Museums in earthquake !
How will museums respond to the growing population of the art world which refuses to produce works for museum premises, instead requiring that museums contribute to the production and realisation of the artwork into an imaginary world where it is a mere title among millions of others? By answering this question museums also assume their own position in the field museums for the future or museums from the past?
In September, I visited the birthplace of museum ideology, the Louvre in Paris. That is the birthplace of the Idea of the Museum. Today, the Louvre remains a central point in the city with some 22,000 daily admissions.
I was participating in a conference on the change of museums, and during the breaks I was able to stroll, nay, to flâner, along the alleys of the Louvre. The expression is correct, for the Louvre is a miniature underground city. Or, actually, it is an American style shopping mall, a tourist attraction swelling with masses of people who devote most of their time shopping in the art lanes, the majority of which have nothing to do with the collections of the Louvre. Reproductions, art kitsch, art implosion, displayed in the style of haute couture boutiques, make one wonder where the world of art is headed. Is the Louvre again showing the way, also when it comes to extending and commercialising the concept of museums, to escaping from the place traditionally reserved for art? In the Louvre, the Warholian art business has reached such dimensions that one wonders whether the majority of visitors even enter the actual museum any longer, or do they just spend most of their time shopping or artcruising.
On the Tar Bridge
The contemporary all-penetrating market economy is reminiscent of a postmodern interpretation of a magpie on a newly tarred bridge: if you try to avoid sticking your beak in the tar of commercialism, you still get tarred feathers as there is no such thing as non-commercial economy. Interpreting the old fable, we tend to forget the everyday level: we are firmly stuck to the tarred bridge in any case, be it by beak or by feathers. What we are trying to do is impossible, the tar and the bridge make up our daily life, the culture of our time, and we are all children of its shadows.
Museums are clearly standing on a bridge, forced to make changes. The medialisation of the omnipresent electronic culture, the influence of digitalisation on the basis of museum work, and the radical changes taking place in art towards an extending, interdisciplinary mode and the control of production processes, instead of mere ´presentation´ — all this truly challenges the traditional, rigid museum structures.
Museums are cultural institutions, machineries of objectified memory, which have to operate on their own basis within a harsh competition. The commercialisation of art and the fuzzy edges of art itself (art is becoming less ´Art´ and more something else, involving artistic elements) is bound to have a structural influence on the activities of museums, those of contemporary art in particular. New means and methods of consuming art mean that museums can build on their strong points (original artworks and cooperation with artists), yet making original decisions in the long run as their economies are not strictly bound to the market (the commercial field has to run the consuming marathon on a constant basis in this respect). Nevertheless, this means that museums must be active and stay cool at the same time: respecting their history, but responding to the future instead of clinging to the past. In fact, museums are media machineries in their own right. They are selected space contexts, virtual worlds within the real world, removing art from its original context, and then packaging it and feeding it back to the audience.
Contacts on the Fields of New Media and Networks
Museums operating in the field of new media may involve a number of things. Networks, like a CD-ROM, can be a new, virtual gallery, an exhibition space. Secondly, the new media tools in the hands of artists form a new, broad genre of art. Thirdly, many museums will apply new media to the more traditional activities of marketing and information distribution.
And fourthly, networks are becoming a new channel and location of communication, an electronic market place bringing together artists, audiences, and representatives of art institutions alike. According to a European assessment committee, cooperation between museums works successfully if it can provide an efficient method of exchanging information on the development of new media and applications suitable for museums. Moreover, we can form a cooperative circle for telecommunication projects, which are on the increase. We can also employ data on audience studies and launch a wide cooperation programme involving artist exchanges.
Art Net: from Presenting to Subproducing
At the Ars Electronica festival in Linz this autumn, the jury of Prix Ars Electronica (a major competition in new media art) chose not to award any works which merely present art on the Net. All awarded works were interactive in one way or another, based on users actually developing and realising the work. Authors provide the visual framework and a series of programme codes (this is the ´work´, but then is it ´artwork´), enabling the user to participate in the development of the ´world´ of the work.
But if the user partakes in creating the work when using its functional structure and life, we may ask does an original exist? In the strict sense of the word, there is none, only a series of various starting points. In many interactive works it is the act of representation itself, the environment and the user that together form the work; in traditional terms, we could hardly even refer to representation in this case. Does media art ultimately involve burying the concept altogether?
Perttu Rastas
The writer is the Curator in Media Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art
