natural history museums, which deal with damage and touching very differently than art institutions do.
• We're working at my museum on a strategic approach to our educational outreach with K12 classes and students. This Createquity article by Talia Gibas on "Unpacking Shared Delivery of Arts Education" was so useful to me that I shared it with our whole advisory group. I found the article to be a clear starting point for thinking in a fresh way about how our museum can best intersect with schools and artists (and students, in our participatory setting) to develop strong programs.
• EMCArts put out a brief report from their recent study on how arts organizations deal with conflict around new ideas. The results are fairly interesting, and not entirely surprising: clear decision-making processes, shared agendas, action-oriented leaders, and comfort with conflict all lead to better support of innovation. I'm sometimes wary of studies of "innovation," but I like how this one could be used reflectively within an organization to assess openness to change. 

What's inspiring you in these last days of 2012?

Voting on Art and its Surprising Consequences

What happens when you let visitors vote on art?

Let's look at the statistics from three big participatory projects that wrapped up recently. Each of these invited members of the public to vote on art in a way that had substantive consequences--big cash prizes awarded, prestige granted, exhibitions offered.

• ArtPrize, the grandaddy of visitor voting, just completed its fourth year in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This citywide festival showcased work by 1,517 artists competing for a $200,000 top cash prize awarded by public vote. An estimated 400,000 people attended the event over two weeks, of which 47,000 cast at least one vote. Voters had to register to vote, but there were no restrictions on how many artworks a voter could "like."
• The Brooklyn Museum just finished the public stage of GO, a "community-curated open studio project." GO invited people to visit artists' studios throughout Brooklyn over one weekend and to nominate up to three favorites; the top ten will be considered for an upcoming group show at the museum. 1,708 artists participated. An estimated 18,000 people attended, of which 4,929 nominated artists for the show. Note that in this case, people had to register to vote AND check in at at least five studios to be eligible to nominate artists for the show. Full stats here.  
• The Hammer Museum recently awarded the first annual Mohn Award, a $100,000 prize that will be awarded biannually to an artist in the "Made in LA" biennial exhibition based on public vote. Five artists out of sixty in the show were short-listed by a jury. 50,000 people visited the exhibition, and 2,051 voted for their favorite artist of the five. Fascinating (and long) article about the Mohn Award here.

In each of these examples, the press and public dialogue mostly revolved around the idea of public voting for art. But when it came to the actual experience, the vast majority of participants and attendees did NOT vote. In Grand Rapids, 12% cast a ballot. In Brooklyn, 27% made it through the voting process. In LA, only 4% voted. 

What's going on here? Why are hundreds of thousands of people flocking to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize but not choosing to vote? Why did the Hammer Museum have record summer attendance if people weren't coming for the thing that was being flaunted--the opportunity to vote?

There are surely some people who didn't want to go through the hassle of registering and learning the rules of voting. There are others who may not have felt "qualified" to select winners and losers. But my sense is that the biggest reason people didn't vote is that for most visitors, voting wasn't the point. The point was to be part of an exciting, dynamic, surprising new way to engage with art.

Or at least, that's what I experienced when I went to ArtPrize in 2010. I was blown away by the social experience provoked by the unorthodox format. Voting on individual artworks turned each one into a social object worthy of lengthy conversation. Talking with Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum, it sounds like GO comparably sparked a huge number of community conversations in artists' studios around Brooklyn. When the public is invited to decide, they may not take on that power and responsibility... but they may show up in droves to see what the fuss is about.

This leads me to two conflicting perspectives on voting in exhibitions:

1. Voting on substantive outcomes (money, exhibitions) is good because it provokes engagement with objects, artists, and fellow visitors. Whether you tick the ballot or not, the opportunity to do so opens up a conversation about what's good, what's bad, and what's art.  
2. Voting on substantive outcomes is dangerous because not enough people participate to make serious decisions in good faith. The Hammer is reconsidering the public vote component of the Mohn Award after only 2,051 people determined who would win $100,000. And in Brooklyn, Shelley Bernstein noted that the data generated during GO was insufficient to generate statistical significance in a "wisdom of the crowds decision-making" format. In the case of ArtPrize, founder Rick DeVos has explicitly said that the event is a creative act designed to engage people in "conversation" about art. And yet they have added juried prizes alongside the public ones to diversify that conversation.

How do you weigh the positive engagement that comes with community dialogue against the ethics of voting for outcomes that matter deeply to the artists involved?

Ancient Greece 2.0: Arts Participation before the Industrial Age

When we talk about making museums or performing arts organizations more participatory and dynamic, those changes are often seen as threatening to the traditional arts experience. Audience commentary, comfortable spaces for eating and talking, opportunities for amateurs to contribute to professional work: these are often considered intrusions into formal, classical settings for enjoyment of arts.

But what if the "traditional" arts experiences is a myth? What if historic arts experiences were actually a lot more participatory? This week, I read a fabulous essay that made me feel a new kinship with the past in the quest to advocate for active audience engagement.

In In and Out of the Dark [pdf], Colby College professor Lynne Conner argues convincingly that the current refinement of the Western fine arts experience is an aberrant blip in a long history of participatory audience engagement. From the Ancient Greeks through the 1800s, audiences were rowdy, engaged people. They had the freedom--and in some cases, the obligation--to make their own meaning and share their interpretations of art with each other in structured and informal ways. They voted on the best plays in the days of Sophocles, stormed the symphony halls when confronted with artistic dischord, and talked and wrote about what they saw and what they thought. If arts managers fear bloggers today, imagine how they would have felt back in the good old days when the audience was yelling and throwing things at the stage.

Conner posits that it was only in the last hundred years that the passive audience was "constructed" via a confluence of cultural, economic, and technological changes. From Conner's perspective, this construction has led us to a bifurcated cultural landscape, in which people seek out active audience experiences outside of the fine arts structure because the passive audience experience is not as satisfying or enjoyable as the alternatives. Conner argues that open mics, poetry slams, even professional sports events, are thriving because they offer audiences diverse opportunities to co-author meaning as participants, not just consumers.

What exactly constructed the passive arts audience? The big cultural shift came in the increasing distinction between highbrow and lowbrow art, which Conner describes as "the result of a deliberate effort to create a cultural hierarchy in America." The arts were sacralized and professionalized in their funding and presentation. Museums no longer showed human horns alongside historic documents; theaters made differentiations among types of live entertainment. Arts institutions began publishing instructive placards and documents to train audiences to behave more formally and to treat artists and artworks with silent respect. Proper audiences were like docile children, seen and not heard.

Conner is a theater person, and the technical changes she documents in theater that accelerated the quieting of audiences are fascinating to me as a novice in that world. Seats which once were moveable became fixed. Advances in electrical lighting allowed theaters to put actors in light and audiences in darkness. What was once a democratic forum became increasingly defined by the dividing line of the stage. As Conner puts it:

Eventually the combination of environmental forces (i.e., the dark auditorium and mandated etiquette) and the growing gap between the societal position of the artist and the arts patron effectively quieted the audience. By the early twentieth century people of all social classes were expected to treat arts events as private experiences. They were to sit still, to refrain from talking, and to keep their opinions to themselves. In the process opportunities for public discourse about the arts and the attendant opportunity for formulating and exchanging sets of opinions about the arts event itself were, for the most part, lost.

This perspective--that audiences were "silenced" during the past 100 years--creates a new kind of arsenal for those who support democratization and increased audience participation in the arts. We are honoring the deep history of serious arts engagement by pursuing participatory approaches. You could even argue that the "activist" conservatism of the past hundred years has done disturbing damage to the sharing, experiencing, and support of art in the U.S. In a time of intense socio-economic division, the concept of cultural hierarchy smacks of elitism. Arts organizations are seen as part of the 1% instead of forums to bring together 100%. Perhaps it's time to turn back the clock a little further when we talk about the good old days.


P.S. Lynne Conner has a book coming out next year called We the Audience. I can't wait. And thank you to Lauren Shultz, who introduced me to this article in a recent Museum 2.0 comment thread.

Ze Frank Takes Over (My) Museum

I get excited about a lot of things in my work at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. But every once in awhile, something extraordinary comes up, something that isn't emergent or evolving or encouraging but something that explodes into your life like a comet knocking on your door.

That's how I felt when artist Ze Frank got in touch to talk about a potential museum exhibition to explore a physical site/substantiation for his current online video project, A Show (see minute 2:20, above). And to cut to the end of the story first, yes, we are creating a project together, yes, you can participate, and yes to whatever other questions this brings up in your head.

Ze Frank is a participatory artist who creates digital projects that are explicitly about creating and enhancing authentic interpersonal connections. He is an authoritative artist of the social web with a slew of accolades and a suite of diverse projects under his belt. This 2010 TED talk is a good introduction if you haven't experienced his work before.

Ze is a skilled performer, but more importantly, he's a thoughtful ringleader for a series of intricate games, missions, and provocations that invite participants to bridge social barriers in surprising ways. He invites participants to write songs for each other about dealing with rejection. To recreate childhood photographs. To celebrate political differences. To dress up their vacuum cleaners.

Ze's work can feel silly or strange. It's often intended for an audience that I only barely understand through the ways they respond and interact with the work. In other words: I have a lot to learn from him. This winter, as part of a museumwide exhibition called Work in Progress, Ze and the virtual army of participants in A Show will take over a gallery of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. We will be displaying products created by the online community, creating a process for ongoing online and onsite collaboration, and providing a gathering space for people connected to each other through Ze's digital universe. And on a conceptual level, we'll be exploring questions of how online and onsite participation interrelate and what their babies look like.  

This project excites me for a number of reasons:

• Our values are aligned. Ze genuinely cares about his participants, and he is driven to design interactions that inspire real moments of intimacy. His projects are rigorous, sincere, and generous. As someone with a keen interest in designing exhibits that engage strangers meaningfully with each other around objects, I'm thrilled to work with a pioneer on this in a different context.
• Ze's work has always gone beyond the digital. Photography, video, audio, text, origami, mail art... These projects don't only "work" on a screen. We won't just be "printing out" the experience. It will be exciting to play with a gallery space because the work is multi-dimensional physically as well as conceptually. 
• The scale and scope of participation in A Show is extraordinary. Most of the participatory projects I've been involved with are rooted in a community that is geographically-defined. Ze's community is worldwide people who self-select to engage with strangers online. This isn't a group I know a lot about, and we're all curious about how they will intersect with our local audience and with each other.
• It offers unique opportunities for learning more about participation. How will this partnership influence the way we think about other participatory experiences in our institution? How will it change the way we see online and onsite interactions? What constraints and surprises will emerge? I'd love to find a grad student or two who are interested in creating some interesting research around this project, and of course, I'll be blogging about it.

We don't have a lot of details at this point about the specifics of the project, but here's what we do know. The exhibition will run from December 14, 2012 to March 4 of 2013. Ze will be in Santa Cruz for some but not all of that time. We will be looking for interns and volunteers who want to help facilitate the space throughout the winter--please contact me if interested. And copious thanks to Eric Siegel, who introduced Ze and me to each other.

Most importantly, I'm curious: what would you like to see us explore with this exhibition? 

Weekend Reading: 2012 Trends and Young Adult Programs

Two great museumy reports to brighten your weekend:

• TrendsWatch 2012. The folks at the AAM Center for the Future of Museums have been experimenting with sharing ideas in several ways over the past couple of years--through their blog, their weekly newsletter, and a series of research reports. This TrendsWatch report, which I hope they intend to make an annual affair, is the most effective piece I think they've put out. It's tight, clear writing on seven big ideas on their radar: crowdsourcing, shifting non-profit tax status, pop up museums, online fundraising, creative aging, augmented reality, and education reform. Each article includes museum examples along with a broader look at the trend. The content is pretty US-specific (especially regarding tax status and education) but the blend of issues makes it more broadly relevant than other reports that focus solely on demographics or technology. Such a diverse group of topics in one report got my mind moving laterally and imagining other trends I might want to follow.
• Creativity, Community, and a Dash of the Unexpected: Adventures in Engaging Young Adult Audiences. I have a personal connection to this report, which was produced by the Denver Art Museum after a multi-year project developing meaningful connections with young adults. Three years ago today I was in Denver working with this terrific group of educators, technologists, and marketing folks to help them imagine new community-driven approaches to programming. It's amazing to see how far they've gone and how thoughtfully they've engaged in this work. While I'm clearly biased based on my involvement, I think this report is a bit deeper than some others I've been seeing lately that mostly focus on the branding/marketing side of working with younger audiences. It mostly focuses on program design, not marketing or evaluation, and some of the program design insights and framings are really valuable. I found myself frequently thinking: we should do that at our museum. The report starts with the statement: "We originally thought of this audience as an age group but later realized that style, not age, was a better way to categorize the target audience." Amen. Enjoy this quick read on rethinking engagement with new audiences.

Adventures in Artist-Driven Public Engagement: Machine Project at the Hammer Museum

What happens when a formal art museum invites a group of collaborative, participatory artists to be in residence for a year? Will the artists ruin the museum with their plant vacations and coatroom concerts? Will the bureaucracy of the institution drown the artists in red tape? How will the visitors, the registrars, and the security guards respond?

No, this is not a reality TV show. But for museum and art wonks, it could be. The Machine Project and the Hammer Museum have just released an incredible ebook documenting Machine's year-long residency at the Hammer in 2010. The 182-page book includes detailed descriptions of projects, budgets, and decision-making processes, along with extensive interviews with artists, curators, and museum staff of all stripes.

The book is fascinating on multiple levels. Artists and administrators grapple with the shifting roles of institutions as hosts and incubators for creative work. Several artists offer surprising insights into making participatory projects appealing to visitors. The honest reflections from staff members beyond curatorial and education departments--including registrars, security staff, and PR--are unparalleled. And the projects themselves are brilliant.

Here are a few elements that really resonated for me.

Artist as Problem Solver vs. Artist as Problem Explorer

Mark Allen (director of Machine Project) and I have talked about this issue several times, and Mark articulates it beautifully. As an artist, he doesn't see himself as someone who is hired to solve problems but as someone who uses those problems as the starting point for investigation of deeper issues and possibilities. When I was working as a design consultant and he as an artist, we'd often note the fundamental differences in our approaches via this issue. As he put it (page 14):

When people at an institution speak of a problem, it is often to indicate something that interferes with their operation. From the artist’s perspective, a problem is a provocation or a site to which the artwork responds by creating something that engages the problem and makes it visible in a different light. The problem is aestheticized, framed, or reconfigured; it is seldom erased or resolved.

This issue is highlighted in the Giant Hand project at the Hammer, in which Machine Project artists and collaborators created a Monty Python-esque, oversized hand to help visitors navigate the museum. In the end, the Hand did more to point out (literally) wayfinding issues than to solve them. As Mark noted in conversation with collaborator Chandler McWilliams (page 116):

One of the things that I found working with the Hammer is that, because it is a challenging space to navigate, there was a lot of anxiety that generated for the institution. They were concerned that visitors were confused, so any project had to work toward making people less confused. I remember when we were talking about it you said, “What’s wrong with confusing the visitors?” 

Are you asking your collaborators to solve your problems or to help tease them out in new ways? Is it appropriate to ask artists to be problem solvers in the same role as designers or consultants? Much of the tension and creative spark in this book comes from the fundamental differences in perspective on this issue.

This is particularly true when it comes to project evaluation. I'm a bit troubled by the lack of rigor in the evaluation of the impact of all these projects--big and small. Both Mark and Alison Agsten, the Hammer public engagement curator, talk lovingly about the power of the intimate, but it's hard to figure out how to act on statements like "We’ve talked often about how you measure success: it’s not just the number of people that come through; quality is part of it" (Alison, page 37). Mark often talks about how he and his collaborators do this work because it is their artistic practice, not because they are trying to achieve specific outcomes. I'm sympathetic to this perspective, but as someone who wants to be able to make a case for certain kinds of projects--and to make programmatic decisions based on research--I'd like to see the artists paired with some inventive evaluators. As artists expose and play with possibilities in engagement, it would be useful to see how those possibilities play out in terms of visitor responsiveness--whether the artists care about those outcomes or not. Otherwise, the artists' work gets put in the black box of "inspired activity" which may or may not be sustained or replicated by staff.

Whose Job is it to Inform (or Confuse) the Visitors?

I loved the sections of the book that focused on the interplay between artists and security staff. Security staff are so rarely involved in the creative development of public engagement projects, but in many museums--especially art museums--they are the staff members who end up negotiating them.

For example, the Machine Project offered an ongoing two-minute concert series in a coatroom under the stairs they named "The Little William Theater." In an interview with Mark, artist/sound curator Chris Kallmyer reflected on the basic challenges of negotiating the space alongside security guards (page 43):

Chris: Conflicts arose partially because we were also aiming to be the front line, so we were competing with them in a way. 

Mark: Right. At the time when you entered the lobby at the Hammer, the only person there to talk to was the guard. Since then, they’ve added a front desk with people whose job it is to greet you, which is great. We added a different layer, this random guy who’s like, “Do you want to see a concert in this coatroom?” 

It's easy to understand from this perspective how the artists could be seen as distracting from or even causing trouble for the security guards in their front line function. The Hammer Museum's operations manager, Andrew Werner, reflected on the early challenges (page 145):

The initial response, from both management within security and more of the rank and file, was primarily resistance, confusion, annoyance, and generally not supporting it. I think, as with all unusual activities that interfere with one’s routine, that was a reasonable response. Once those activities become the routine, and with the right personalities involved, things start to smooth out. Chris [Kallmyer], I think, was exceptional in his approachability, and in his willingness to explain and engage, so he made it easier for the guards to eventually accept, respond, and enjoy.

Developing Opportunities for Intimate Participation

Many of the Machine Project's projects at the Hammer were designed for very small audiences. Eight person needlepoint and psychotherapy groups. Two person audiences in the Little William Theater. Frequently, we get stuck on developing participatory projects or events that serve as many people as possible. Machine had the vision--and the luxury--of creating big experiences for small numbers of participants. But, as Mark argued in conversation with poet Josh Beckman, these intimate experiences can "colonize the audience's imagination" (page 63) and have much broader impact conceptually.

As an example, guitarist Eric Klerks provided a "personal museum soundtrack" to visitors by following people around with an electric guitar, playing music just for a single listener/visitor wearing headphones. The piece was evocative not just for the individual participants but for everyone walking through the museum alongside the participants--and probably, for most of you, who are just imagining what this would feel like.

This kind of intimacy has power partly because it's more personal and vulnerable than the typical ways that museum staff members engage with program participants. In conversation with Mark and Chris Kallmyer, Eric talked about the sign-up process for the soundtrack tours (page 80):

Eric: At first it was a little bit intimidating—all these looks that you get from patrons, especially the regulars. You can tell they are wondering why you are here but they don’t necessarily want to articulate it, so you just get this weird vibe. You know, I’m standing there and I’ve got my sign-in sheet, but it looks a little bit trivial. 

Mark: Right, like you apparently have permission to be there, but you are not quite part of the Museum. 

Eric: Exactly. But I think there’s a difference between something being difficult and something being a problem. The difficulty is almost as much a part of the event as walking through the gallery. If it had been a more clinical situation, where people came up to a desk and I was sitting there saying, “Oh, yes, we have this slot open and this slot open,” I think some of that intimacy would have been lost. It would have been more like those audio tours, and it’s not about that. 

Mark: Right. This piece is a critique of those pieces: those pieces are a sad simulacrum of a human interaction in the museum; this piece is about real engagement. 

Eric: Absolutely. And it had as much to do with my evolution as with the audience. I think there’s really an art to being able to put somebody at ease. It got easier for me, getting that comfort level and the confidence to say, “Here I am. I’m part of the space. People can engage me just like they’d engage that painting.” 

This section really expanded my thinking, especially as I am trying to encourage my staff and interns not to always design for "maximal participation" but to also think about opportunities for intimate, surprising, and personal moments. It can get so easy to slide into "let's make a festival" mode and miss the opportunities for secrets in the elevator. Again, I'd love to see some evaluative study of this intimacy--perhaps to pair the artists with social scientists who measure cultural impact or evolution in perception of an institution over time based on small and distributed changes. There are many people studying the audience for participatory work--especially online--and it would be fascinating to understand more about the ripple effects of these projects on the broader visitor base.

Who Owns the Work?

There are some fascinating bits about intellectual and artistic property sprinkled throughout the book. One of the reasons I feel strongly that museum staff should assume their own creative agency to create experimental public engagement projects is because then the museum owns the work and it can grow, perpetuate, and shift over time. That's not always true when you work with artists (or consultants). I always worry that the mindshare--and the related products--will walk out the door when the contract ends.

Take the lowly ping pong table. Elizabeth Cline, the Hammer's public engagement curatorial associate, talked with Mark about their different perspectives on the ping pong tables that Machine Project installed on the Lindbrook Terrace. While initially conceived as a way to make the museum more convivial, over time, Mark came to feel that the ping pong tables were creating an ambient sound installation that should be treated as a piece of art (and formally acquired by the museum for a fee at the end of the residency). Elizabeth disagreed, saying (pages 51-52):

Elizabeth: Some of what the grant was asking you to do was to develop projects that, in the end, the Museum could have used, or to generate ideas that we could have implemented in some way again in the future. So I feel like the Museum should have inherited the Ping-Pong tables as part of your Residency, with a plaque describing the work we did together during the Residency. ... [T]he sticking point in everyone’s mind is that what you proposed was not an artwork. The tables were situated in an unusual space in the Museum—Lindbrook terrace—that you hoped to transform over the course of your Residency into a social space. 

Mark: To me that shows a really strange idea of what art is—that art is completely determined by its instantiating moment. If I were a painter and you came to my studio and saw me working on a canvas, that material is transformed into an artwork at the moment I say it is an artwork. Similarly, we can think of the Ping-Pong tables as a social canvas that was transformed into an artwork by people using it.

This gets back to the difference between artists and consultants (or designers, or internal staff members).  It's philosophy and business model rolled into a messy package. Near the end of the book, Margot Stokol, the Hammer's associate director of legal affairs, weighs in (page 161):

[B]ecause we’re a museum and we work with artists all the time, the words artist and ownership mean certain things to us, and we often distinguish how we, as an institution, contract with artists as opposed to consultants. In the past, we have drawn those categories very broadly and in relatively black-and-white terms, and one of the things we learned from last year is that sometimes it’s not so clear. Because a lot of the art was conceptual or ephemeral or something that we expected to incorporate into ongoing practice, we found that the implications of calling something “art” didn’t always reflect our expectations for the specific project or for who owned the work. 

Ultimately, I think this book does an extraordinary job of transparently, honestly, and provocatively presenting the impact of artist collaborations with institutions. Read it. Check out the related videos. Grapple with the things that inspire and frustrate and confuse you. I know I did.

Mark has agreed to do one more interview (daunting after you see the list in the book) with us--with you--if you have specific questions you want to discuss. Please leave your thoughts or questions in the comments and Mark will join me in responding. If the questions are sufficiently voluminous, we'll do an interview follow-up post sometime in the next month.

Lead or Follow: Arts Administrators Hash it Out

Last week, Douglas McLellan of artsJournal ran a multi-vocal forum on the relationship between arts organizations and audiences, asking:

In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?

Sixteen arts administrators, journalists, and researchers weighed in on the question over a series of posts. Several decried the oversimplification of the question, arguing that it's not an issue of "lead vs. follow" but a spectrum of forms of participant engagement. A few trotted out familiar arguments for arts administrators as tastemakers (lead) or audience research as incontrovertible (follow). And some made fairly brilliant and impassioned cases for idiosyncratic perspectives. Here are three of my favorites... and a few more thoughts.

Roberto Bedoya: The "Yes And" Argument and its Civic Implications
Bedoya, the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council, makes a beautiful statement that arts administrators need to facilitate a multiplicity of leading voices, or as he puts it, "the courage of imagination and the plural." Particularly in an age of cultural and political division, Bedoya argues that leaders in the arts need to responsibly and boldly intermediate among many voices, using a combination of ethics and aesthetics to make policy and artistic decisions. If you care about how participatory art experiences can shape civic processes, read Bedoya's post.

Diane Ragsdale: You Can't Lead if No One is Paying Attention to You
Ragsdale, researcher and author of the terrific Jumper blog, suggests that most arts organizations are not "leading" communities but disregarding and demeaning them. Audience engagement happens strictly on institutional terms, for institutional purposes, and when audience members' views differ from the organization, their perspectives are not taken seriously. Ragsdale equates true following with listening, and acting on listening with leading. It's a good post that is representative of her powerful writing (mostly focused on the performing arts).

Trevor O'Donnell: Leaders Use Their Words 
O'Donnell was not one of the invited bloggers but a commenter from the field (a follower... or a good example of how silly the term "follower" is?). He made a comment on Michael Kaiser's fairly formulaic "great artists lead the nation" post, laying bare the banality of most of the language used to describe and present art experiences to the public. O'Donnell notes that great leaders don't sell their message with generic templates and exclamation points, but with "relevant, meaningful, motivational language that leverages the needs, wants and desires of their listeners." The way we talk about our work helps shape its importance to current and potential audiences.

This whole debate made me think about Adam Lerner, the Director and Chief Animator of the MCA Denver. Adam and I first met in 2008, when we were part of a National Academies think tank-ish thing on the future of museums and libraries. All the participants were asked to write one-page position papers about museums and libraries in the 21st century. Adam and I wrote papers that split dramatically on either side the lead/follow line. Adam argued for museums to become "less visitor-oriented," and I argued the opposite. He said museums were too spineless to project their own voices and so were misguidedly searching for direction from audiences. I said museums were too self-centered and needed to create community spaces with the growing army of people choosing cultural experiences outside of traditional arts institutions.

Turns out we're a lot more alike than I thought at the time. We both believe that institutions should have a strong identity and should boldly pursue and present it with audiences. The problem is three-fold:

• some of our institutional identities are not culturally or civically significant (see Bedoya)
• some of our institutions are too lily-livered to deliver a consistent, strong audience engagement strategy that reflects their unique significance (see Ragsdale)
• some of our institutions are too lazy to develop an authentic and powerful voice for their identity and program blend (see O'Donnell)

Adam concluded his position paper beautifully, writing:

The paradox is that developing a clear, authentic voice doesn’t isolate the institution but infinitely expands its relevance in the life of the city and citizen. It is so clear what the organic supermarket Whole Foods stands for, so they don’t need to worry about just selling food. They sell clothing, books, classes, skin care, yoga supplies, which all relate to the core of who they are. Museums have had difficulty becoming more integral to people’s life because they lost sight of their core, which should be different for each museum. A museum concerned with integrating art into the life of young people might find it appropriate to open a dance club. A museum that believes that it is most suited to be a temple of art can be a truly meditative oasis in the heart of a bustling city. A museum that is committed to childhood education might find it relevant to open a charter school. Museums in suburban locations need to determine how they can integrate themselves into the leisure patterns of their own constituency. Museums shouldn’t change by looking elsewhere; they should change by looking more carefully at themselves. That’s too difficult a task to pass off to visitors.

I'd add the caveat that for some institutions, it's too difficult a task to pass off to visitors. In an institution like mine, where the organizational identity is built on participation, the task can and must include them.

In the end, the issue is not who is leading or following, but the fact that we're dancing with our audiences in the same room, together. Not in separate rooms to separate songs.

What did you get out of the Lead or Follow experience? How do you respond to this question?