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The visitor as curator: a new type of museum to democratise the institution? 

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The visitor as curator: a new type of museum to democratise the institution? 

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By Anna Holligan
BBC News, Rotterdam

Sunbeams rebound off a mirrored facade, abseilers perform stunts on the imposing 40m-high cauldron-shaped sculpture.

This is The Depot in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which opens to the public on Saturday after a royal unveiling by King Willem-Alexander.

Most museums have capacity to display only a small percentage of their works.

The Depot is exhibiting the Boijmans Van Beuningen's entire art collection of more than 150,000 pieces.

Other European museums have been in touch, investigating how they might share their storage in ambitious, previously unseen ways.

In reflecting Rotterdam's skyline in the soaring curved exterior, the idea is that as people look at The Depot they see themselves.

It is a thematic ambition that continues inside.

As we soar skywards in a glass elevator, I spot Picasso's Grey Owl and a bejewelled carpet by Dutch artist Suzan Drummen: ancient artefacts jostling for attention with contemporary treasures.

An eclectic collection is visible from the six-storey atrium. Traversing, transparent staircases encourage visitors to explore beyond their comfort zones and discover new realms.

In traditional galleries, the main attractions occupy prime position in great halls.

In the Rijksmuseum, Louvre or Prado, enthusiasts might make a beeline for The Night Watch, Mona Lisa or Hieronymus Bosch, the pragmatic layout of The Depot forces visitors to change their behaviour.

The collection is worth an estimated $8bn (£6bn), but works here are arranged according to type and size, rather than value or status.

The hierarchy has been deliberately dismantled.

Away from the atrium in storage areas white coats must be worn. We tread over white sticky plastic mats, designed to prise off any bugs and dirt to protect and preserve.

Paintings are hung on retractable ceiling-to-floor white wire racks, attached to rails. They can be pulled out, but strictly by museum staff only, to reveal the works of some of the world's most revered masters.

Seeing these old masters in a new light invites the audience to appreciate art as we see it, rather than from a prescribed or preconceived perspective.

The idea is to make this space more inviting for those intimidated by monumental museums.

Gasps resound as a ceiling-height Salvador Dalí is hauled out from the racks like a library book, it is breath-taking to see such masterpieces slung almost like objects displayed in a Swedish furniture store.

"We are as safe as the national bank; we have to be," Ina Klaassen, one of the museum's directors, assures me.

Not even the directors have the biometric credentials required to access the secure zones within this priceless collection.

Putting the backstage front-stage is a means to celebrate the importance of curating to contemporary culture.

Restoration and conservation work is conducted in public view as staff peer through microscopes. Rotterdam's cityscape provides a dramatic backdrop, transforming behind-the-scenes procedures into almost theatrical displays.

Sometimes it's hard to differentiate between art and life and where the boundary lies.

Engineers hang upside down, housekeepers in shimmering jumpers lug vacuum cleaners alongside us in the lift.

The interior, industrial concrete is in keeping with the concept of this being a work space and a practical solution to the challenges of storing such vast public collections previously vulnerable to floods.

The original museum here had to be shut after suffering years of flooding and it could anyway only show a small proportion of the objects.

With a focus on sustainability, the building's toilets are flushed with rainwater collected on the roof, where elm trees are thriving. It is emblematic of a space that wants to blend in with the local environment as much as it aspires to stand out.

The Depot's answer to the problem of exhibiting and storing all of a museum's works has given the art world a valuable precedent.

In 2023 London's Victoria and Albert Museum will open the V&A East Storehouse on the former 2012 Olympic site, taking visitors behind the scenes in an "immersive experience".

But Ina Klaassen believes The Depot will remain one of a kind. "We had the space and idea to do it in a really radical way, I don't think anyone can do it like this."

All images by Anna Holligan subject to copyright

More on this story

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The Rotterdam museum set to display its entire art collection

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By Anna Holligan BBC News, Rotterdam Sunbeams rebound off a mirrored facade, abseilers perform stunts on the imposing 40m-high cauldron-shaped sculpture. This is The Depot in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which opens to the public on Saturday after a royal unveiling by King Willem-Alexander.

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The work of art in the age of digital re-construction

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The work of art in the age of digital re-construction

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"To be sure, the use of technology to revitalize works of human artistry comes riddled with thorny questions. Even if there was a perfect AI that could figure out what colors or brushstrokes Klimt might have used, no algorithm can generate authorial intent. Debates about this have been raging for centuries. Back in 1936, before Klimt’s paintings were destroyed, essayist Walter Benjamin argued against mechanical replication, even in photographs, saying that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”"

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Recent projects used machine learning to resurrect paintings by Klimt and Rembrandt. They raise questions about what computers can understand about art.

In 1945, fire claimed three of Gustav Klimt's most controversial paintings. Commissioned in 1894 for the University of Vienna, "the Faculty Paintings"-as they became known-were unlike any of the Austrian symbolist's previous work. As soon as he presented them, critics were in an uproar over their dramatic departure from the aesthetics of the time. Professors at the university rejected them immediately, and Klimt withdrew from the project. Soon thereafter, the works found their way into other collections. During World War II, they were placed in a castle north of Vienna for safekeeping, but the castle burned down, and the paintings presumably went with it. All that remains today are some black-and-white photographs and writings from the time. Yet I am staring right at them.

Well, not the paintings themselves. Franz Smola, a Klimt expert, and Emil Wallner, a machine learning researcher, spent six months combining their expertise to revive Klimt's lost work. It's been a laborious process, one that started with those black-and-white photos and then incorporated artificial intelligence and scores of intel about the painter's art, in an attempt to recreate what those lost paintings might have looked like. The results are what Smola and Wallner are showing me-and even they are taken aback by the captivating technicolor images the AI produced.

Let's make one thing clear: No one is saying this AI is bringing back Klimt's original works. "It's not a process of recreating the actual colors, it is re-colorizing the photographs," Smola is quick to note. "The medium of photography is already an abstraction from the real works." What machine learning is doing is providing a glimpse of something that was believed to be lost for decades.

Smola and Wallner find this delightful, but not everyone supports AI filling in these voids. The idea of machine learning recreating lost or destroyed works is, like the Faculty Paintings themselves, controversial. "My chief concern is about the ethical dimension of using machine learning within the context of conservation," says art conservator Ben Fino-Radin, "because of just the sheer volume of ethical and moral issues that have plagued the machine learning field."

To be sure, the use of technology to revitalize works of human artistry comes riddled with thorny questions. Even if there was a perfect AI that could figure out what colors or brushstrokes Klimt might have used, no algorithm can generate authorial intent. Debates about this have been raging for centuries. Back in 1936, before Klimt's paintings were destroyed, essayist Walter Benjamin argued against mechanical replication, even in photographs, saying that "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." This, Benjamin wrote in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is what he called a work's " aura." For many art lovers, the notion of a computer reproducing that intangible element is preposterous, if not downright impossible.

And yet, there is still a lot to be learned from what AI can do. The Faculty Paintings were pivotal in Klimt's development as an artist, a crucial bridge between his more traditional earlier paintings and later, more radical works. But what they looked like in full color has remained shrouded in mystery. That's the puzzle Smola and Wallner were trying to solve. Their project, organized through Google Arts and Culture, wasn't about perfect reproductions; it was about providing a glimpse of what's missing.

To do this, Wallner developed and trained a three-part algorithm. First, the algorithm was fed some hundred thousand images of art from the Google Arts and Culture database. This helped it understand objects, artwork, and composition. Next, it was schooled specifically in Klimt's paintings. "This creates a bias toward his colors and his motifs during the time period," Wallner explains. And finally, the AI was fed color clues to specific parts of the paintings. But with no color references to the paintings, where did these clues come from? Even Klimt expert Smola was surprised by how much detail the writings of the time revealed. Because the paintings had been considered so sordid and weird, critics tended to describe them at length, right down to the artist's color choices, he says. "You can call it an irony of history," says Simon Rein, the project's program manager. "The fact that the paintings caused a scandal and were rejected puts us in a better position to restore them because there was so much documentation. And those kinds of data points, if fed into the algorithm, create a more accurate version of how these paintings probably looked at the time. "

The key to that accuracy lies in pairing the algorithm with Smola's expertise. His research revealed that Klimt's work during this period tends to have strong patterns and consistency. Studying existing paintings from before and after the Faculty Paintings provided clues to the colors and motifs recurring in his work at that time. Even the surprises Smola and Wallner encountered are corroborated with historical evidence. When Klimt first showed his paintings, critics noted his use of a red that was, at the time, rare in the artist's palette. But The Three Ages of Woman, painted soon after the Faculty Paintings, boldly uses a red, one Smola believes to be the same color that caused an uproar when first seen in the Faculty Paintings. Writings from the time also raise a hue and cry about the shockingly green sky in another Faculty Painting. Pairing these writings with Smola's knowledge of Klimt's particular palette of greens, when fed into the algorithm, is what produced one of the first surprising images out of the AI.

"As soon as you see a black-and-white picture, the first thing you do is imagine what it would look like: You assume things about a painting; you see the sky as blue," Wallner says. As he watched the image generate, a swirling, mysterious green-tinted sky appeared in the rendering on his screen. "That was the shocking part because you see your bias," he says. "For me, the first moment when I saw these paintings in color was like wow, this is what it looks like!"

Klimt's isn't the only work getting an AI resurrection. As part of an ongoing research and conservation program called Operation Night Watch, Robert Erdmann, senior scientist at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, is using machine learning to solve a mystery surrounding Rembrandt van Rijn's 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch. Currently, the painting is about 15 feet wide and 12 feet tall, but that's much smaller than the artist's original. It was trimmed on all four sides in 1715 to fit in a new location (the deepest cut was a whopping two feet, taken from the left side). The cut pieces were never found, but Erdmann hoped machine learning could decode Rembrandt's original vision for the painting.

When Erdmann began developing his plan, his strongest data point was a 17th-century scaled-down copy by Gerrit Lundens-a painter known for his faithful reproductions of old masters-that included parts of the Rembrandt currently missing. Erdmann's design used a series of three neural networks. With the first one, he mapped out visually matching points across both paintings. Seen side by side, scaled to the same size, it was apparent that the Lundens is faithful to the Rembrandt. However, as Erdmann toggled between a digital overlay of the two paintings, it was clear how much distortion and stretching there was in the copy. That's where the second network came in. It warped the Lundens image, stretching it in some places and compressing it in others until most of the spatial distortion disappeared.

With that, the Lundens and the Rembrandt were very closely aligned. But these are still two works created by artists with their own styles. Rectifying that necessitated a third step, the one Erdmann refers to as "sending the neural network to art school." Through a process called backpropagation, the network learned to render the Lundens in the style of Rembrandt. It created iteration after iteration, getting closer and closer until it plateaued out. Was it a perfect match? No, there's always a loss, a limit to how close it can get.

Like all new technology, AI and machine learning raise questions around usage and ethics, including when it comes to decades-old artworks. Richard Rinehart, director of the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University, points out that working with technology has always been about determining our social contracts with it, but AI might be unique in one aspect. "Techno-social contracts have so far been decided unilaterally, but AI may be able to negotiate on its own behalf," he says. Yet technology has always been at the heart of conservation, across material sciences, chemistry, and color science. "Bringing AI into the mix may signal a potential sea change," Rinehart adds, "but the concept of applying technology to art is a historically accepted part of the practice, with self-critique as a healthy part of those practices."

Self-critique within the industry is what art conservator Fino-Radin would like to see more of, but their concerns run deeper. They are excited for the creative avenues this technology opens up but are wary of it being confused with restoration and conservation. "Calling AI 'restoration,' calling it anything that implies that it's like bringing the artwork back to life, is a misnomer, it's overly simplistic," Fino-Radin says. "This kind of work belongs in the field of what's being called Digital Art History."

Smola and Wallner are aware of the criticisms and take pains to explain the scope and limitations of the Klimt project. "We used the photos as they were to make sure that we don't deviate too much from the original paintings," says Wallner. Erdmann notes that the goal behind his reconstruction was to let the public see what Rembrandt's original composition looked like. "When I translate from the Lundens copy into the style of Rembrandt, the AI doesn't have the ability to put the life and the genius that is Rembrandt back into the painting," he emphasizes. "I'm not trying to do that. I don't want to do it." What you see at the Rijksmuseum today is the cropped painting, all that remains of the original Rembrandt. The printouts of the extended composition were on display only temporarily, from June to October 2021, and were mounted in front of the painting, not flush with it, so there was no mistaking them for the original.

Rinehart sees both projects as valuable case studies in how AI can be used effectively in the art world. Instead of shying away from what this technology holds for the future, he hopes for more involvement from everyone-curators, conservators, museums, and the public. "What is important is to invite the public to follow museums along that continuum so that we use these instances to learn to see more clearly the shades of nuance and utility among 'real' and 'simulacrum,'" he says.

When technology produces plausible answers to age-old mysteries, does it diminish the aura of the art or artist? Ask the team at Google Arts and Culture and their answer is a straightforward and pragmatic "no." If anything, they believe their work highlights the Faculty Paintings and heightens the mystery around Klimt, a revolutionary painter known to most only through works from his less rebellious Golden Phase. With Erdmann's AI reconstruction, people can see Rembrandt's original, dynamic vision for The Night Watch. Surely, this ability to visualize what is lost is a net gain.

Perhaps it all comes back to aura. AI can fill in a lot of art history's blanks, but it can't recreate masterworks. Nothing can. "Aura does not offer a binary choice of 'true authentic original' versus 'fake artificiality,'" Rinehart says. It's possible to enjoy being right in front of a painting or looking at it on a computer screen, but they're different, layered experiences. What matters is what we feel when we see them.

The WIRED Resilience Residency is made possible by Microsoft. WIRED content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists. Learn more about this program.

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Can AI Truly Give Us a Glimpse of Lost Masterpieces?

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Recent projects used machine learning to resurrect paintings by Klimt and Rembrandt. They raise questions about what computers can understand about art. In 1945, fire claimed three of Gustav Klimt's most controversial paintings. Commissioned in 1894 for the University of Vienna, "the Faculty Paintings"-as they became known-were unlike any of the Austrian symbolist's previous work.

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Give the Parthenon marbles back to Greece – tech advances mean there are no more excuses

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Give the Parthenon marbles back to Greece – tech advances mean there are no more excuses

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"The Parthenon marbles could now be reproduced as indistinguishable from the originals, even if snooty art critics can dismiss them as fakes and “not the same thing”. This then raises the question of which museum, London or Athens, should get the “originals” – and does it really matter? We can admire the second casting of a Rodin statue or the fourth state of a Rembrandt etching as much as a first. Who cares?

To this there is only one answer: that the Greeks do care."

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One day a British government will return the Parthenon marbles to Athens. The only question is: who will obtain Greece's undying credit and thanks?

The obvious candidate was surely Boris Johnson. In 1986, the classics scholar invited the Greek culture minister Melina Mercouri to speak at Oxford University, pledging to help her restore the Parthenon's glory. Yet this week it became yet another of Johnson's Don Giovanni promises - words meant only at the time. Visiting London earlier this week, the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, challenged him to "think out of the box in terms of global Britannia" and stage a "fantastic coup for public diplomacy". Johnson pretended the issue was for the British Museum to decide, and nothing to do with him.

Anyone who has seen the other half of the Parthenon frieze, now on display in Athens' magnificent Acropolis Museum, will agree that this greatest of European treasures should not be cut up and divided between Athens and London. It belongs where it was created, radiant in the Greek light and laid out within sight of its original temple. Half of it should not be sitting, frigid and out of context, in a bleak Bloomsbury mausoleum.

The Parthenon marbles saga has lately become enveloped in a wider debate over cultural identity and restitution. The British Museum has long argued, for a time powerfully, that its amassing of global artefacts over two centuries of British empire has delighted and educated tourists to London. The marbles were not looted but were cut from the Acropolis between 1801 and 1805 by the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, with permission from Greece's then conquerors, the Turks. No one asked the Greeks, but otherwise it was legal.

The British Museum now protests that what it has, it holds with care. Yes, it did come close to wrecking the marbles when cleaning them with wire brushes in 1938, but at least they were safe from war and pollution. The whole world can get to London to see them, rather than traipsing to a distant Balkan capital, the museum says; we don't want to open the floodgates to every tinpot regime seeking to boost its cultural image by raiding London basements for ancestral stuff. Museum curators love worst-case scenarios.

Yet the world is moving on. Cultures are craving their homelands, settings, identities. Museums across Africa and Asia are improving. They are seeking to rediscover and interpret their ancient narratives. Surely we should respect rather than impede this desire. There may be no rules governing the restitution of museum objects, but dealings between peoples require qualities of courtesy, generosity and common sense.

To be fair, western museums are responding. Paris is returning looted artefacts to south-east Asia and Senegal. Benin bronzes have been returned to Nigeria from Cambridge, Aberdeen, Germany and France. The British Museum returned royal jewels to Ceylon in the 1930s and regalia to Burma in 1964. It even returned part of the Sphinx's beard to Egypt. To circumvent rules forbidding "deaccessioning", these moves are often couched as "permanent loans".

In 1941, during the second world war, the British Foreign Office actively considered the Parthenon marbles' return as a gesture of support for Greek nationalism, as and when the war should end. The British Museum has occasionally mooted lending them to Athens for an exhibition, but does not trust the Greeks to return them. Nor is it moved by Greek offers of sumptuous objects lent in return, such as the golden Mask of Agamemnon.

This debate has been further transformed by developments in replication. Computerised 3D printing and etching pioneered in Italy and at Oxford's Institute for Digital Archaeology can now recreate with microscopic accuracy ancient buildings and statues, even using the original stone. There are plans to "reprint" Palmyra's Temple of Baal, destroyed by Islamic State in 2015, and replicate monuments tragically lost in Mosul and Nimrud.

The Parthenon marbles could now be reproduced as indistinguishable from the originals, even if snooty art critics can dismiss them as fakes and "not the same thing". This then raises the question of which museum, London or Athens, should get the "originals" - and does it really matter? We can admire the second casting of a Rodin statue or the fourth state of a Rembrandt etching as much as a first. Who cares?

To this there is only one answer: that the Greeks do care. The missing Parthenon frieze in its original state is a reminder of the country's humiliation by the Turks, and by a British aristocrat. They feel these stones are theirs, just as the Stone of Scone belongs to Scotland, and Stonehenge would "belong" to every Briton, had the Emperor Claudius decided to cart it back to Rome. If Londoners want to experience the aesthetic appeal of Greek carving, they can: technology can replicate it for them, as it is now replicating famous statues across Europe. But let the stones return.

This issue, so important to the Greeks but not to the British, could be sorted out with goodwill in an instant. Precisely such a negotiation on the marbles was demanded in September by Unesco, and rejected by Britain. If it requires a "perpetual loan" or an act of parliament, then get on with it. If money is required, raise it. Johnson is being feeble in fobbing off Athens' request as not being under his purview. The museum is a state institution. Instead of keeping his promise and doing the right thing by the marbles, he has performed another U-turn and funked it.

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Give the Parthenon marbles back to Greece - tech advances mean there are no more excuses | Simon Jenkins

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One day a British government will return the Parthenon marbles to Athens. The only question is: who will obtain Greece's undying credit and thanks? The obvious candidate was surely Boris Johnson. In 1986, the classics scholar invited the Greek culture minister Melina Mercouri to speak at Oxford University, pledging to help her restore the Parthenon's glory.

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“Critical race theories combine progressive political struggles for racial justice with critiques of the conventional legal and scholarly norms which are themselves viewed as part of the illegitimate hierarchies that need to be changed. Scholars, most of whom are themselves persons of color, challenge the ways that race and racial power are constructed by law and culture. One key focus of critical race theorists is a regime of white supremacy and privilege maintained despite the rule of law and the constitutional guarantee of equal protection of the laws.“
Source: Critical Race Theory

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AUTOMATISATION IN THE CULTURAL HERITAGE SECTOR

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AUTOMATISATION IN THE CULTURAL HERITAGE SECTOR

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MUSEUM OBJECTS, CULTURAL OWNERSHIP & EDUCATION

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MUSEUM OBJECTS, CULTURAL OWNERSHIP & EDUCATION

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Museums and Social Media: Is Instagram damaging to museum practice? 

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Museums and Social Media: Is Instagram damaging to museum practice? 

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https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/hoad/2021/02/23/museums-and-social-media-is-instagram-damaging-to-museum-practice/

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Susanna Connolly, Third Year BA (Hons) History of Art and Design student assesses the use of Instagram in current museum practice.
Over the past decade, museums have begun to embrace social media as a promotional tool and a means to encourage engagement within the museum setting. Critics, however, are concerned about how engaging in social media devalues the museum experience and undermines museum authority. This discussion has become more relevant with the global pandemic forcing many museums to re-evaluate their practise and broader role within their community. Within this piece, I argue that utilising social media platforms such as Instagram can be extremely beneficial in creating and consolidating connections with museum artefacts and audiences.

Instagram is a social media platform that is centred around the posting and sharing of images. Designed to be accessed predominantly through mobile phones, the platform encourages personal photography grounded in individuals' everyday experiences. The rise of Instagram has been closely entwined with the selfie phenomenon and as a result, holds negative connotations with critics believing the site fuels superficiality and vacuous entertainment.

With the events surrounding the global COVID-19 pandemic beginning in March 2020, museums and cultural institutions were forced to close their doors to the public. In doing so, these institutions had to re-address relationships with its visitors with social media platforms to reconsider how to overcome physical barriers to access. I decided to use the @Tate Instagram page to examine how museums used social media to encourage interaction, engagement, and education with their collection.

Over lockdown, Tate sought to engage their audience by organising various art related challenges and promoting entries on the Tate Instagram page. An example of this was the one-minute sculpture challenge. Posted on the 29 th March, Tate challenged followers of their Instagram page to create a one-minute sculpture and post it on their personal account, tagging Tate so that entries could be shared on the Tate platform.

Tate shared 86 responses to the challenge which are pinned permanently to the highlights section of their account. The entries featured responses from a diverse range of participants, suggesting how social media can be an accessible site to engage with art and art institutions. The quality of responses was also varied, implying that difference in art ability was welcomed and encouraged. The one-minute element of the challenge made it easy to engage with and informal which encouraged participation. As mentioned in the announcement, the challenge was inspired by the work of the artist Erwin Wurm, and information of his art practice alongside photos were also shared on the Tate Instagram page. This is an example of how Tate was able to use Instagram as a platform to reconcile accessible forms of art education while encouraging audience participation and entertainment.

A benefit of utilising social media platforms is that they can eliminate not only physical barriers to access but social ones too. Anyone with an Instagram is invited to participate within the one-minute challenge. This active engagement centres the viewer within the experience and consolidates informal learning. The immediacy of social media allows for objects to be re-framed within current cultural contexts, making them more relevant, and draws out different understandings of the artefacts. Involvement within challenges such as the one-minute challenge was a much-welcomed escape from the anxious realities many of us were facing during the first lockdown. Within these uncertain times, museums can provide a sense of community and escape, vital for collective mental health. With this considered I would argue that museum social media profiles foster interactions with the audience, which in turn, can be beneficial to both the public and museum practise itself.

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Museums and Social Media: Is Instagram damaging to museum practice?

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Susanna Connolly, Third Year BA (Hons) History of Art and Design student assesses the use of Instagram in current museum practice. Over the past decade, museums have begun to embrace social media as a promotional tool and a means to encourage engagement within the museum setting.

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Is video surveillance  really protecting the artifacts?

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Is video surveillance  really protecting the artifacts?

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A recent act of vandalism in one of the most important museums in Berlin which holds a large exhibition of ancient pieces rose the question of how well the security system works on protecting the exhibition from damage or theft. Apparently none of the security camera’s was working sufficient enough to record the crime which lead to officials questioning the security system.
Source: Berlin museum vandalism raises questions of security

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Theft and vandalism are not new phenomena that museums have to deal with, but when they do occur, museum managers face a balancing act between protecting the art on display while keeping it accessible and available to the public. There is a reason why the recent incident at the popular Berlin museums were not immediately made public - the ongoing investigation, authorities said.

More than two weeks ago, vandals splashed 68 exhibits with an oily liquid at Neues Museum, Pergamon Museum and Alte Nationalgalerie. The investigators are mystified as to who might be behind the attacks, and what their motivations might have been. So are the museum operators.

The liquid left clearly visible stains on the exhibition objects, particularly on a number of Egyptian sarcophagi and stone sculptures. Restorers are working hard to remove them, which is turning out to be easier on wood than on stone. According to reports, however, the extent of the damage could be contained.

One of the sarcophagi damaged by the recent act of vandalim
Why did it take so long to react?
Witnesses report that on the day of the attack, a lot of museum staff were on duty. Cameras recorded the events in the museum rooms. All the same, no one noticed the damage until later that evening.

Just a few weeks ago, Germany's minister of state for culture, Monika Grütters, had labeled the safety situation in German museums as inadequate. At a security conference of the German Museum Association at the end of September 2020, she demanded the situation be "thoroughly investigated and questioned."

The art treasures in the museums mirror our history and culture, she highlighted, saying: "They form our identity."
Threats old and new
Their material and even more importantly their immaterial value can hardly be quantified, she argued, adding that museums across the country would have to master a difficult "balancing act between protection and openness."

Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters has expressed concern for the current security measures in place at German museums

The security situation in the museums has in fact changed, according to David Vuillaume, Managing Director of the German Museum Association: "The threat is more complex," he told DW. In the past, fire and water posed the greatest danger to artefacts displayed in museums, but today, there were also hidden threats in transportation, careless visitors, burglaries and vandalism.

Whatever it is, he said, "you can learn something from each instance."
Three-minute heist
A museum director who would know all about such lessons learned is Marcus Reuter, director of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier - one of Germany's most important archaeological museums.

Archeologist Marcus Reuter is in charge of the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier

His collection ranges from prehistory to Roman times, covers the Middle Ages and the Baroque era, and includes the Trierer Goldmünzenschatz (Trier Gold Hoard), the largest preserved Roman gold treasure in the world. A year ago, would-be thieves forcefully broke into the well-protected building, and were "in and out again in three minutes," Reuter told DW.

The robbery, however, failed. "Our security concept worked," the museum director said, adding how it was important to make access to the museum treasures more difficult by keeping would-be thieves busy for as long as possible.

The museum was lucky that time but Reuter revisited the security concept that was in place up to that point, added new police recommendations, and sent the museum's sponsors a list of requests to update the safety measures. They responded by granting him a six-figure sum for renovations and new security technology.
No guarantees
Whether funds are made available for additional security measures often depends in most cases on politicians in the municipalities, states or the federal government. It is also a matter of negotiation, said David Vuillaume.

Dr. Alke Dohrmann is an expert on museum safety

Public museums prefer to invest their fund in mounting exhibitions that will draw in the public - instead of boosting their security measures which nobody takes notice of, says Alke Dohrmann, an expert who has helped develop security guidelines for museums on behalf of the Conference of National Cultural Institutions. Many museums however, she said, would very much like to provide more security - but can they?

"No museum can prove that costly security measures protect the works of art," David Vuillaume of the Museum Association said. But if no precautions were taken, that might backfire in the event of a burglary, theft or damage to the artwork. At that point, security becomes a major issue.

The "Big Maple Leaf" - the biggest gold coin in the world - was stolen in 2017

The situation is different however in private institutions and museums: their operators - foundations, individuals or collectors - have to insure their holdings, and that is an expensive undertaking. This is in contrast to public museums which do not have their own individual insurance policies.

Their insurance is covered by the respective provider, for instance Germany's state-run Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in the case of the act of vandalism at the Berlin museums.
Museum thefts can cause incredible damage to a collection, Dohrmann added. Some artworks - like the giant gold coin stolen from the Berlin Bode Museum - can simply not be replaced. The gold value of the "Big Maple Leaf" was €3.75 million ($4.43 million).

In general, however, the security situation in German museums is not overtly precarious, Dohrmann said, but she warned that of course, "something can always happen."
This article was translated from the German original by Dagmar Breitenbach.

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Berlin museum vandalism raises questions of security | DW | 26.10.2020

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Theft and vandalism are not new phenomena that museums have to deal with, but when they do occur, museum managers face a balancing act between protecting the art on display while keeping it accessible and available to the public.

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AI learning human emotions from art and empower the future of museum curation

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AI learning human emotions from art and empower the future of museum curation

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"The ability of AI technology to learn about emotion offers greater possibilities for the interchange between art and AI. For culture, AI challenges and enhances how we make, exhibit and understand art. [...] It’s not difficult to imagine a future where curation is assisted by AI.  A future where AIs can combine observations, quantitative, and emotional information to give museum staff powerful curatorial insights. [source]

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Researchers at Stanford University have programmed their AI algorithm to look at a work of art, and then, astonishingly, to form an emotional response to it.

More than this, the AI can form multiple responses. for different parts of the picture. This means that is can read different parts of the picture, understand emotional responses from the viewpoints of different people, and in different contexts.

So, has art taught an AI algorithm empathy?

And what might this mean for museums in the future?

Meet ArtEmis

The study conducted by Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered AI trained their artificial intelligence, called ArtEmis, to read emotional responses from great artworks.

By drawing from a dataset of over 81,000 paintings and 440,000 human responses, the AI algorithm learned to predict how a human might respond to the artwork - and then to justify this prediction in words. Empathy is built in.

For Van Gogh's Starry Night, the AI responded with 'Awe. The blue and white colours of this painting make me feel like I am looking at a dream'.

When shown Dali's The Persistence of Memory, ArtEmis replied with 'Fear. It looks like an animal is laying dead on the ground'.

These responses go further to understand images than AI has gone before. And it's truly extraordinary that the AI has the ability to respond differently to different parts of a work, and recognize that human responses may differ, too.

AI does not have a great reputation for its emotional intelligence. Emotion recognition technology is on the rise and has masses of potential, from marketeers tracking facial responses to law courts using AI to decipher the expressions of those standing trial. However, it's also fraught with issues such as extremely troubling racial bias, simplification of psychological states, and dehumanization. This last has been termed 'emojification' by Dove Tail Labs in their Emotion Recognition System, which seeks to open up discourse around this technology (and the website has a brilliant - and worrying - AR camera to try yourself).

So, the complex understanding that ArtEmis offers is a leap forward in bestowing emotional intelligence on our AI.

And the creators can see a myriad of uses for it, from helping designers to test the effectiveness of their work, to enriching chatbot responses, and ultimately improving wider AI functionality.

The art of technology

Many, if not most, museum professionals encounter some kind of AI in their workplace. Computer vision can help with collections management, and robotic interpreters intrigue visitors.

And this study shows that AI has the potential to do much more to help manage a museums workload.

Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy, the Co-Directors of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centres AI stated that "If AI is to serve the collective needs of humanity, it must incorporate an understanding of what moves us - physically, intellectually and emotionally. It is critical that we design machine intelligence that can understand human language, feelings, intentions and behaviours, and interact with nuance and in multiple dimensions." and ArtEmis shows that art is the ideal vehicle for training AI in human feelings.

In contemporary art, AI is being used by organisations like ART AI to create artworks that focus on evoking an emotional response. 'As passionate believers in both art and technology,' they say, 'we were greatly intrigued by the idea of developing an artificial intelligence that would be able to affect people emotionally, while inspiring creativity and innovative thinking.'

But these AI artists are trained through data sets of human made art and developed by human programmers. So should we consider the artwork to be made by the AI, or by the human originators of that AI? Or are they co-creators?

This train of thought applies equally to curation.

For the 2021 Liverpool Biennial's publication Stages #9, Joasia Krysa and Leonardo Impett proposed an AI curated Biennial. 'Our relationship to computers is rapidly changing and so are developments in automation (AI), and so is our understanding of creative practices, including curatorial practice.' they wrote, 'The overall project takes machine learning algorithms beyond the 'search engine' paradigm in which they have been mostly used to date, and instead considers them to be curatorial agents, working alongside human curators.'

And it's not difficult to imagine a future where curation is assisted by AI. A future where AIs can combine observations, quantitative, and emotional information to give museum staff powerful curatorial insights.

But how will this impact the visitor experience?

Avoiding the uncanny

At best, AI offers a way to greatly enrich how we engage with our audiences, for example, through a highly trained chatbot. By engaging with culture we increase our sense of connection to others, and chatbots could synthesizing the input of a whole team of people.

At worst, robotics run a risk of becoming uncanny - creepy and a little bit too human - and turn our visitors off.

If AI can suggest an emotional response to art, it immediately seems more human. And, it's tempting to use humanizing language about AI, which exaggerates its novelty and grabs our audience's attention.

But, a study at MIT found that when humanizing language was used about AI artists, people were more likely to give them the credit for the artwork. Where they were not humanized, people instead gave credit to the team of people that use the AI for this task.

So, it seems that careful use of language around AI can help our visitors to embrace these experiences. By reducing humanization of AI, we can reduce the risk of entering the uncanny valley (and make sure that the people behind the experience get the credit that they deserve).

AI in the museum toolkit

The ability of AI technology to learn about emotion offers greater possibilities for the interchange between art and AI.

For culture, AI challenges and enhances how we make, exhibit and understand art.

For AI, research can develop in a more meaningful and responsible way through learning from art.

And by acknowledging the importance of culture to describe human nature, AI research can become a powerful champion for the arts.

About the author - Rebecca Hardy Wombell

Rebecca Hardy Wombell is a freelance writer who works with a broad range of creative organisations, including artists, galleries, museums and design-led retailers.

Her writing aims to develop and delight audiences by putting her clients' beautiful works to well-crafted words.

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How AI has learned human emotions from art

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Researchers at Stanford University have programmed their AI algorithm to look at a work of art, and then, astonishingly, to form an emotional response to it. More than this, the AI can form multiple responses. for different parts of the picture.

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Museums struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk about race.

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Museums struggle to train a mostly white, unpaid tour guide corps to talk about race.

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“People trust [museums] so much and trust the education they provide. […] People really assume that when they come into a museum, they are encountering a truth of some kind […] Mistakes that docents make get folded into that.” [source]

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Palace Shaw was standing in one of the galleries in Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art when she heard something that rattled her. It was the summer of 2017, and the show on display was Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, a large retrospective of the Jamaican American artist's work. Shaw, who had recently graduated from college, was working as a "visitor assistant"-which meant, she says, being a "mediator between the art and the visitor, but also kind of a policing role where I was enforcing museum policy." She spent long days on her feet watching visitors stream in and out of galleries.

That June day, one of the museum's volunteer guides was leading a tour of four school-age girls. Three of the girls were Black, says Shaw, and one was South Asian. The girls were asking the guide questions about the art, which included collages, large-scale installations, works made from found objects, and photographs, many of which dealt with racism, identity, and history. "What's Black Power?" one of the girls inquired. The guide, an older white woman, was clearly struggling to give answers. At one point, Shaw says, she compared Afro-textured hair to different kinds of animal fur. "She knew what she was saying wasn't quite right. But she didn't really know how."

It wasn't the first time Shaw, who is Black, had witnessed a guide saying something racist, unwittingly or not. Soshe decided to speak to her supervisor. The response she got, she says, was along the lines of "I hear you, and we can do more training, but there isn't that much we can do, because it's a volunteer position."

Over the past few years, museums have been forced to confront politics at every turn, from legacies of colonialism to the provenance of their funding. In the wake of George Floyd's killing by police and subsequent protests, museums have come under renewed fire for their handling of race in exhibitions, on social media, and in the workplace.

Many museums aren't even open to visitors right now at all due to the pandemic. But that doesn't mean these tensions aren't continuing to escalate, especially as institutions chart paths forward in a grim financial landscape and reevaluate their programming. Museums are in the process of confronting how they educate the public about the art on their walls-arguably the most important thing a museum can do, but also a job that often falls to unpaid employees. These volunteers were historically dubbed "docents," though many museums have abandoned that term. The work a docent job entails varies by institution, but it is often public-facing, and can range from manning an entrance desk to leading student tours. It also tends to skew toward a certain demographic. As one museum education employee who has worked at New York's Museum of Modern Art said, "It's not totally this, but mostly, it's an army of privileged old white women."

According to the museum employees and educators I interviewed, incidents of racial insensitivity and sometimes outright racism involving white volunteers are not uncommon. "I have personally witnessed and overheard very disparaging comments from docents, who don't even I think realize what it is that they're saying," said Porchia Moore, department head and assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Florida and co-creator of the Visitors of Color project.She has also served as an independent consultant for museums including the National Gallery in D.C. and the North Carolina Museum of Art, training staff and volunteers in racial literacy and cultural competency. "There's some tension between museums and museum professionals who increasingly want to get it right," she said, "and a docent corps that doesn't have the language and framework for that."

Monica Garza, the director of education at the ICA, declined to comment on the specifics of the incident Shaw described, but said, "The entire allegation is super distressing." "Unequivocally," she added, "there are no different standards [for volunteers versus staffers]."

Moore advocated for a reimagination of the role of volunteer guides as paid positions, along with hiring more people of color. "Docents are one of the most vital resources for museums, but the current model literally has inequality and exclusions baked into it," she said, noting the economic privilege inherent to committing to free labor in service of an institution, one that might entail hours of training before the volunteering even starts.

One way to help make the pool of applicants more inclusive would be to turn these positions into paying jobs; many museums, the ICA included, have paid positions who fill some similar roles. Another option is to attract students into the corps by offering credit for courses, as the Getty Museum in L.A. has done. But for most museums, cutting down on unpaid tour guides doesn't seem feasible, particularly now. "I don't know any museum in the world that could afford to have their staff do the breadth and depth of the tours that we do," said Arlene Brickner, chair of the Volunteer Organization at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which may have the largest corps of volunteers of any museum in the United States; as of 2019, the Met had approximately 1,400 volunteers across several departments, of whom 400 lead tours in 11 languages. Hence the question many museums have been asking themselves: How do we better train the volunteers we already have to talk about race?

The onboarding for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts volunteer gallery instructor programs used to mention Thomas Sully's iconic portrait of George Washington, "The Passage of the Delaware" (1819) once or twice. "It wasn't insufficient. We had a historian come and talk about it from the perspective of the Battle of Trenton," said Nicole Claris, who manages gallery teaching and collections training at the MFA. But in 2018, they instead had four different speakers address the painting. First, they discussed the work in the context of early 19 th century painting. Then Claris talked about it in the context of portraits of presidents and how Washington was seen in 1819. Then an educator who has written a book on slavery came to talk about a figure in the shadows of the painting: William Lee, whom Washington enslaved. Finally, a student of color who'd worked as a docent came to talk about why and how that context matters.

This approach is part of a volunteer training program that began in the fall of 2018, centered on the museum's "Art of the Americas" collection. The program uses objects as windows into history: a locked silver box that once contained sugar, for instance, is used to tell a story that's about silver mining but also about slavery and labor conditions in the Americas. The course is mandatory for all gallery instructors who lead tours of this collection. And since last year-when a class of mostly Black and Latinx seventh grade students was subjected to racist comments from museum staff and patrons, ultimately leading to a formal apology from the MFA-all staff members and volunteers have been required to undergo unconscious bias training.

Garza said that the ICA has also put more educational emphasis into its training program and instituted implicit-bias awareness training. " It was several years ago that we began to see the need for more training by outside specialists to help tour guides navigate challenging content and foster dialogue," Garza said. In the fall of 2017, the museum hired a dedicated person to oversee the training, hiring, and firing of volunteers. Since the museum has been closed due to the coronavirus, Garza said they've "continued to work on implicit-bias awareness and have expanded readings and discussions on racism in response to current events with our gallery volunteers."

Ginnie Hibbard is retired, in her 70s, and has been a volunteer gallery instructor at the MFA for about a decade. During that time, the training has shifted drastically, as has her own understanding of the art. "When I took my first Art in Americas course, it was strictly history and how the MFA American collection reflected that history," Hibbard, who is white, told me last summer. "I can say this without prejudice: It was the white male historian version worldview that you get in the textbook."

Hibbard said that the MFA's new curriculum has changed the way she leads tours and discusses objects, like the museum's John Singleton Copley portrait of Samuel Adams. "Nine years ago, I would have gotten the kids involved by asking them how he was dressed or what his pose was or his expression," she said. "It's age-dependent, of course, but now you can get into civil rights, you can get into different ways of protesting."

She said the new training has helped prepared her for more challenging discussions. In the museum's Spanish Colonial gallery, there are a series of "casta" paintings, which portray the detailed racial classifications in colonial Latin America. Los Angeles Times art critic Carolina Miranda has described casta paintings as "decidedly weird territory, displaying an obsession with the races and the ways in which they mix"-but they're also works that were sent back to Spain as a way of supposedly combating negative stereotypes about interracial marriage. Contextualizing and describing them to a group of 10 kids is difficult, but Hibbard said she now has a clear vision of what she'd do if a young child on her tour asked about them.

"I would not bring up race," she said. "I would not bring up the differences between people in the paintings, because you're making the assumption that the kids notice the differences. I would say that they were part of a series that show us what life was like in New Spain. They're valuable because they show us what people wore, what the plant life was like." She said she would probably not ask the kids if they had questions. On the other hand, she said, with older kids, she'd go into their history and context. "If I had AP Spanish students who were fluent in Spanish, I'd give them the whole spiel," she said. "They're old enough to understand, and they might experience racism in their own lives."

But even this pedagogical approach isn't clear-cut. Moore, the racial literacy consultant for museums, takes issue with the choice to omit all racial context in discussing art with young kids. "I would argue that the notion and structure of racial equity and historical thinking are concepts that need to be taught from the earliest age possible," she said. "In fact, there is no better place to do this than the museum."

Training is by no means a cure-all, and in recent years some in the museum world-and other workplaces-have come to question its efficacy. Though Moore has trained volunteers herself, she fundamentally believes docents need to be paid if there is any hope of change. "I recently worked with a corps of docents where most people had a winter home and a summer home," she said. "For most museums around the country, the way the docent program is set up makes that a reality." Palace Shaw pointed out that people of color often have to sit through training that is largely designed for a white audience. "You have to ask yourself, who is this training really for?"

Many museums are facing an even more existential crisis right now: the question of whether they will be able to reopen at all. But when and if they do, these issues will inevitably become a daily reality again, and perhaps a more pressing one at institutions that-racked by layoffs and financial woes-might rely more than ever on volunteer labor. The ICA, Garza said, is using this moment for a fundamental reimagining of its tour programs. "When we eventually start tours up again, the program will look quite different," she said. One experiment during the closures has been assigning museum volunteers to a food distribution site that the ICA has been operating out of its seasonal gallery space in East Boston during the pandemic-an attempt at rethinking what a museum's community role can be and what its volunteerism can look like.

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Moore said she is taking some time now to think deeply about the efficacy of training as it relates to docents. "I'm reading a lot of the literature and looking at what the data says about implicit bias, about cultural competence, about racial literacy, about whether you can 'teach' someone these things," she said. "I think that you can, but what I've seen is that [museums] make this a one-off thing. They invest in it for a year and they're like, OK, now we have our shared language and we have our terminology and we're good. " She said they instead need to envision something more fundamental, a whole structural reimagination of museums that goes well beyond volunteers. "We need to use this time to think about wage equity, hierarchy of the boards, and the systemic and institutional racism in museums," Moore said.

Shaw also believes that the problems here are much broader and deeper than questions of training. "People trust [museums] so much and trust the education they provide. ... People really assume that when they come into a museum, they are encountering a truth of some kind," she told me. "Mistakes that docents make get folded into that." She left the ICA in 2018 and now works in media and has hosted a podcast called The Whitest Cube about race and museums. After her time working inside these institutions, she said, "I really don't believe in museums anymore."

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Palace Shaw was standing in one of the galleries in Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art when she heard something that rattled her. It was the summer of 2017, and the show on display was Nari Ward: Sun Splashed, a large retrospective of the Jamaican American artist's work.

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Artificial Intelligence as Museum Curator

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Artificial Intelligence as Museum Curator

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"What constitutes a well-curated exhibition is a matter of taste [...] Is it possible that AI can be better than skilled curators with decades of experience? Could technology really put together a better exhibition that boosts attendance figures? More intriguingly, perhaps, is the question of whether the shows produced in this manner will be better or simply more popular."  [source]

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Artificial intelligence (AI) may have been around for some time but museums are only just getting used to the sort of functions it can perform. That said, there have been some impressive uses of this type of technology in the museum sector before where learning algorithms, in particular, have been deployed to predict human behaviours. However, Bologna's Civic Museum has surprised many by making use of AI in an entirely new way - to help improve its curatorial prowess. Of course, what constitutes a well-curated exhibition is a matter of taste. Some might say that it is just a question of personal preference, almost like trying to decide what constitutes good art. Why then, should a museum see fit to use AI rather than human intelligence to curate its shows?

The idea driving the project is to give museum attendees more of what they like and less of what they don't. In this regard, the principle behind the use of the technology is much the same as a museum or gallery director might demand of their flesh and blood curators. What most museums and public galleries are after, in the end, is augmented visitor numbers, after all. And yet, is it possible that AI can be better than skilled curators with decades of experience? Could technology really put together a better exhibition that boosts attendance figures? More intriguingly, perhaps, is the question of whether the shows produced in this manner will be better or simply more popular. In this regard, we return to the question of personal preference and taste, of course. So, what is going on?

Emotional Reactions

In June, an Italian research team announced that they were working with the Civic Museum in Bologna along with two other institutions, one in Rome and the other in Parma. Their project involved the use of video cameras placed around the galleries of all three institutions to monitor visitors. However, rather than simply tracking visitors to see which works of art they were most drawn to, the technology made use of AI algorithms to judge the emotions of members of the public as they interacted with the art on show.

Therefore, the AI project is much more than working out which parts of a museum's collection are the most popular but deciding the degree to which people engage with them. By gauging reactions to individual items on display, such as works of art, the researchers hope to build an AI system that has some degree of empathy - or, at least, understanding - of the way people feel about what is before them. What's more, this process is supposed to go on without the visitors realising that their emotions are being monitored even if they are aware of the presence of cameras.

Facial Expressions and Value Judgements

Without filling in questionnaires about their emotional reactions to pieces, the technology takes over and assigns certain value judgements, or scores, to what it detects. AI systems can already determine five distinct facial expressions and this is what the research team is using to work out how people feel. The algorithms used are able to work out when happiness or sadness is detected in a facial response as well as whether people feel surprised or angry. More subtly, however, the technology is also supposed to be able to work out when someone has had a neutral reaction to what they've seen. The key here, of course, is to determine whether someone is genuinely neutral about something emotionally or has simply not engaged with it at all.

Furthermore, the AI systems being trialled in the three Italian cities are not limited to judging people's emotional responses to museum collections. They are also being used to make certain demographic judgements. For example, the technology now being operated is purported to be able to determine a museum visitor's perceived gender as well as how old they are likely to be. Furthermore, the AI system is also able to capture information about people's eye movements. According to the researchers, this will help the system to work out how much an exhibit is genuinely prompting interest as opposed to all of the other things you find in galleries, such as way-finding information and so on.

Computers: the Curators of the Future?

Although the experiments in AI are at the stage of gathering data and improving algorithms, the Italian technology specialists hope that the information gathered will be used to redesign museum layouts for optimal visitor experiences. This could, of course, include which exhibits are put on show and which ones are removed or placed in less prestigious settings. It seems, therefore, that what was once the job of curators could be automated. Certainly, this would look more likely if automatically curated galleries started to perform better than other institutions in terms of visitor numbers.

Silvia Battistini, a curator at the Civic Museum in Bologna, did not appear to be unduly concerned about the project or her future when she spoke to the press, however. Instead, she expressed surprise at what she deemed to be an opportunity to learn more. She said that as a curator she was not used to be able to get her hands on such useful information about how the public interact with the artefacts and artworks in her museum and that it could be a powerful tool in determining future exhibitions.

How this might work exactly as well as the privacy concerns some have raised over such close monitoring of visitors remains an open question, however. Some artists have already said that they don't approve of the approach now being experimented with. In the main, they have complained that AI used in this way will become a race for more, not better, interactions, thereby devaluing art and museum exhibitions to the level of social media.

About the author - Manuel Charr

Manuel Charr is a journalist working in the arts and cultural sectors. With a background in marketing, Manuel is drawn to arts organizations which are prepared to try inventive ways to reach new audiences.

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Museum Uses Artificial Intelligence to Curate Better Exhibitions

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Artificial intelligence (AI) may have been around for some time but museums are only just getting used to the sort of functions it can perform. That said, there have been some impressive uses of this type of technology in the museum sector before where learning algorithms, in particular, have been deployed to predict human behaviours.

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Even art museums can be censored by algorithms! Should social media algorithms decide about human cultural legacy?

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In certain historical periods, such as in Ancient Greece, it seemed that no artist could work without receiving the feedback "hmm, it's good, but could it be better if they had their genitals out?"

Then there are other times when artists pushed the boundaries of acceptability. Either way, the result was the same: museums are crammed to the brim with statues and paintings of people in the nude. This is a problem when museums try and share the work on social media with very strict "no nudity" rules.

The Vienna Tourist Board, bored with having content taken down by Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, has decided to go with the obvious solution: starting their own OnlyFans page.

"Right now, an algorithm determines what is okay to see and what is not," spokesperson for the Vienna Tourist Board, Helena Hartlauer, told NBC News. "And it definitely should not determine our cultural legacy."

"Over the years, Vienna has been home to some of the world's most famous artists - including Egon Schiele and Koloman Moser, whose works pushed the boundaries of what was considered acceptable in art and society at the time," the museum wrote of their decision to join the site, which has become synonymous with paying to see nudity.

"And the battle against censorship still rages on: with the rise of social media, bans like these are back in headlines once again. Major social media channels like Instagram and Facebook have nudity and 'lewd' content firmly in their sights."

"Vienna and its art institutions are among the casualties of this new wave of prudishness - with nude statues and famous artworks blacklisted under social media guidelines, and repeat offenders even finding their accounts temporarily suspended. That's why we decided to put the capital's world-famous "explicit" artworks on OnlyFans. By putting Vienna's historical 18+ content on OnlyFans, subscribers can now view provocative works by the likes of Egon Schiele, Richard Gerstl, Koloman Moser and Amedeo Modigliani - all of which are on show for all to see in the capital."

On their OnlyFans page, you can see paintings from Two Squatting Women by Egon Schiele to the wife of Peter Paul Rubens, Helena Fourment, getting out of the bath.

As well as being a clever way to draw attention to their exhibits, and to post images of them without getting told off by Mark Zuckerberg, the idea is to get people talking about modern-day censorship on social media.

"We've decided to try to start a conversation about this topic because we thought it's very Vienna," Hartlauer told NBC News. "Because Vienna has always been a very open minded city. We believe it's important for Vienna institutions in general to have some space for different ideas, and we're not afraid of the naked truth."

Subscribers to the OnlyFans page can get a free Vienna City Card or an admission ticket to one of the museums featured on their OnlyFans channel by sending proof of their subscription to the board.

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Museum Joins OnlyFans After Social Media Algorithms Censor Nude Art

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In certain historical periods, such as in Ancient Greece, it seemed that no artist could work without receiving the feedback "hmm, it's good, but could it be better if they had their genitals out?" Then there are other times when artists pushed the boundaries of acceptability.

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"The museum as a modern institution has its epistemic foundation and raison d´être embedded in the colonial logic. This is the case in its role as producer and preserver of heritage and memory for the nation-state, and as part of a wider complex that allows for the reinforcement of colonial power structures by virtue of its ability to operate a visibility apparatus, that of exhibiting or being exhibited" [source]

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Tiago Gualbert, Pay Per Doll, 2012, two-color Lithograph, 19 x 25 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

We must decolonize the museum or else. We must decolonize the museum because we must justify its existence and permanence. We must decolonize the museum because it is a stiff, rigid, outmoded and antiquated institution. We must decolonize the museum because it makes us uncomfortable. We must decolonize the museum from the standpoint of history, from the standpoint of culture and from the standpoint of its publics. We must decolonize the museum from the standpoint of art, we must decolonize the museum because, hell, someone has to do it, whether this is in order to cleanse its institutional conscience, in order to follow a trend, or out of sheer conviction.

Few today would dispute that the museum is the product of both a colonial narrative and its apparatus. Hence, there have been growing calls for institutions to establish non-colonial practices, understood primarily at the level of exhibition and collection policies. These calls have also extended themselves to the archive, conceived as an institutional exercise in selective forgetting. It is worth noting, however, that the politics of representation in museums have been a subject of discussion at least since the 1970s, becoming a recurrent theme for the so-called "critical museology". Such calls have gained unprecedented energy as they have been taken up by the contemporary art world both as a task and as a trend. At the very least we can say that the art museum - in particular the museum of contemporary art - has finally woken up to its colonial legacy.

Hence, decolonizing the museum has become an urgent task. The number of institutions that implement curatorial projects, public programmes, educational services, seminars and engagement activities that propose ways of achieving this or, rather, that propose themselves as the way of achieving decolonization has increased exponentially.

Nonetheless, the problem persists. As we have already noted, the museum as a modern institution has its epistemic foundation and raison d´être embedded in the colonial logic. This is the case in its role as producer and preserver of heritage and memory for the nation-state, and as part of a wider complex that allows for the reinforcement of colonial power structures by virtue of its ability to operate a visibility apparatus, that of exhibiting or being exhibited.

The above might sound like a moot point, but it is not. The contemporary museum - with its programmes focused on specific publics, so-called socially engaged works and curatorial practices that go from the politically correct to the incorporation of themes previously considered inadequate for museum display - might give the impression that such a contradiction does not exist, or even worse, that it has been superseded. This is why it is important to explore in more detail some of the premises that these attempts to decolonize the museum have mobilised, identifying the blind spots and conflict zones that slip in between the good intentions. This is important in order to rescue its critical possibilities. Otherwise, we might end up reinforcing the very categories and power relations we had tried to unpack.

We can identify in these recent attempts to decolonize the museum two tendencies, which are not mutually exclusive: one of them focuses on the politics of identity and representation, while the other privileges the introduction of the South as a category that is offered as an epistemological solution. It is the latter that has left the deepest mark in the discourse around contemporary art.

Multiculturalism and cultural hybridization: between recognition, the ghetto and 'folklorization'
One of the first critical fronts to the museum as a colonial apparatus was launched around discussions of multiculturalism and cultural hybridization, in the wake of a crisis of the nation-state. The emergence of new forms of territoriality (not necessarily grounded in concrete physical space or bound by the traditional model of the border) and the eruption of new migration and mobility flows brought categories like 'identity', 'representation' and 'appropriation' under close scrutiny.

We can identify three lines of debate: first, the narrative of national museums and their relationship with historical discourse, memory and collective identity; second, the representation of minorities and subaltern groups; and third, the constitution, ownership and management of collections. Exhibitions like Magiciens de la Terre, publications like the influential Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display and legal initiatives like the ones pursued by Australian indigenous groups to demand the return of artefacts from the collections of district and university museums were based on the conviction that the museum had to move towards the recognition of cultural diversity. In other words, that the problem of the colonial museum was condensed in its politics of representations and it was on that front that it had to be sublimated. In Latin America, and especially in Mexico, one of the most consistent proposals that tried to go beyond the mere recognition of a 'multilingual and diverse nation' was the programme of community museums promoted by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and led by Cuauhtémoc Camarena and Teresa Morales since 1985. The welcome reception and palpable results of this programme fed a wave of optimism regarding the extent to which the museum had managed to turn a corner from its colonial past. However, although the discourse of multiculturalism and the subsequent introduction of the category of 'inter-culturalism' as a critical counterpoint placed the museum at the centre of academic reflection, its first contradictions and conceptual limits did not take long to surface.

Indigenous subjects, women, afro-descendants, and chicanos 'gained a voice' given by the other and rarely obtained by themselves; they were turned into themes and, in the worst cases, into museum fetishes.

This recognition of cultural diversity was primarily thematic rather than structural. The value assigned to a whole set of activities and expressions that had until then been considered 'low-brow', 'popular' or aligned with minority groups did not result in opening up spaces of representation at the level of decision-making in museums and exhibition centres. Likewise, no real mechanisms for revision at the level of collection and exhibition policies were devised; even when a culturalist approach was privileged, the attitude remained largely top-down and reliant on the vision of 'experts'.

Indigenous subjects, women, afro-descendants and chicanos 'gained a voice' given by the other and rarely obtained by themselves; they were turned into themes and, in the worst cases, into museum fetishes. Some inclusivity policies gave rise to an extreme racialization and 'folklorization' of communities, negating their internal differences, power struggles, negotiations and conflicts. While attempting to break with stereotypes, new labels were produced in a simplification and acritical appropriation of cultural production.

On the other hand, the work with communities revealed that in certain contexts, identity narratives were linked to the idea of 'full citizenship' in as much as this implied the recognition of subjects as members of the State or another iteration of the 'national identity' discourse. That is to say, the affirmation of identity was grounded in the idea of being recognised and made part of an official historical narrative, not necessarily in the desire to be inscribed in a discourse 'out of history'.

Recognition did not go beyond the level of the exhibition, in most cases even at that level the discourse centred on otherness rather than on a first-person voice. Multiculturalism was presented as a discourse that 'levelled differences', promoting an inclusivity that was depoliticized, a celebration of diversity that was free of conflict and historical tension. As Paul B. Preciado has noted, representation in terms of political identity does not necessarily constitute or construct decolonial strategies.

South, south, south: When contemporary art met decolonial theory
The 'postcolonial turn' reached the international art circuit mainstream in the 11th edition of Documenta (1998-2000) under the directorship of Okwui Enwezor. The documentation of the event describes it as 'the first truly global, postcolonial documenta exhibition'. In Enwezor's words through its five platforms his curatorship attempted 'to describe the present location of culture and its interfaces with other complex, global knowledge systems.' This edition of Documenta was distinctive in the wide range of nationalities of the artists selected, a great deal of whom lived and worked in Africa, Asia and Latin America, although their careers had developed within mainstream art institutions.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is striking that the event was reviewed in some contexts as an encounter of artists from the first world and a Western (European) public with the gaze of artists from the third world; while the curatorial team asserted that they had tried to move away from an exoticizing of the other, and were privileging archival or documentary work.

The idea of a 'global artist' was thus put in place, global in as much as her discourse was rooted in the particularities of local contexts but uprooted and relocated in a handful of centres of artistic production (Berlin, London, New York). Enwezor's work allowed the discussions of postcolonial and decolonial theory that were taking place in other fields to reach the contemporary art world, in turn the art world found in this discourse a way out of the impasse that theories of postmodernism had reached.

At the same time, in Latin America a renewed reflection was taking place on the narrations, representations and identifications that colonial discourse continued to generate. Authors such as Aníbal Quijano and Rita Segato tried to reveal the epistemic mechanisms of the power relations that inform these discourses as well as their relation to specific category-formations, in particular that of 'race'. However, the rise of the so-called decolonial turn in contemporary art can be more directly traced to the work of Walter D. Mignolo and his proposal of a 'decolonial aesthetics'. These ideas were tested and displayed in an exhibition curated by Mignolo and Pedro Pablo Gómez, 'Estéticas decoloniales', organised in 2010 in Bogotá, across three different sites: the Sala de Exposiciones ASAB at the Faculty of Fine Art in the Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, the project space El Parqueadero and two rooms of the Museuo de Arte Moderno. The exhibition was based on Mignolo's proposal to undo the colonial logic established by the 'privileging of the eye'. That is to say, the ways of seeing and aesthetic categories inherited from Western art history and art institutions, its mechanisms of control and ways of constructing differences.

Mignolo's idea found an echo in other groups - especially those that gathered around the Conceptualismos del Sur Network (Southern Conceptualisms), such as Ana Longoni, Graciela Carnevale, André Mesquita, Cuauhtémoc Medina or Joaquín Barrientos - focused on the history of Latin American conceptualisms through an approach that questioned the existing power structures of aesthetics and art history.

The South appears then as a term that allows for the structuring of 'a framework for the representation not just of a cultural context of regions that are geographically in the South, but also regions that share a common colonial legacy [...] patterns of colonization, migration and cultural mixing'. In this way, the South was an attempt to establish a category of dissensus regarding the narrative of art institutions, in particular the museum and the archive, understood as necessary tools for the articulation of a historiography linked to the nation-state now resignified and amplified from a neoliberal perspective.

Art was to recuperate what neither history nor politics had managed to, it had found a way to decolonize the museum and with it, the institution of art. But, to what extent has this been the case? Have the basic epistemic categories been unsettled or are we merely calling them something else when we no longer talk of 'centre'/'periphery' but of 'North'/'South'.

It is hard to deny the attractiveness of both Mignolo's proposals and the criticisms from the South, not just because they resonated with the idea of a global and peripheric art scene sanctioned by the international art circuit, but because it recuperates for art a political component that appeared to have been blurred within a socio-economic context marked by the flows of transnational capital and its territories, not to mention the fact that it was conceived as a profoundly original position. Art was to recuperate what neither history nor politics had managed to, it had found a way to decolonize the museum and with it, the institution of art. But, to what extent has this been the case? Have the basic epistemic categories been unsettled or are we merely calling them something else when we no longer talk of 'centre'/'periphery' but of 'North'/'South'. Perhaps one of the most contradictory aspects of this drive to decolonize is the apparent ease with which this 'South' fits into the current models of institutional management of the museum-as-enterprise, its ability to be co-opted within a museum model that remains linked to the international circuit of the contemporary art market.

Resembling the issues that surrounded the adoption of multiculturalism as a way of undoing the politics of representation at the museum, the mere articulation of artistic discourses identified as part of that 'South' (in as much as they can be considered 'local', 'non-Eurocentric' or 'peripheric') - has not implied a questioning of the structure and the rationality of the museum itself and, in particular, of the ways in which the museum of contemporary art articulates relations of power and value. In this way, the validation or legitimation of artistic discourse seems to become a kind of 'personification of difference', often predicated on the place of residence or on belonging to social or cultural minorities. It is worth asking how that foregrounding of dissensus or that movement towards 'the South' play towards a particular production of art-value, the very value towards which it putatively wants to cast its critique.

In some ways, this gesture of invoking a museum from the South, a 'decolonized' museum, can be understood as an attempt to retain agency and status as the prime site for the legitimation of artistic and art historical discourses.

While few would question the usefulness of opening up to other discourses and practices as a way of widening the platform of visibility offered by the museum, the museum continues to operate on the same mechanisms of artistic legitimation: critical consensus, market position and integration of artists in local, regional and international circuits as well as the sanctioning of authority. In some ways, this gesture of invoking a museum from the South, a 'decolonized' museum, can be understood as an attempt to retain agency and status as the prime site for the legitimation of artistic and art historical discourses. In this way, while exhibition policies and public programmes tend to announce a collaboration with, or inclusion of peripheric subjects - often under formulas that depart neither conceptually nor formally from relational art, or from objectifying representations -museum policies and management continue unchallenged to operate along the lines of the cultural industries. Hence the 'museum of the South' seems desperately to seek revalidation as a 'museum of the first world', in terms already suggested by that phrase: entrepreneurial, efficient, successful and popular. We are witnessing a museum that has decolonized its curatorial and museographical discourse, but whose institutional structure remains eager to be recolonized.

What comes after the promise?
Put in such bleak terms, it might look like the only viable alternative is to destroy the institution, to completely dissolve its rationality. To burn the museum down to the ground. But perhaps, before we declare the museum decolonized, we should linger in its present contradictions, we should situate ourselves at its limits, we should understand it as being in crisis with itself. This does not mean renouncing the critical possibilities of the museum, but to affirm them only in as much as it acknowledges and recognises its own conflict zones. The museum might not currently be able to decolonize itself, but it could certainly start by constructing different institutional ethics.

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Afterall - We Promise to Decolonize the Museum: A Critical View of Contemporary Museum Policies

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In collaboration with Museu de Arte de São Paulo we are building a critical forum for cultural theorists, curators and artists to raise questions and formulate proposals for the reinterpretation of exhibitions and museum collections in non-canonical ways. In this essay Brenda Caro Cocotle critiques the drive to decolonize the museum.

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List of ten museums and how much they integrate this processes in their development 

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How do museums adapt to a changing role in cultural heritage preservation in a digitalized world?

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How do museums adapt to a changing role in cultural heritage preservation in a digitalized world?

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The study analyzes selected Museums’ sustainability perspectives, technology use and promotion in active visitor participation as an effort to preserve their role in Cultural Heritage preservation in different regions of the world.
General findings are that the current level of integration of these ideas may differ in different regions but are mostly put in the focus of developing strategies.
Özer Sarı, Ferika & Nazlı, Murat. (2018). Sustaining Cultural Heritage by Means of Museums in an Ever-Changing World. Gaziantep University Journal of Social Sciences. 17. 10.21547

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Digital cultural colonialism and Google Arts & culture

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Digital cultural colonialism and Google Arts & culture

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Paper published in December 2020 documents a noticeable lack of balance in the content available in Google Arts and Culture. Out of all individual items, over 82% are from USA institutions, and as a whole only 7.5% of the content is from institutions beyond the USA, UK, Netherlands and Italy. Additionally, content from African continent is almost non-existing.
Read more: Melissa Terras.org

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Map showing the dominance of content with origins in the USA, in Google Arts and Culture.

In February 2011, Google launched its Google Art Project, now known as Google Arts and Culture (GA&C), with an objective to make culture more accessible. The platform (and the content on its app) has dramatically grown since then, and currently hosts approximately six million high-resolution images of artworks from approximately 2,500 museums and galleries in almost every country featured in the UN member list. Although Google does not publish user statistics for the resource, it is understood that virtual visitor numbers increased dramatically during 2020, when many leading arts institutions had to close their doors because of the COVID-19 pandemic. There has, to date, been very little research published on the platform, and our newly published research in the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (which was a Digital Humanities class project with Inna Kizhner 's students at Siberian Federal University) interrogates GA&C to understand its scope, scale, and coverage.

Our scraping of the site content (in summer 2019) shows that Google Arts and Culture is far from a balanced representation of the world's cultures:

The major proportion of the holdings feature content that resides in the USA;

Only 7.5% of the content is from institutions beyond the USA, UK, Netherlands and Italy;

There are very few African cultural institutions who have contributed to the platform, and very little African culture present;

The culture of some countries (such as Kazakhstan) are represented entirely by pictures of American and Russian culture via the space programme;

Artworks from capital cities dominate the collections, while art from provinces is underrepresented;

There is a dominance of art from the 20th century.

Pie chart showing that 82% of individual items in Google Arts and Culture are presented by USA institutions.

This leads to some extreme examples in the platform. There are next to no entries in GA&C featuring content originating in large parts of the African continent. American culture dominates Canadian culture. The culture of Kazakhstan (in 2019) was represented entirely in GA&C by 4000 pictures of American and Russian astronauts, from the NASA archives: no Kazakhstani institution had uploaded content themselves.

In 2016, Amit Sood, the Director of GA&C, 2016 claimed that it would introduce a new era of accessible art. However, we have shown that GA&C is a corpus where a number of cultures are underrepresented or marginalized. It maintains dominant cultural systems, including promoting the cultural holdings of the United States of America above all others. Google Arts and Culture is therefore an example of "digital cultural colonialism", which amplifies the cultural holdings of one particular country, and also reinforces the conventional traditions of art collection and interpretation that dominate museum displays in larger Western cities.

The biases we have discovered in GA&C may have long-ranging affects. If larger quantities of objects, images, and stories related to a particular idea or representation of selected knowledge are present in aggregators of cultural content, these ideas and concepts will be promoted, accessed, disseminated, and studied, becoming the foundation of the new digital canon: one that can be appropriated for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.

We argue that the choices that have gone into the content feature on GA&C should be made clear, as well as the biases contained within the platform. Our research is the first step to understand that this major platform is not neutral, and contains biases that will impact on its large user base, as well as data-led approaches that draw upon it, both now, and in the future. We end with a challenge: what will GA&C do to make its processes for ingesting and showcasing 'arts and culture' transparent, and how will it deploy its resources to expand the reach and spread of the digital content it features?

For more, see: "Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture" by Inna Kizhner, Melissa Terras, Maxim Rumyantsev, Valentina Khokhlova, Elisaveta Demeshkova, Ivan Rudov, Julia Afanasieva. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaa055.

Given that the copyright in DSH belongs to the authors, I've placed a copy of the journal article here on this blog, for easy and open access.
We are following up this research on the platform with a follow up study to understand the GLAM sector's views on Google Arts and Culture, including the process of becoming a partner in the platform. If you would like to give your anonymous opinion, our online survey is open until 15th February 2021: we would appreciate all insights.

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New paper: Digital cultural colonialism: measuring bias in aggregated digitized content held in Google Arts and Culture

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Map showing the dominance of content with origins in the USA, in Google Arts and Culture. In February 2011, Google launched its Google Art Project, now known as Google Arts and Culture (GA&C), with an objective to make culture more accessible. The platform (and the content on its app) has dramatically grown since then, and...

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Museum displays and the return of cultural property

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Museum displays and the return of cultural property

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Who owns cultural heritage objects? The state where they have been discovered? The people? The country where artefacts have been brought to before the establishment of the antiquity law?

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has made a momentous decision to urge the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum, according to a statement from Greece's Culture Minister on Thursday.

Culture Minister Lina Mendoni stated "Together with the recommendation that was issued - referring to the poor conditions of exposure that the sculptures are kept in at the British Museum - Greece also achieved a decision from the Intergovernmental Committee that pertains specifically to the return of the Parthenon sculptures."

Her remarks come one day after the 22nd session of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property (ICPRCP) came to a conclusion in Paris.

Mendoni noted that "The committee urgently calls on the United Kingdom to review is position and enter into a discussion with Greece, recognizing that the issue is of an intergovernmental nature - in contrast to claims from the British side that it is a matter for the British Museum - and mainly that Greece has a valid and legal claim to demand the return of the sculptures to their place of birth."

Marking what many across Greece hope is a turning point in the longstanding disagreement regarding the Parthenon Marbles, which were chipped off the facade of the iconic building before they were taken to Great Britain, Mendoni noted that today's committee action constitutes a "particularly significant development."

Parthenon Marbles debate part of larger "de-colonialization" effort

Greece's ongoing campaign to return the Parthenon Marbles to their rightful home atop the Acropolis takes place in recent times as museums around the world are attempting to "de-colonialize" their collections, reassessing whether or not the priceless antiquities that come from other nations should be displayed in faraway institutions.

Additionally, reports of water leakage in the windowless room in which the Marbles are displayed has posed another problem, although the British Museum insists that the issue has been ameliorated.

The looting of the Parthenon marbles was committed by Thomas Bruce, the Seventh Earl of Elgin and a Scottish nobleman, who served as Great Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1801-1805.

Over the decades, there have been countless petitions by citizens, politicians, and celebrities from around the world to return the marble sculptures to their rightful home, atop the Acropolis in Athens, Greece.

There have even been offers to trade antiquities from Greece to the UK in hopes that the British Museum might consider "loaning" them back to Greece. However, the British Museum has declined all options and offers.

The British Museum claims that Lord Elgin didn't "steal" the Parthenon Marbles. Instead, the museum insists that Elgin took them with the complete knowledge and permission of the Ottoman authorities. During the time when Lord Elgin was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Athens was under its rule.

Of the items that Lord Elgin took from atop the Acropolis, it is estimated that he looted some 247 feet of frieze from the Parthenon. Furthermore, it is believed that Elgin took around half of what was still standing of the Parthenon at that time.

Elgin shipped his loot to England and in 1816 he sold the marble statues for £35,000 - nowhere near its estimated market value; while to Greece, they are a priceless piece of the country's culture.

Eventually, they were acquired by the British Museum in London. However, even back in the early 1800s, the legitimacy over "ownership" of the marbles was controversial. Only after a Parliamentary Select Committee debated the legality of Elgin's ownership, where Elgin argued that the sculptures would be better cared for in Britain than in Greece, did the museum finally take possession of the Parthenon antiquities.

The marble sculptures date back over 2,500 years and were first created in honor of the Greek goddess, Athena.

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UNESCO Urges Return of Parthenon Marbles to Greece

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The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has made a momentous decision to urge the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum, according to a statement from Greece's Culture Minister on Thursday.

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A survey conducted in the UK in 2019/2020 revealed parameters related to museum visits, including: Reasons for visiting museums, frequency of visits by individuals, age groups and ethnic groups.
Moreover this study revealed that 20% of respondents are not visiting museums due to health issues or disability, and financial reasons.

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Ethics and zoological collections: Kill and collect versus the presentation of extinct or exotic species

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What defines a cultural object? Is the mere shape respective image defining or also the material(s) it is made of (e.g. stone, wood, textiles etc.)? Can technical details be captured  in digital visualizations of cultural artefacts? Does a 3D-scan authentically depict an artefact?

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Virtual museum tours have gained increasing popularity in the past years, allowing users to access and "experience" the collections 24/7 and from any place. Google Arts and Culture is systematically starting to establish a domain in this field, see  e.g. a tour through the Pergamon Museum. But can a virtual museum visit replace a physical visit?

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"Making collections of objects is a universal human practice. Collections were made long before there were museums. The concept of the museum was developed from the association of objects and learning at the Temple of The Muses of ancient Alexandria. Museums have evolved from the private Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, which were open only to a few, into modern institutions with primarily educational functions that both reflect and shape human society." (Simmons, 2017)
Access paper here

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From the late 16th to 19th century, when only a few European museums were yet founded, young aristocrats or members of the upper class made trips through Europe, often accompanied by savants. The so-called "Grand Tour" promoted education in classical art and architecture, as well as Greek and Latin literature.

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The Grand Tour was the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a tutor or family member) when they had come of age (about…

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Colonialism, Otherness and Politics of Museums in Popular Culture

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Colonialism, Otherness and Politics of Museums in Popular Culture

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Marvel's hugely popular movie Black Panther (2018) manages to encapsulate "condescending treatment of a museum visitor of color, a discussion of questionable acquisition practices, and the self-assured yet misinformed retelling of cultural narratives" in just one scene.
Read the full article: HyperAllergic.com

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Black Panther: Killmonger's Brazen Heist [CLIP] | TNT

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When something is virtual, is it actually accessible for everyone?

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When something is virtual, is it actually accessible for everyone?

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In September 2021, Statista recorded that 59.5% of the global population are active internet users worldwide. Of this total 92.6% accessed the internet via mobile phones.

Living in a country that has access to a stable internet connection without internet censorship or significant government control can create a misconception that these circumstances are applicable globally. Additionally, factors such as working infrastructure, financial privilege of owning a working mobile phone or a computer, and linguistic barriers play a role in what's accessible and to whom.

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November 2021: France returns 26 treasures looted from Benin

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November 2021: France returns 26 treasures looted from Benin

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After passing a bill in 2020 that allowed France to return cultural artifacts to country's former colonial territories in Benin and in Senegal, a major review of Quai Branly museum's collection was started to identify works believed to have been acquired through violence or coercion. In November 2021, France handed back 26 treasures that were looted from Benin. President of Benin Patrice Talon sees this as a first step over in large restitution process and comments that this isn't just about the restoration of artwork, it's about Benin regaining some of its soul back.
Read the full article:  Al Jazeera

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France returns 26 treasures looted from Benin

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Benin's President Talon travelled to Paris to bring home the artefacts that were stolen by French forces 130 years ago.

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Which objects do museum collections showcase online? The most prestigious ones or artefacts representing various cultures? "The Museum of the World" by the British Museum is an excellent example of a balanced, cross-cultural and inclusive digital presentation of exhibits.

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The British Museum's remarkable collection spans over two million years of human history and culture. Over 6 million visitors every year experience the collection, including world-famous objects such as the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures, and Egyptian mummies.
Discover our interactive experience The Museum of the World

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British Museum, London, United Kingdom - Google Arts & Culture

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The British Museum's remarkable collection spans over two million years of human history and culture. Over 6 million visitors every year experience the col...

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The role of scientific research departments in museums and invasive sampling: Do museum objects need to be preserved in their state of recovery? Or can (micro)invasive techniques be applied to selected objects (e.g. human bones and teeth for C14-dating; provenance determination of ceramic objects etc.)?
Links of interest:
Department of Scientific Research, British Museum
Sampling human remains

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Are museums perceived as cool by young people?
Following the release of a music video by Beyoncé and Jay-Z shot in the Louvre, a 25% increase in visitors has been noted. Read article here

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Can digitization help to decolonize collections?

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Can digitization help to decolonize collections?

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In the Episode 41: Digitization is not neutral of Museopunks podcast, Suse Anderson and Ed Rodley discuss the complexities of digital culture heritage with guests dr. Andrea Wallace and dr. Mathilde Pavis.

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Michel Foucault (1926-1984): power is everywhere and in constant negotiation. Power is recreated through knowledge and conceptualized through language. Museums are a source of power in society, and they produce knowledge by filtering what’s conserved and accessible. His power-knowledge discourse plays a notable role in critical museology studies.

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In the discussion about colonialism and eurocentrism of Western museums, questions such as

which items are kept in collections

which items are exhibited

what sort of narrative these items construct

who has access to museum space

are curators aware of their bias

who owns the items/donates to collections

how are museums funded

are worth noting for.

"Decolonisation is not simply the relocation of a statue or an object; it is a long-term process that seeks to recognise the integral role of empire in museums – from their creation to the present day."
Read more about decolonization of British museums: Museums Association: Decolonsing Museums

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Is digital transformation taking into account people with disabilities? Virtual exhibitions and collections should include:

visual descriptions of images for screen-reading software users

captions and audio-visual descriptions on videos

live-captioning on streamed performances

sign language interpretation

clear font choices for all materials

Moreover, ableism is an essential topic when discussing mass digitization. If the goal is to make material accessible for as many people as possible, digital transformation needs to be mindful of people with disabilities.

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Museum - space that shapes the reality of Western society   

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Museum - space that shapes the reality of Western society   

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“A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment."
Source: ICON

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Museums in the raise of authoritarian nationalism

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Museums in the raise of authoritarian nationalism

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The article describes how museums which's "stated missions are explicitly antipathetic to the values of populism and nationalism” are facing assaults or pressure to rewrite certain narratives or to fire non compliant curators under populist gouvernments.
Source

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The Art Newspaper - International art news and events

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Museums in the changing world order: the rise of authoritarian nationalism

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In the third part of a new series, Adrian Ellis looks at the cost of state support in illiberal democracies and the insidious erosion of institutional independence

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The changing role of museums in cultural heritage preservation

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The changing role of museums in cultural heritage preservation

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Definition of cultural Heritage: Cultural heritage is any part of a society’s past and present that it holds to be significant to pass on to next generations. It is mainly described as objects, places or practices which have been a tradition or a historical connection. Also new or recently altered artifacts or places might hold value for current generations and have the potential to become parts of cultural heritage.
Role of Museums: "Through their collections museums can encourage communities, groups and individuals to preserve their intangible cultural heritage. ... Social communities can use museums as cultural platforms to educate and communicate with their ancestors."
Crisis in museum's role of cultural heritage:
- changing audience
- different role (more educational than only collectional)
- active participation in communities
- technology (traditional and conservative past of museum)
Source