koven j. smith dot com

One of the best things that came out of this year’s Museums and the Web conference in Philly was an “unconference” session I organized around re-thinking and re-imagining what museum websites could/should be. It was a great conversation, with lots of interesting viewpoints. I hope to do a longer post about this in the next few days, but for now, here’s the video of a talk I gave at Ignite Smithsonian a few days ago that tries to get at the root of the problem I’m trying to identify. I only had five minutes, and was still pretty hoarse from MW, but I think the talk still does a decent job of laying out the problem. Would absolutely love input from others on this–it seems to be a topic that’s resonating with a lot of us!

Video streaming by Ustream

Koven Museum ignite smithsonian, museums, museums and the web, websites

Hey, kids! We’re hiring over here at the Denver Art Museum. We’re looking for an experienced Web Developer to help us completely re-design and re-imagine the Denver Art Museum’s web presence from the ground up. The Web Developer will collaborate with internal staff including technology developers, designers, editors, and other stakeholders to create appealing user interfaces and experiences, integrate relational databases, and implement effective, professional Web projects with an eye towards constantly improving the museum’s Web presence.

You can find more information about the job, and how to apply, here. Let’s rock it up, people.

Koven Museum denver art museum, jobs, Museum

I’ve never done a year-end wrap-up post here at kovenjsmith.com before, but this seems better than doing real work, so here we are. A few things that I liked (or at least noted) in 2010:

• Most important conversation I had in 2010: At Museums and the Web in Denver in April this year, Bruce Wyman had a long conversation that began with him saying, “you should really consider applying for the Director of Technology job at the Denver Art Museum.” And here we are!
  • Honorable Mention: The conversation I had with Madelyn five minutes after that, in which she said, somewhat tentatively, “yeah, I might consider moving to Colorado.”
• Best Concert: Tune-Yards at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Holy crap! She blew us all away with just a uke, a floor tom, her voice, and a bad-ass bass player.
  • Honorable Mention: Pearl and the Beard at Union Pool for the Farm to Folks fest. If you haven’t seen these peeps yet, you need to do that right now.
  • Honorable Mention Runner Up: The True Love Always reunion show at the Rock Shop. Seeing John Lindaman on stage always makes me smile.
• Best Moment With Madelyn: After driving three days (in separate vehicles stuffed with luggage and cats) out to Colorado, we stopped at the overlook on the Denver/Boulder Turnpike at Mile 42 to see Boulder Valley all lit up, just before driving to our new house for the first time. Yeah, that was the shit.
• Best Catfish Po-Boy Purchased From a Truck: This would be the catfish po-boy purchased while Nate Solas and I were on our way to see the bats fly out from under the Congress Bridge in Austin. The bats were somewhat underwhelming, but the po-boy was effing amazing.
• Favorite New Record of 2010: Riposte, by Buke and Gass. Goddamn. I just started laughing the first time I listened to this; I can’t remember just straight-up enjoying a record this much in quite some time.
• Favorite Record from 1969 that wasn’t released until 2010: That would be U.F.O., by Jim Sullivan. One of those rare re-discoveries latently touted as a “masterpiece” that might actually be just that. I love, love, love this record. There’s a fascinating backstory to this album as well (involving U.F.O.s and Jim Sullivan’s sudden unexplained disappearance); there’s a great interview with Light In the Attic’s Matt Sullivan on NPR about it here.
• Most Improbable Concert of 2010 that I actually saw in 2009: The inexplicable Jawbox reunion on the Jimmy Fallon show. My old bandmates and friends Mason and Megan somehow were able to swing tickets to the morning rehearsal, in which Jawbox rocked “Savory,” FF=66,”"Chinese Fork Tie,” and my all-time-favorite Jawbox song, “68.” Victor Samra ditched his duties at MoMA for the morning and walked a few blocks over to the studio to see the show with us. Trust me, you’ve never seen DC post-punk properly until you’ve seen it seated in a freezing-cold television studio.
• Strangest concert experience also involving Victor Samra: This would be the Iron Maiden/Dream Theater show at Madison Square Garden. Victor called me early the day of the concert offering an extra ticket. I am not, nor have I ever been, an Iron Maiden fan (though I admit a certain begrudging respect for the technical facilities of my fellow Berklee alums Dream Theater), but when Victor Samra calls, you’ve gotta accept the charges. We ended up in MSG’s own private box, drinking Heinekens and eating risotto with people we didn’t know while watching the show. I have officially now eaten risotto at an Iron Maiden show. How many of you fools out there can say that?
  • Honorable Mention: The Medications show in Brooklyn that ended with the sound guy attempting to turn off power to the stage mid-set, and Devin Ocampo almost killing said sound guy with his guitar. Punk rock! Sorta!
• Best Birthday Present: Madelyn gave me a bike for my birthday; it’s the first one I’ve owned (or ridden) since I was 12 years old. Now it is a vital component of my morning commute. Vroom.
• Best Quote I Totally Agree With While Recognizing That Doing So Makes Me Realize That I’m Officially Old(er): That would be this quote from former NEA Chairman Bill Ivey, on the “Hide/Seek” controversy at the Smithsonian: “A sense of proportion is required as it is not a good idea to convert every small offense into a fight over principles.” Ivey summed up in just a few words what it took me an entire post to express. These are words to live by in 2011, kids.
• Best Book I Read in 2010: Philip Jenkins’ Decade of Nightmares. Jenkins examines the decade 1975-1985 and looks at trends leading up to and following that decade, and manages to show how so much of what’s happening currently in America had its genesis in that decade. An excellent read.
  • Honorable Mention: Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, for much the same reasons as above.
• Best Technology That Changed My Damn Life: Rdio, hands down! I got tired of waiting for Spotify to make its way to our shores, and opted for the music-streaming service Rdio instead. Jeffrey Inscho has a great post about Rdio that expresses why it works. I’ve discovered so much amazing music thanks to this service, particularly since Rdio has made big strides to license all sorts of independent music and make it available. The entire Now Again, Light In the Attic, Warp, Teenbeat, and Merge catalogs available for one low monthly price? Yes! Rdio has also caused me to stop purchasing CDs entirely, and to start purchasing LPs again–the record-as-physical-artifact has real meaning thanks to Rdio.
• Best Moment In Which I Almost Peed In My Pants: That would be my best friend Don Undeen’s sudden emergence, complete with Mexican wrestling mask, as “El Museo” the day before Halloween at MCN 2010 in Austin. I wish that I had taken a picture of the force of nature that was El Museo; I haven’t laughed that hard in a loooong time.

Awright, I guess about wraps it up, y’all. Happy New Year–see you in 2011!

Koven appreciation

Usually I refrain from talking about museums on this blog except to discuss how museum policy/tradition/approach affects (or is affected by) technology, and I generally keep my political opinions to myself, so this is sort of a new thing for me. And this is probably just an overreaction to a relatively small issue. So please forgive this digression–I’ll get back to ranting about collections management systems or whatever soon enough.

However…

The recent firestorm surrounding Wayne Clough (secretary of the Smithsonian Institution)’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s work A Fire In My Belly from the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and the public response to that decision, has provoked me out of my comfortable treehouse. For those not familiar with what I’m talking about, I’ve collected a bunch of links related to the controversy here: http://bit.ly/fC7uD8. Of what I’ve read thus far, I would say that Tyler Green’s ongoing coverage at ARTINFO is the most balanced and researched.

I don’t think I need to point out that the Smithsonian’s decision was horribly wrongheaded (though I’ll do that briefly below), so I want to focus on one aspect of the response to this incident: the “Clough Must Go” movement that’s been emerging this week. This movement, which will have its coming-out party at a protest scheduled for this weekend in New York City, seeks to hold Wayne Clough personally responsible for the decision (which is good), and to then remove him from office as a result (which is bad).

This feels wrong to me. Here’s why.

The Smithsonian’s response to this issue was the wrong one.

So yeah, lemme get this out of the way first. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Smithsonian’s decision to withdraw Fire in My Belly from the show was absolutely wrong. Though this issue has undoubtedly caught the public’s consciousness, it would appear that the Smithsonian could still have kept the piece in the show with a fair minimum of public outcry. As the mysterious museumnerd put it pithily:

And the timing of this couldn’t be worse, in that it’s hard to not fit this into a much larger (and far more dispiriting) narrative in which the voices of reason and tolerance are being drowned out by a hysterical, intolerant vocal minority. Watching one of our most beloved public institutions cave to this craven minority is enough to make one resort to extreme measures for retribution. And this is exactly what’s happening with the “Dump Clough” movement.

But…

Removing Wayne Clough over this incident sets the worst kind of precedent.

It would be one thing if this were the last straw in a long line of capitulations to political pressure on Wayne Clough’s part. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The last time I recall the Twitterverse speaking his name, it was to praise him for the Smithsonian 2.0 initiative, which he sponsored. Maybe Clough has made a whole lot of terrible moves that compromise the integrity of the Smithsonian as a whole, but if so, I’m certainly not aware of them. Even while acknowledging that the decision to remove the piece was wrong, Jonathan Katz, one of the curators of the exhibition, still praised the NPG for putting the exhibition on in the first place.

So what we’re talking about here is essentially a “one strike and you’re out” policy when it comes to the leaders of our institutions. The precedent we’d be setting says, in effect, that your past performance is meaningless if you step over the line even once in a way we don’t approve of. I just can’t hang with that. While there are certain transgressions that a museum administrator (or his/her bosses) can commit that rise to the level of an Impeachable Offense (such as, oh, maybe selling artwork to pay your electric bills), I don’t believe that this is one of them.

As many of us who work in museums know, there is a painful shortage of museum directors in this world who actually “get it” (I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few). And of those, there’s an even tinier subset who are capable of guiding an institution as multi-faceted and unwieldy as the Smithsonian. If we’re going to remove someone who, generally speaking, seems to be doing a good job (as opposed to a ‘heckuva’ job), we’d better be doing it for the right reasons. Which brings me to my last point…

Dumping Clough only furthers the agenda of those who sought to remove the piece in the first place.

While I don’t doubt that a tiny minority of the visitors (emphasis on ‘tiny’) who have visited this show were truly offended by the work in question, it’s not for those people that this artificial “debate” has been created. What this is, in the end, is a political power play to establish authority over our country’s public institutions. And make no mistake, this issue IS a cynical one for a majority of the politicians, pundits, and commentators who are using it to their advantage. If it served Eric Cantor’s or John Boehner’s political ends to argue that the content of “Hide/Seek” wasn’t offensive enough for an organization supported with taxpayer money (even though this particular show was privately funded), that would be the case they’d make.

Removing Clough plays right into those people’s hands. It sends a message that if you can’t behead our precious institutions by stirring up bullshit controversy, we’re perfectly willing to finish the job ourselves. I fear the blowback that something like this would create. If the movement to dump Clough is successful, who do you think we’ll get in his place? Someone who’s willing to face debate head on, or someone who, when appointed by the Board of Regents, is willing to state for the record that there will be no more “controversial” exhibitions on his/her watch?

So, in short, let’s hold Clough accountable for this, certainly. But let’s find the right corrective action.

Koven Museum cloughMustGo, hide/seek, museumnerd, smithsonian

I posed a quick question on Twitter this morning (or this afternoon, for those of you east of the Rocky Mountains) that I feel needs a bit more clarification than I could squeeze into 140 characters, so I thought I’d log into the ol’ blog (for the first time since July) and do some old fashioned clarifyin’.

Anyway, the question I posed was this:

While it’s easy to think of all kinds of things that museums could do better (and indeed, since asking this question, I’ve received a bunch of excellent replies to this effect), what I’m really trying to get at here are identifying processes that we (perhaps grudgingly) accept as givens, but that we would never enact if we were just starting from scratch today.

A good example of this would be object (or accession) numbers. If museums didn’t already exist, each with their own unique object numbering schemas, I have a hard time imagining that we would take a similar approach to object identification. It seems far more likely that we’d do something along the lines of what Richard McCoy and I have been discussing for a while, something like an ISBN or PURL for works of art. This number would be forever permanent, and would move with the object when deaccessioned, purchased, loaned, or whatever. The reason that this is such an interesting example to me is that because unique objects don’t, in fact, have truly unique identifiers, using them in a linked data context is extraordinarily difficult. The main reason objects don’t have truly unique identifiers is because tradition dictates that objects have identifiers only within the context of an institution–once the object leaves that institution, the identifier no longer has meaning.

It’s just a small example (and a super-technical one, because that’s my thing), but the implications are huge in that we wouldn’t have to build big, complicated systems around compensating for the lack of unique IDs. I wonder what other processes there are like this in our world–how would we build museums differently, if we were just starting out now?

Koven Museum disruptive technology, linked data, Museum, Semantic Web