YAHOO! "AMERICAN FURNITURE / GOOGLED" DEBUTS AT MAM

(above: A visitor enters the American Furniture / Googled show at the Milwaukee Art Museum)

CHIPSTONE FOUNDATION WORKS ON CHALLENGE OF LABELING ART IN DIGITAL AGE
Giving the Public a Say on what Art Says to Them
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube Next?
Milwaukee in Exhibition Vanguard with New Show

Special to the Readers of Milwaukeeworld.com

By Michael Horne

An experimental exhibit called "American Furniture / Googled" opened July 9th, 2009 at the Decorative Arts Gallery of The Milwaukee Art Museum.
In an era littered with so-called "blockbuster exhibitions," this modest survey of a dozen 19th-century American pieces may be a real groundbreaker.
At least that's the hope of the Chipstone Foundation, and show curator Mel Buchanan.

The "experimental" part of the exhibition refers to the use of video screens filled with Google search results next to each piece. They replace the traditional text boxes that are as much a commonplace of the world's galleries as are picture frames and sculpture bases.
Each piece is accompanied by a vertical screen listing basic information about the work, an image, and a handful of links for further research. One link, say, might be to an auction record, showing the item had been sold for $15,000. If you Google around a little further, on the computers provided, the viewer might discover that the purchaser was the Chipstone Foundation itself. Other links are to provenance, articles about the decorative arts objects or their makers and other useful data.
Perhaps the viewer will Google up a result that had escaped the attention of scholars. Perhaps he or she might Twitter to a friend who owns a similar piece. Or put a link to the show on his or her Facebook page. Who knows?
The Google-inspired project is part of Chipstone's larger mission of using 21st century technology to promote and enhance the museum-going experience.
The Fox Point foundation's special relationship with the art museum puts local gallery goers in the forefront of experimental exhibitions, such as this one.
Along the way we may be able to shatter conceits of current museum best practices and possibly interject the loud, brash voice of the public into the hushed conversations of cultural elites.

CHIPSTONE, MUSEUM, UW IN VANGUARD OF DIGITAL COLLECTIONS

Beginning in 2003, Chipstone financed the pioneering Digital Record for the Decorative Arts and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin Libraries. The database receives 750,000 10-minute or longer visits annually, according to Jon Prown, the Chipstone director and guiding force behind its innovations, including this show. Others include plasma screen video displays, which debuted back in 2001 when such devices cost real money, and experiments in using cellphone devices to enhance the museum-going experience. [Users can download material directly from the exhibited piece.]
Prown, who spent 13 years at Colonial Williamsburg, ultimately serving as Assistant Curator, gave an influential talk at the Williamsburg Antiques Forum in 1995 on "The New Connoisseurship," in which he asserted that any artifact has the potential to be a significant historical document.
This leads directly to the question of "How do we display and identify these objects?" The American Furniture / Googled show is part of Prown's continual quest to answer the question, which he restates as "How do we get people to relate to the museum experience?"

"GOOD, BETTER, BEST" BAD

For one thing, Prown does not think the "Good, Better, Best" aesthetic that dominated the decorative arts exhibition experience for 90 years suits this diverse age. Gone from the Milwaukee Art Museum's American Collections are the ossified "Period Rooms," which presumed to decorate a recreated space as it might have been on a given day in, say, 1776, with every corner filled with items of the most austere good taste and social pedigree.
These rooms are as "fictive" as a Hollywood set, Prown says, since they never existed as such in the functioning households of the time. Where is the mess and the shifting light through the windowpanes? Back then, as today, most folks lived in a jumble of old and new, of good, better, occasionally best and bad.

"THE HOLY TRINITY" NOT SO GOOD, EITHER

The New Connoisseurship also takes aim at the "Holy Trinity," as Prown calls the three audiences for whom most art exhibitions are curated. The trinity consists of

• Dealers
• Collectors
• Other curators
  

The museum-going public is an afterthought, pandered to in the jargon-riddled academic-speak labels that usually accompany pieces on exhibition.
These are the labels Prown hopes to replace with a more robust dialogue, including input from the general public.

American Furniture / Googled is a first step in establishing a framework for future exhibitions in the Google era. It should lead organically and incrementally to the use of social media to complete the museum experience and to enhance scholarship in the objects on display -- even if such scholarship does not come from scholars.
This, of course, is the Wikipedia conundrum. The show explicitly acknowledges that today's art historians make use of Wikipedia themselves -- if only as a jumping off point for further research.
Likewise, some of the finest art collections have made purchases from online auction sites like E-Bay or (gasp!) Craig's list, further democratizing the art process. Prown envisions the evolution of exhibitions like American Furniture / Googled to incorporate Twitter and Facebook posts. So, readers, head on down to the museum and start twittering about this interesting new show.
--Michael Horne
[Milwaukee Art Museum photographs by Andrew Whitcomb.]