Getty head speaks about museums of the future

When Stanley Smith, Head of Collection Information and Access at the J. Paul Getty Museum, opened the tech talk, "the World's Biggest Art Museum" today, he paraphrased the Atlantic Monthly, outlining the choice museums are faced with today:

1: Shun the digital world and try their best to hoard their treasures so the only way to access them is to actually patronize the museum.

2: Dabble in the digital for marketing and PR purposes, in service of the on-site museum.

3: Embrace the Internet and other digital media as an extension of their mission to make works of art accessible to the public.

While 1 and 2 have certainly been popular choices, very few museums have committed to 3. Smith held the Walker Museum up as a rare example. The website is extensive, immersive, an art experience in its own right. It encourages communication and participation from its patrons.

Other ways Smith suggested museums improve their digital presence included print on demand; open public, academic and commercial channels; involve Google; and allow fuller digital exploration of the art.

Peter Samis, Associate Curator of Interpretation, went over some cases of good digital access to art for the iPad. The panel also discussed novel gallery accommodations for novel media, or, as Samis called them, "images that had been born digital and remain digital." One such idea was, instead of a well-lit white room, a dark, black room, for screen-native art.

That's good news for Bert Monroy, who claimed that, in the past, museums have been rather unfriendly to the digital. "They won't touch digital art. The computer did all the work."

When Smith paid lipservice to the concern by some within the museum that such access would reduce on-site visits ("if that content is available elsewhere, then why should they come into the museum?"), he didn't give the view much creedence.

"As much a I love the iPad, it's a bit of a parlor trick," he said. "There's really no substitute for standing in front of a piece of art."

For more of Allvoices' coverage of Macworld | iWorld 2012, check out allvoices.com/macworld2012.