Are We at an Inflection Point as a Field?

There’s been a great deal of sports fanfare in Ohio lately. Bengals went to the Super Bowl and then Cleveland hosted the basketball all-star game. I don’t often think about sports, truthfully. But all the sports made me reflect on our own field, oddly. 

AAM has often noted more people go to museums than sporting events. It’s a good stat, and one I like to trot out when speaking to politicians. But I suspect it’s a false number in a way. Museums are open more often than not. Even with my rudimentary knowledge of professional sports, I know that most pro sports teams have shorter seasons. So, numbers-wise, given there are more museums than sports arenas, as there are more museums than Starbucks, there is an easier chance for museums to beat sport. But there is a bigger issue underlying that stat. I’d wonder how that number would look if you omitted field trips. Many museum-goers are there bc someone else has decided it’s educational or important. Student groups are important, and education underlies the raisin d’etre of the field. But as a child who spent a childhood going to pro-sporting events under duress, I can assure you it doesn’t make for a lifelong habit. 

The recent Culture Track study brought up another important statistic. Many Americans look to arts and culture as a source of fun. Now, I’d love to see that same sample rate the types of arts and culture from fun to not fun. I fear museums would not be near the top. Museums often miss fun altogether, because we fear being seen as dumbing down our educational mission. An interesting finding in the same Culture Track study is that respondents believe meeting the needs of new visitors is important even if it means losing old visitors. In order words, change even if people don’t like it. 

This brings me to the Super Bowl. The halftime show was incredibly enjoyable for some. It’s not surprising. Many people watching are the age of the performers. Gen X and Millenials are now 40 percent of the population. But, there was some backlash, as expected. Boomers, particularly, were not thrilled to have this type of music on the Super Bowl. Boomers are about 20 percent of the population. But they remain in the workforce and they hold an outsized amount of power and wealth. For museums, as they look to change, to meet new needs, they will see some of the same criticism from some of the same forces. Change often shows changes in power and that can make people upset. 

In the next few years, the voice and power of the older museum-goers will continue to decrease. Have we made enough impact on the younger generations? Do they see us as the once a year, "good for you" requirement? Or do they see us as an enjoyable place to visit on their own? 

As people have found plenty to keep them busy at home, we need to really step it up to meet the needs of these audiences. We showed we could be fun on digital in these last few years. Will we revert to our old ways, where we expect people to accept our status quo? Or we will meet this moment with change?  

Six things I learned about museum work from our three months on TikTok

My team and I have wanted to do TikTok since 2019. We launched into the platform, finally, in February of 2021. This weekend marked our three-month anniversary. In that time, we had 1.5 million views and 112 K likes. We are definitely still a small museum account with only one thousand followers, but we have the seventh and eight most viewed #museumtok videos. (Also, you can watch TikToks on your browser if you can't get yourself to download the app.)

@akronartmuseum

##duet with @anouarchelabi_ ##arttiktok##arthistorytiktok##learnontiktok##museumtok

♬ SugarCrash! - ElyOtto

Here are my reflections of our time:

1.     Don’t let the bureaucracy be the enemy of the joy: In some Clubhouse talk in January, Mar Dixon mentioned that administrator often muck things up. (As an administrator, I decided, well, I don’t want to be a stereotype ;>) Her comment really points to the fear of risk in museum. We often really want to get it perfect before putting it out there. I get the impetus, honestly. Our stakes can feel higher. We have fewer resources and no R&D departments. People might visit us once in a lifetime. But, what if you ignore those stakes? You focus instead not on the negative, but the possibilities. Then you become centered on plenty and action.

2.     Lose control: Much of this last year of museum work has been adding content to platforms. Museums are pretty used to controlling all the variables to retain their norms. When we left our galleries for Facebook, et al, we had to break out of our norms. Opening this up was good for us, or can be, if we take some of those lessons back to the galleries. The biggest lesson has been that the lack of control can be freeing. When you share your content to anyone, anyone can engage.

3.     No one cares about us: Tiktok is a watchers market for content. The two biggest #ArtHistorytiktok accounts are run by, perhaps, grad students. I imagine showing those videos to curators I’ve known. There would certainly be apoplexy and disgust about the approach and the content. But guess what? No one cares about museum. A museum account won’t get more views than a random person, because largely institutional authority has no weight in that platform. This lack of power is actually freeing. You aren’t bound my our field hang-ups.  For creators, this can be a bit of a balancing act; to be like them but keep our core competency (of research-based content). But, if you can manage it, the rewards are great.

4.     Adapt: So often, before this year, I saw museums trying to plop museum content on digital to match their desires, rather than the users needs or the platform’s norms. In this year, I’ve seen so many organizations truly catch up with the times and adapt. For example, on Tiktok, dueting others is a common norm. We used that to do art appreciation, and then link to collection objects. Historically, we’d have started with the collection object. It was a different way from our norm, but we decided to be flexible. It definitely increased our views considerably. The algorithms are no joke, so this transformation was essential to success. But, now we’ve shown ourselves we can adapt. So, where else in our field can we use this knowledge.  

5.     Enjoy: Our social team started with watching many videos. Teenagers playing music on upturned bowls, parents acting like fools, cats chasing dogs—we were there for all of it. We laughed and laughed in meetings, where my team tried to explain much of pop culture. After a year of loss, we really needed the good feelings. I can’t say we’re experts on this. Many museums are killing it on Tiktok, but that wasn’t the point. We could message each other about our successes and missteps.

6.     Make Mistakes Over and Over: Tiktok values authenticity. Polished videos don’t get better traction than mediocre ones. It forces us to really rethink the value of the polish we use everywhere. In one of our videos, I said, “the blue is really blue.” I’m actually a credentialed art historian. I could have been a bit more articulate. But, honestly, that video wouldn’t have done as well. Many of our mistakes were really just tests. We are trying content and then trying new content. We’re letting the stakes me low and therefore the gains can be high.

Should your museum do Tiktok? I honestly couldn’t tell you. We could do it, because we had the capacity and the desire. We wanted this for ourselves. What instead you should think is, what is something that will help us continue to push our desires forward? What is something that will increase joy and success for my team after this terrible time? What is something that will show our visitors that we’ve grown? What is something that puts a bit more good out into the world? For us, one of those things was Tiktok.

We are the Solutions to Access Barriers

This month, we’ve been thinking about access barriers. I took us way off the beaten path on this subject. While I do admit to loving a tangent, these last few weeks have been purposeful detours. In our field, everything is tight. Money, time, energy, goodwill…we have only enough if we are lucky. We try to solve problems and often look for the most parsimonious solution.

We’ve all been there. A grant comes in. We whip out our logic model. We figure out the program that gets us the solution the grant wants. This way of solving has been occurring for years in our field. But we also know that it hasn’t made an appreciable impact on the people coming to museums.

People see impact and changes when they don’t solve for “x” using the same old formula. This month I talked about two variables that are often ignored when we talk about access and equity: the way we do our work and the frames we use to judge our work. I chose these because often when we talk about access, we think about ways to get people to come. We forget it is a lot harder to change other people. It’s a lot easier to change ourselves. Of course, changing yourself requires a certain level of self-reflection. Being honest with yourself, as an organization, is hard. But when you can really look at yourself, your workflow, and the flaws in your assumptions, you are also in control of the changes you can make.

Now, I’m not an expert in throwing open the doors, but just one voice, trying to make this happen. I put it out to everyone. I cheered every time people tagged me in their shares. And, I liked every comment. There was one particular thread that came in through Twitter from Rebecca of Melbourne, Australia. I loved how she brought up so many issues, often combining structural issues with the related effects. I’ve been thinking about her comments all month. From the very start, we are often setting ourselves up for challenges. We beg people to come in but we have formidable ticket booths. We are basically setting up a contradiction. To add insult to injury our visitors’ desks are often a barrier (both physical and perceived to entrance), Rebecca notes.

At my organization, we’ve just started to talk out the ways our space might be accidentally signaling inaccessibility to staff. These conversations are hard. They take time. But we believe the outcome will be worth it. How many organizations are doing this?

The relationship between perceived barriers and physical ones are incredibly important. If someone is already uncomfortable with the notion of coming, what does a physical block do? Prove their point? Now, I understand the economics of tickets, trust me. No one in leadership in a museum can be immune to the financial responsibilities of keeping collections available. Rebecca’s point gets to such an important point. We do these things one way, say putting a ticket desk up in the middle of the lobby, but we don’t always interrogate what the perception of our conventional wisdom is, and as such, we ignore contradictions therein. Our ticket desks are often more like draw bridges, gatekeeping, rather than inviting people in. Then we wring our hands when people don’t show up.

Rebecca also mentioned another issue about our museums and how we entice people. I’m a big e-reader. I never check out a book before reading the preview. I love shoes. I generally try them on before I buy. I even taste ice cream before selecting my flavor. Our whole society has moved to a transactional model where previews are the expectation. That is, except museums. We expect people to pay upfront on spec. We are giving people no tools to assess interest or value, and then we can’t understand why people aren’t snapping up the tickets. (Rebecca’s full thread is, hopefully, listed below for you to read.)

Overall, my point from this month, and I think Rebecca’s, is that much of our accessibility problem lies in us, not our visitors. We need to be self-reflexive and honest. We need to add new voices, from within our organizations, to help ourselves see the ways that we aren’t actually opening doors for visitors. And, then we have to make the necessary adjustments if we are truly hoping to open doors.

For more, read this thread, starting here:

An interesting question posed by @artlust, "what is keeping museums from emotionally (and figuratively) throwing open their doors?" I have some thoughts about thishttps://t.co/mU7NgSSOmO

— Rebecca❤️💜💙🌈 (@blue_bec) August 18, 2019