#his9808

[ahistoricalramblings]

Bringing the Visitor In: Putting People at the Centre of Conservation

                                                                                          September 20, 2020

A disclaimer: this post will talk about people who value objects that are held in museums. For the sake of this blog post not being 10,000 words, I will not discuss reparations. When I talk about people who value objects, I mean everyone who comes to visit the institution and see that object or site.

In my final semester of undergrad, I took a conservation course at the Royal Ontario Museum. Every week, one specialized conservator would teach the class about their specific material and then take us into their lab to see conservation firsthand. This has drastically affected how I understand objects and their roles in a larger curatorial effort. Every conservator we met had the same issue, curators don’t listen to them and conservators often have to ‘play the bad guy’ when advocating for objects. 

There are three major conservation theories: materials-based, values-based, and peoples-based. Materials-based is interventions based solely on the materials of the object or site. Values-based is about the value of the object or site as understood by conservators. Peoples-based focuses on the communities who value the object or site. Materials- and values-based conservators focus on loss aversion. Loss aversion is a conservation theory, and also an economic theory, that conservators will do anything to avoid the loss of the object’s materials or value. 

Curators’ work relies on the ability for visitors to interact with and see the objects or sites. So, how do you reconcile what’s best for the object or site with the curatorial and educational goals of the institution? While these two things may seem at odds, I would argue that they aren’t. Peoples-based conservation argues that value comes from the people who care about the object or site. This means value is gained rather than lost when visitors interact with the object or site. This theory, that value is created in a constant dialogue between people and objects or sites, counters loss aversion in modern conservation techniques. 

Peoples-based conservation is the key to solving the problem the curators and conservators face. Here’s how: peoples-based conservation is about valuing objects through the eyes of the visitor, so include them. I hate to say it’s that simple because it’s not, but it’s definitely the starting ground that most museums and heritage sites haven’t reached. 

What do I mean when I say include them? I mean tell people about conservation. Tell people why there can only be 30,000 visitors to a site daily, tell people what will happen if over the next ten years 1 million people touch the Mona Lisa, tell people why Egyptian mummies are kept inside zero-oxidation chambers. When we treat the questions of conservation as educational opportunities, they stop being roadblocks to curatorial work. Transparency about why and how objects are preserved isn’t going to make the roof cave in. 

This has actually been done. Pompeii is a city in Italy that was covered in ash in 79 CE following a volcanic eruption. Today it is a very popular Italian tourist site, surpassed only by the Palatine Hill. The site allows visitors to engage with an ancient Roman town in which wall paintings, floor mosaics, and other decorative features survive in large. The problem is, like with all historic sites, visitors cause damage; particularly they damage the floors they walk on. Conservation staff at Pompeii have solved this problem incredibly. There are now elevated glass floors over some of Pompeii’s mosaic flooring. These glass floors allow for two things to occur simultaneously. First, the visitors are informed about preservation efforts and actively participate in not damaging the floors. As part of the tour, guides tell visitors about conservation efforts and can talk about why the glass floors assist in conservation. And second, they get to see more of the floor!! This example shows how preservation and education are not diametrically opposed. 

This solution won’t solve everything, I’m aware of that. But if we stop thinking that educational and curatorial interests contradict conservation interests, we can see that they actually aren’t all that different. Museums should teach visitors about conservation practices because it helps them understand the work museums do and the value of objects.

   One last word: I wasn’t going to spell this out explicitly, but I feel like it might be glossed over. Conservators need to be given the respect they deserve by curatorial and educational staff. I know it seems difficult, but it’s crucial that we meet them in the middle. We need to take this energy that says education can involve conservation and remind ourselves that conservators are not our enemies. Quite the opposite, their work is fundamental to everything else the museum does.  

Until then, stay savvy.

Still interested? Check out these articles: 

Clavir, Miriam. “Conservation and Cultural Significance.” In Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas, and Uncomfortable Truths edited by Alison Richmond and Alison Bracker, 139-149. Butterworth-Heinemann: 2009. 

Clavir, Miriam. Preserving what is valued: museums, conservation, and First Nations. Vancoiver: UBC Press, 2002. 

Holtorf, Cornelius. “Averting loss aversion in cultural heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 no. 4 (2014):  405-421. 

Osanna, Massimo and Enrico Rinaldi. “Access and Conservation at Pompeii: Strategies for Sustainable Co-existence.” Studies in Conservation 63 no. 51 (2018): 2503-5208.

Sully, Dean. “Conservation Theory and Practice: Materials, Values, and People in Heritage Conservation.” In The International Handbooks of Museum Studies edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy 293-314. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

[ahistoricalramblings]

Understanding Transitional Justice

                                                                                              October 13, 2020 

Last week Tim brought up my podcasting post at the beginning of class. He actually wanted to talk about transitional justice more than he wanted to talk about podcasting, something I was definitely okay with. Since then, I cannot stop thinking about it. A fair warning: this is absurdly long, like way too long, but I’m obsessed with these questions and have been struggling to cut myself off. In all honesty I wanted this to be about 1000 words longer. Transitional justice is one of those topics that has so many unanswerable questions that you fall down a rabbit hole all the time. 

For those reading who aren’t in the class, Tim had asked my opinion on the comments of a French public historian at a conference in 2017 in Bogotá, Columbia. This man had said that following WWII France chose to consign the actions of the Germans and the collaborators to oblivion. They chose to let these issues rest for a couple decades and pick them back up when the wounds had scabbed over. I should be clear, the Frenchman is not the only person to hold this belief, not by a long shot. Individuals, often individuals in power, in every country facing questions of transitional justice have advocated for some form of forgetting. 

This view of transitional justice is outdated and it ignores so much of what transitional justice is. 

Transitional justice is not about criminal justice. Or at least, not entirely. It can certainly be about holding perpetrators accountable for crimes through the legal system; but often that is largely impossible. Here are some examples: in Chile, the former dictator was still head of the military and had threatened attack if anyone was tried; in Rwanda, the number of perpetrators was so large that it overwhelmed the prison system; in South Africa, there was a controversial Amnesty for Truth law that gave perpetrators amnesty if they testified in court. In cases like Argentina, Germany, and Peru successful trials have brought down the very heads of the institutions that committed the crimes but have largely left low-ranking individuals alone. Legal justice is only a small portion of the larger discussion on transitional justice. 

So, what else is there? Well first I’m going to plug my podcast because who would I be if I didn’t? Listen here to hear me talk about an amazing memorial in Paine, Chile. 

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs), the creation of memorials and museums, and reparations are three of the biggest forms of non-legal transitional justice. TRCs are government funded commissions that use oral history and traditional research methods to uncover what happened. They create the state narrative and become the beacon for government work. 

Memorials and museums can be both private and public and can serve the state or serve the people. If you’re interested in this (which I imagine some of you might be) I have a good deal of knowledge on this part of transitional justice particularly in (can you guess?) Chile and also the former USSR, Germany, and Argentina. 

Finally, we have reparations. We might imagine reparations to be cheques handed out once or monthly or yearly to victims or victims’ families. And reparations can be cheques given to individuals, but they can also be sustained investment into infrastructure. This is particularly important when talking about traditionally underserved communities – for example the Mapuche in Chile or, oh would you look at that, Indigenous communities in Canada. This can be controversial because it brings up questions of who you consult about infrastructure changes, how you prioritize issues, and how you split funding (didn’t I tell you, there are tons of unanswerable questions in this field). 

Each of these three methods do not involve the legal system. Instead, they work to rebuild the social fabric of a country in the wake of devastation. They provide truth, memory, and restoration and they provide justice. We just need to reframe what justice means. 

When we think of transitional justice as criminal justice, we imagine the black and white world of a judicial verdict. We imagine that transitional justice will solve everything and make the world whole again. It won’t. It can’t. It never will. Massive human rights violations are irreversible, they tear through lives and communities, social structures and societal ideals. Instead, transitional justice is about holding systems accountable and reforming them; it’s not about the individual who committed the crime, but rather about the system that allowed, accepted, or authorized the crime. 

I really got lost on a tangent there but now you know a little more about what transitional justice looks like on the ground. 

Back to the Frenchman. His argument centres on the idea that talking about recent crimes only serves to re-traumatize victims. He’s not wrong in this idea but his solution is too encompassing. Instead of silence as a national policy, transitional justice allows for silence as a personal choice. All TRCs and trials are self-selected meaning the victim choses to tell their story. This isn’t a perfect solution, but it allows the victim the dignity of choice and the ability to put their own needs first. 

France is a unique case. They could say, “well it’s time to forget what the Germans did to us” (this ignores the roles of collaborators, but it still works). France as a country could project all of the crime onto an ‘other’, who were truly an other because they left. Again, we’re ignoring collaborators. Almost no other country has this option. In Rwanda, when the civil war and genocide subsided, no one left. The same can be said for South Africa, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Peru, Canada and the list could go on forever. So, we need transitional justice to mediate the relationship between the victims and perpetrators as they co-exist in a single society. 

The 1990 National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report in Chile explains the need for transitional justice quite well. In the introduction, they wrote “although the truth cannot really in itself dispense justice, it does put an end to many a continued injustice – it does not bring the dead back to life, but it brings them out from silence: for the families of the ‘disappeared,’ the truth about their fate would mean, at last, the end to an anguishing, endless search.” (The National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report, “Introduction,” 14.) 

I hope my ramblings on transitional justice have been informative. It’s not perfect, it’s not black and white, but it’s necessary. There is no healing in silence for society, that is an individual choice. Society is not allowed that privilege as the systems that allowed the violence must be held accountable for that violence.

Next week is undecided. Let me know if you have any suggestions for what I write about. 

Until then, stay savvy. 

[ahistoricalramblings]

The Changing Landscape of Museums

                                                                                            October 25, 2020

Before you read this, I recommend you watch Marvel’s Black Panther (for the purpose of this post but more importantly because it’s the best movie Marvel has ever released) or at least the scene in question and this TedTalk by Hannah Mason-Macklin. 

I’ve spent many hours of my life thinking about repatriation, I’m sure that came through in my post about the Elgin Marbles. I’ve also spent a great deal of time thinking about my own role in museums as colonial institutions. I’m an optimist and I truly believe that museums can transform. Transform into what exactly has never been clear. In part, because I’m not sure that I, a white cis-het female, have the right to decide. So instead, I’m going to talk about the amazing points Mason-Macklin brings up and think about how we can begin to talk about the future of museums.

I’m going to start by talking a bit about the way this scene sets up the movie. Because Black Panther, again an amazing movie, has a lot of really important subtext. Eric Stevens, also known as Killmonger or by his Wakandan name N’Jadaka, is the villain of the movie. Or at least, he’s the closest thing the movie has to a villain. Killmonger, as his name suggests, is not opposed to violence which is why viewers are less inclined to support him. But his argument is actually valid and the movie ends (spoiler alert!) with the partial adoption of his views. 

That’s part of the reason this scene is so important to me. The actual action of the scene barely matters to the plot. It’s really there to set up Killmonger’s psychology and beliefs. His anger towards colonial states and the legacy of colonialism is what drives his plot. He wants to give the power back to Black Americans and give them a chance reclaim their power. This scene is a perfect opener to that belief. Because he has the power to reclaim what is rightfully his.

  This is important because in reality no one has this power. A colonial institution can possess something that rightfully belongs to you and your people and has the power to educate people about it incorrectly. And there’s very little accountability in that incorrectness. Museums are so powerful that they can incorrectly label an object and not listen to people when they tell them its incorrect. I wanted to open with this tangent about Black Panther generally before delving into what Mason-Macklin argues because I love this scene as the set up for the larger thesis of the movie. 

Moving on to the content of the TedTalk. To me, the most important part of Mason-Macklin’s talk is about people. If you read my post about conservation you know that this is the hill I’ve chose to die on: the role of regular people in museums. I want them to have influence and say and purpose and I know that invites issues of critical thinking and popular history but it’s so important. If we exclude people from public narratives of history, how is that any better than our academic counterparts? 

Mason-Macklin uses the Black Panther clip to talk about two different power-plays: knowledge and space. The knowledge power-play is about Western society prizing academic knowledge above all else. That’s part of the colonial heritage of museums. That we treat oral knowledge, cultural knowledge, as lesser because it doesn’t come from the colonial institutions of universities. A big part of decolonizing museums is going to have to be recognizing that and moving away from it. The museum expert shows disbelief at Killmonger’s statement that the artifact is from Wakanda. She immediately gets defensive and would have, had he not poisoned her drink, forced him out of the museum. 

Museums as a tool for social healing is not necessarily a new idea. Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports around the world have recommended the creation of sites of memory and museums for decades. But this is different because instead of new museums being built, this is about museums changing. And that they will have to change. Mason-Macklin’s point is so good because she helps you think about the ways in which current museums can work within themselves to be better. 

In a perfect world, repatriation would be the first step. But this is not a perfect world. And curators, educators, and regular museum staff aren’t usually the ones who make those decisions. And until the next generation can get into those positions of power, we will have to work with what we’ve got. Mason-Macklin shows you a way forward: using the tools you have to combat traditional narratives and asking yourself why those narratives exist. 

The message here is about transparency and inclusion. It’s about recognizing the flaws of colonial institutions and working with the community against those flaws. This is not the perfect solution but obsession with perfection is what stops museums and so-called experts from doing anything. 

Invite the people in. It’s their museum, you just work at it. 

Next week, we will probably deep dive in photography. And then the week after, we are going to do it again. 

Until then, stay savvy, 

[ahistoricalramblings]

Podcasting Woes

                                                                                         September 27, 2020

I’ve been working on my podcast for HIS9808 this weekend, understandably as its due on Thursday. The topic is Chilean memorials about the Pinochet dictatorship. I niche topic, I’m aware, but I topic I deeply love and could talk about for hours. I didn’t do an undergraduate thesis, but I did write my longest fourth year paper on this topic, so it’s the closest thing I have to speciality area.

I apologize in advance about the rambling nature of this post. This is basically just me reflecting on the different things I’ve found difficult in this assignment. I admittedly have actually already recorded the podcast at the time of posting this, but I did write most of this before I recorded. 

I’m really passionate about transitional justice. At UofT, History Specialists take 3 fourth year seminars. I loved all three of my seminars, but Transitional Justice and Historical Memory in Latin America was my very favourite. Not only did it cover my favourite topic, memory of violence, but the class itself was made up of really engaged students. We had some of the coolest debates about a wide variety of things. One of our earliest debates was about the role of memorials in collective memory of human rights abuses.  

We read Janet Kamien’s “Sites of Memory: Argentina” about Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This sparked a long drawn out conversation about whether memorials are useful to collective memory. Kamien recalls overhearing two men talking and misinterpreting the memorial. While Kamien herself argues that this misinterpretation isn’t too important, my class latched onto the questions of whether memorials are too vague to help in transitional justice. 

I tell you this because I’m in the process of making a podcast about this very topic: the role of memorials in collective memory and transitional justice. Now we come to the problem I’m having: distilling this larger issue into a podcast that doesn’t lull my audience to sleep. I’m deeply interested in this topic, but I’m aware that not everyone is. So, I’m trying to figure out the best way to introduce a complex historical conversation – how memorials work within the larger world of transitional justice – alongside deep contextualize issues and make it at least partly entertaining. 

I’m also struggling with contextualizing Chilean history. This realization was crazy to me when. I had sat down to read the script I’d written and realized that I basically skipped over the important information about the human rights abuses in Chile. I’ve always contextualized my essays but I’ve always written for an audience that is deeply involved in the topic. I’ve never had to explain what the concentration camp system looked like or the deep economic issues at play. And then add on to it, I’m trying to explain it in a succinct way that doesn’t bore my listeners. 

I should be clear, I love this issue! This issue feels like the kind of issue real public historians encounter in their real jobs. And has left me asking questions about what I think matters most to know and to convey big historical narratives in a concise way. 

The last thing I’m going to lament about is the actual technical work of podcasting. I’m doing this podcast by myself, as in I’m the only voice for 15 minutes. So, I’m really trying to figure out how to make the audio interesting. I’ve tried looking to my favourite podcasts for examples but of course, they have sound engineers whose whole job is tailoring music to the dialogue and I’m trying to work with royalty free music download from YouTube. I persist. I will eventually figure out the best way to include nice background music and fade in and out. I have almost a week, it’ll be fine.

Next week we are going to talk all things Elgin Marbles. Get ready, it’ll be quite something. 

Until then, stay savvy. 

[ahistoricalramblings]

A Nightmare of My Own Creation: Learning how to code during a pandemic

As I am sure many of you know, I have spent the last two months learning how to code. I thought I would reflect on the experience here for a moment and discuss the ins and outs of learning to code.

I won’t go into the nitty-gritty that I already covered in my first blog post. Instead, I want to talk about the experience overall (and I guess argue that it was worth it). I also wanted to take a moment to talk about Strawberry Thief because I didn’t get to during my presentation. 

Strawberry Thief is one of William Morris’ most famous and most expensive pieces. It’s an 1883 textile print made using the indigo discharge method. This method was time consuming (it took three days) and incredibly expensive. This made it a great piece for me to use in an undergrad paper arguing that despite what some scholars think, Morris was a true socialist, not just one on paper. 

You’re probably wondering how making luxury goods could possibly classify Morris as a true socialist. I won’t go into it too much (although ask me if you want more) but essentially Morris used his art as a visual argument for socialism and weaved his ideas into the very fabric of the piece. You’ve heard the saying “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” but I think we can extend that further and argue “there’s no ethical creation under capitalism”. Morris was constrained by the economic realities of the Victorian Britain. His goods were luxury because he could not compete with factory goods that were badly made by underpaid workers. 

Okay, back to the coding discussion. Here’s a timeline for you (I’ll insert some direct quotes from the log I kept):

October 15th: Began to try and code, failed miserably, couldn’t embed an image to save my life. 

October 16th: “Coding is hard ): rip to my sanity”

October 24th: “Facetimed Mark for an hour and learned lots” Thank god for my brother. 

October 25th: I gave up on creating a clickable image. 

October 30th: Finally got a click to play a video. Highlight of the log: “This is what 45 minutes of work looks like… 10 lines of code.” 

November 2nd: “Somehow I got it to work??? This is the entire code:” I inserted every line of code in case I lost something. 

November 7th: “Mark just spent two hours on the phone with me teaching me code.” I’ll say it again, thank god for my brother. 

Last log entry on November 9th: “Oh my god – a miracle.” I inserted a video of it working. 

On November 9th, I got the side navigation test to work. I had only inserted one video but when I clicked background on the side nav, the image disappeared and the video played with a popup. From there, I just had to write a bunch more code that made it work with every side nav option.

After November 9th I stopped the log as things began happening much more quickly. I like this because it demonstrates how steep the learning curve is and then the sudden moment in which everything begins working. That isn’t to say nothing happened. If anything, more things happened between November 9th and December 3rd. But they happened so fast that recording them was difficult. In a single day, I went from having no ‘maps’ version, to having it work completely. 

So now onto the big question of what I learned from this.

Was it worth it? Yes. I am very proud of the website and I cannot wait to flex it in interviews. 

Could I have made it easier on myself? Maybe… I like a good challenge. When I look back, I’m not overconcerned that I made any fatal errors early on. As Tim said on November 26, coding isn’t something that you teach, you learn by doing and by failing. 

Should you do it? The short answer is: yes, you should. I’m not saying every person needs to learn how to code. But I am saying it gave me a better understanding of web design and hopefully one day, I can actually contribute to discussions on website creation at a museum. Try it out, even if you just make a hello world sit and insert a picture. Visual Studio Code is free and it’s so easy (it even auto-populates!).  

Thanks for reading me ramble about all the things I didn’t manage to say in my presentation. 

I will probably continue to post, so keep your eyes peeled for more niche historical ramblings. 

Until then, stay savvy. 

[ahistoricalramblings]

Museums and Social Media

                                                                                    November 29, 2020 

This semester I’ve been working as the Digital Collections Promotion Intern at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology (MOA). My job is essentially to create content to promote the behind the scenes work we do at MOA.  I really enjoy my job and will be sad to finish up in December, but it’s got me thinking about museums and social media more generally. 

Most museums aren’t the Louvre with 4.5 million followers. Don’t get me wrong, there are many famous or semi-famous museums that have large followings on social media (for the sake of this post let’s say over 100,000 is large). But what about the rest of us? What do you do when a museum has 20,000 or 2000 or 200 followers? 

The first thing I want to discuss is how museums (and all business really) should understand social media. Most people think of social media as a promotional tool—and it is, don’t get me wrong—but imagining a social media account that only promotes the upcoming exhibitions, gift shop items, or even behind the scenes work leaves a lot to be desired for me. To me, social media is about creating a community.

The community need not be large. In all honesty, the larger the community, the more likely it is to one day implode. You don’t want to go viral. Instead, you want to build some sort of community that appreciates whatever it is your museum is about. 

But how do you do it? Don’t take social media growth advice from me, my best friends’ little sister has more Instagram followers than I do. I’m still going to give the advice because what kind of blog post would it be otherwise? 

In my mind, engagement is key. Because having a bunch of people follow you is great and all but if only two people comment on or reply to posts, what is your social media actually doing for you? Not a lot. Calls to actions are the cornerstone of engagement. This means asking questions in captions, doing polls, or asking for advice or input. All of these things help your followers feel like following you is more than just watching some institution online; it feels like being part of something bigger that extends beyond just you or your institution. The key here is centering this content around a bigger purpose. Ask yourself: what is the museum’s mandate? What are we striving to do? And then build the community around those ideas. 

You have to imagine your social media as separate from your brick-and-mortar building. Your social media is the online community you build around the ideas and ideals of your museum (or whatever it is you do). When you treat social media platforms as one-way lecture halls instead of seminar rooms, you lose valuable opportunities to engage with your audience. I’m not saying you have to respond to every dm, I’m saying that if you let them, people will tell you what they want to hear. 

Another rather important thing is understanding the medium. Not all social media platforms are created equal. People who love Twitter are very different from people who love Instagram. This isn’t to say that people only use one social platform, but rather that the intentions of each platform are vastly different and that your posts should reflect that. 

Here’s the best example I can give: TikTok. Now, don’t come for me about loving TikTok, it’s a great platform. But the key to TikTok is that (as I saw once in a TikTok) it’s “one big inside joke”. The beauty of TikTok is that it’s a referential platform. It’s a platform based on creating new videos with old audio. And so, to thrive on TikTok, you need to actually use TikTok. You need to understand the original audio and then make your own spin on the audio. 

I say this because 99% of institutions are failing at TikTok. They just don’t get it.

  I would be wrong to say that an incoming generation of museum professional will fix this issue. As we discussed way back in the first class, we are not digital natives. Being young does not mean you are a tech genius I think like all things, some institutions will get better, others will drag along only posting about their collections.

I’m sorry this blog post didn’t come to a better conclusion. 

What will we discuss next week? Only time will tell. 

Until then, stay savvy.

[ahistoricalramblings]

I enjoy watching this and I thought some of you might too. Also going to post my bird flying drawing because it’s nice too. 

context: This is William Morris’s Strawberry Thief which I am using to create an interactive website. 

[ahistoricalramblings]

Take a photo, it’ll last longer

                                                                                          November 15, 2020

The long delayed post on photography is finally here. 

I recently watched this Vox video about the role of photography in museums and we also discussed some of these ideas in HIS9800 this week. 

I have been known to criticize ‘Instagram traps.’ A while ago in class I mentioned my dislike of the drive-in Van Gogh exhibit. At the time I think it seemed like I was criticizing people for going there and taking cool Instagram photos. I was not. Or at least, I didn’t mean to. 

I love photography, I love Instagram, and I love getting cool photos in museums, galleries, and historic sites. I’ve sprinkled my all-time favourite photos I’ve taken at such places throughout this post as proof. My problem with exhibitions like the Van Gogh Drive-in is that the people running them miss out on an amazing opportunity for a more immersive (and educational) experience. I can’t fault people for choosing not to learn when they go to a museum or gallery or whatever, but I can fault curators for choosing to not even give visitors the choice to learn. 

When we talked about this in class, Victoria had said that maybe an app people could’ve downloaded before they went would’ve helped. This is a great idea, not only because an app would allow for interactive portions but also because then people could just choose what they read or listened to. Another idea would be to use the radios in peoples’ cars—similar to how a drive in move theatre works. Those two options came out of less than 10 minutes of consideration. Exhibitions take years to plan, there was plenty of time to think about how to include didactic information beyond wall text, they just chose not to. 

But the Van Gogh exhibition is different from what Vox is talking about. Because Van Gogh is a well-known artist from an established historical movement. He is firmly in a historical discussion where didactic information is expected. The Museum of Ice Cream could give historical or scientific background, but as a subject it is less tied to traditional academic disciplines (let’s save the question of if the Museum of Ice Cream is a museum to another day, shall we?). And so, unlike the Van Gogh exhibition, I have less of an issue with the lack didactic information. I think they should still do it, but it feels less like a failure on the part of the curators to choose not to. 

I’m turning to the photography portion of this because it’s the part I find most compelling. First, I want to say that in my life I have gone to many a museum that have not allowed photography and I didn’t feel like I somehow got more out of those experiences. If anything, as time passes, I feel like I got less. 

Let’s keep the Van Gogh theme going. I was in Amsterdam in the fall of 2018 and I went to the Van Gogh Museum. The museum houses most of the family collection that was inherited after Vincent’s death. Notably, it doesn’t have Starry Night (it’s in the MOMA) which I know throws people for a loop all the time. It also doesn’t have my favourite Van Gogh Starry Night over the Rhone (it’s in the Musée d’Orsay). 

The museum was great. It had lots of interactive, digital stations using tablets and other devices. Because it’s the family collection, Theo, his brother, comes up a lot and I’m pretty sure there was a whole tablet dedicated to looking at the letters between the brothers. I say pretty sure because I actually don’t remember a lot about the museum. Here’s where it ties back to the original content of the post – the Van Gogh Museum doesn’t allow photography. And so, two years later, I remember very little of the experience and I have no photos to jog my memory of the museum.

This brings us to the arguably more interesting argument of the Vox piece, how photography affects our experience. But I guess I immediately need to make the distinction between taking photos and taking photos for social media. I think most people don’t think there’s much of a distinction between these things, but I do. I take a lot of photos; photography is a hobby mine – like a deep hobby, like an I own a film camera hobby. 

When you take a photo with the intention of posting it online, it becomes kind of like an assignment. You become more focused on how it looks, what others will think of it, (for some) how many likes it will get. I will say, these questions don’t bother everyone, just people who curate their feeds—meaning people who post well-crafted, edited photos. But this obsession with crafting the perfect photo can make an experience less enjoyable. The anxiety over getting the photo right can cloud the rest of the experience in your memory. This is what Vox is concerned about. 

You can play a game with yourself if you want. Look at all the photos included in this post and try and decide which were taken for social media and which were taken on a whim. It’s clear to me but I guess that’s a given. 

But some studies (here and here) have argued that you enjoy experiences more and remember them better when you take photos. And I think this is also true. Particularly when you’re not worried about capturing the perfect image but rather interested in taking photos of things you think are cool or art that you like. And I don’t think these two things (the stress of obsessing over the perfect photo and remembering more because you took photos) are mutually exclusive. 

What I’m trying to say is that I think Vox made this conversation a little too one-dimensional for me. I totally relate to wanting to take a nice photo and just not getting it—that’s what creative ruts are. But having photographs of an experience allows you to walk down memory lane in a more immersive way. I can barely remember the Van Gogh Museum because I have nothing to trigger memories. I don’t think this is a major factor in the question of photography in museums, but I do think some museum purest might try to argue that allowing photography detracts from the visitor experience generally. And I simply think that’s untrue. Taking photographs at a museum will likely help you remember it more and it gives you a chance to flex those artistic muscles (something museums and, more importantly, galleries really need to encourage more). 

Lastly, I want to address the idea of instagrammable spots in regular exhibitions. This is the idea of making specific areas of an exhibition photogenic, Vox uses the Yayoi Kusama example (which if you have a keen eye you’ll know I’ve been to). At the end of the exhibit there is an interactive component that, because you actually go inside it, is really photogenic. 

I think these spots are a great idea. Having them as part of regular exhibitions is basically free advertising. People will see it on their feeds, want to take a similar picture, and buy tickets. And if, in doing this, you offer them an opportunity (which they can take or leave) to learn, that’s the Goldilocks spot for me.

I definitely think museums allowing photography is the move forward is all capacities. Limiting flash is a given for conservation efforts but I think there is a net positive outcome from allowing photography and including more interactive, photograph friendly portions of an exhibit. 

Next week we tackle the history of photography and dare I say it authenticity. I know, I’m scared too. 

Until then, stay savvy.