“Real Change Comes from Within!”: Towards a Symbiosis of Human and Digital Guides in the Museum

Extensive research on mobile guides for museums has explored the potential of technology to offer some of the services that have been traditionally provided by human guides, including guiding visitors in the museum space, providing information about the exhibits, and using more advanced interpretative approaches such as digital storytelling and gamified techniques. However, the majority of these approaches either ignores or tries to substitute entirely the role of the human guide. In this work, we present a user study with 10 experienced tour guides, currently working in the museum of modern art of the Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation. Based on a three-phase procedure, the study is designed to empower professionals into envisaging their work in symbiosis with current technological developments. First, we attempt to identify existing challenges guides face and to capture their tacit knowledge in addressing emerging problems in guided tours. In the second and third stage, through a reflective and productive discussion, we employ a set of contemporary innovative digital applications as a starting point to elicit their views on their role in an envisaged symbiotic future of human-led hybrid digital experiences.

Aesthetics of Turntable Art

This article explores the transitional and liminal nature of the author's work and examines the diverse theoretical foundations that inform his creative practice. The particular work discussed here, Wow&Flutter, explores the intermedial relationships between “quotation,” “remediation” and “plunderphonics” within turntable art using acetate vinyl. This work was presented in the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and the National Concert Hall, Ireland (NCH), between 2014 and 2018.

Matisse, "The Moroccans": seeing For Yourself

A New York painter and freelance teaching artist describes an experience visiting Matisse’s painting “The Moroccans” at the Museum of Modern Art with a group of young people and their families. She describes her aesthetic education methods which include encouraging museum visitors to engage deeply with works of art by noticing, asking questions, and participating in group discussion. When the visitors’ conclusions about “The Moroccans” turn out to be at odds with the museum’s wall text, they question what they should believe—their own eyes or the museum’s official interpretation of this abstract work. Connecting this experience to John Dewey’s writing about the purpose of art and the power of the perceiver to activate an art object, the author reflects on the role of museums and the sometimes conflicting priorities of public engagement and scholarly authority.

Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse

The “exquisite corpse” in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller’s domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book’s construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA’s earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism—an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book’s construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book’s intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA’s earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum’s curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists.

Complex Relationships: A Materials Study of Édouard Vuillard’s Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist

Édouard Vuillard (1868–1949) is well known for his small atmospheric paintings, often portraying his own home and family as the subject matter. Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893) underwent at least one restoration treatment before being acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1934. The painting was treated again in 1954, but no analysis was carried out to understand the artist’s methods and materials at that time. To better understand the choices of Vuillard in Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist, a comprehensive suite of imaging and spectroscopic analyses was undertaken, including: XRR, UVF and IRR Photography, XRF, Raman spectroscopy and SERS, and µ-FTIR. Statistical analysis on the XRF data using MCR-ALS further revealed some of the intricacies of Vuillard’s technique and color choices, where a large number of pigments were used in designing this intimate composition, including lead white, zinc white, bone black, ochre, umber, vermilion, Geranium lake, red lead, ultramarine, Prussian blue, chrome yellow, chrome orange, zinc yellow, strontium yellow, cadmium yellow, and a chromium oxide green.

‘NATIONAL COLLECTIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART’: PROGRAMME OF THE MINISTER OF CULTURE AND NATIONAL HERITAGE TO FINANCE PURCHASES OF CONTEMPORARY ART WORKS IN 2011–2019 PART 1. HISTORY: FINANCING

The ‘National Collections of Contemporary Art’ Programme run by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage (MKiDN) in 2011–2019 constituted the most important since 1989 financing scheme for purchasing works of contemporary art to create and develop museum collections. Almost PLN 57 million from the MKiDN budget were allocated by means of a competition to purchasing works for such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MSN), Museum of Art in Lodz (MSŁ), Wroclaw Contemporary Museum (MNW), Museum of Contemporary Art in Cracow (MOCAK), or the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko (CRP). The programme in question and the one called ‘Signs of the Times’ that had preceded it were to fulfil the following overall goal: to create and develop contemporary art collections meant for the already existing museums in Poland, but particularly for newly-established autonomous museums of the 20th and 21st century. The analysis of respective editions of the programmes and financing of museums as part of their implementation confirms that the genuine purpose of the Ministry’s ‘National Contemporary Art Collections’ Programme has been fulfilled.

Reviving Alexander Calder’s Man-Eater with Pennants: A Technical Examination of the Original Paint Palette

Mat-Eater with Pennants, a rarely exhibited sculpture in Alexander Calder’s oeuvre, was commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and installed in 1945. To exhibit the large standing mobile in Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start (2021), the derelict sculpture had to be remediated; this initiated a collaborative investigation with conservation scientists, conservators, curators, and the Calder Foundation into the original paint colors hidden beneath layers of repaint. XRF analysis was carried out to elucidate the paints’ composition, followed by sampling for analysis to assess the paint stratigraphy and binders. Scrapings were analyzed by µ-FTIR and Raman spectroscopies; cross sections were examined with optical microscopy and analyzed with SEM-EDS. Analysis differentiated between the original paints, which contain Prussian blue, parachlor red, chrome yellow, and the many layers of overpaint, which contain titanium white, molybdate orange, a variety of β-Naphthol reds, red lead, and ultramarine. A model for Man-Eater, Mobile with 14 Flags, is also part of the museum’s collection, and was first considered as a point of reference for the original colors. Similar analysis, however, indicates that the maquette was painted after the Man-Eater was first installed, therefore is not representative of the original colors. In addition to investigating an early primary palette for Calder’s outdoor sculptures, this study helped develop the plan for the restoration of the original color scheme of Man-Eater.

The New York Digital Salon: A Memoir

This article traces the twenty-year history of the New York Digital Salon. Started in 1993 to provide an annual venue for digital art images in New York City, it quickly expanded into an international forum for exhibitions, panel discussions, lectures, screenings and a website. In addition to these events, we created a collection of videotaped panel discussions with well-known digital artists and curators from our 2002 Digital Art & Culture Symposium held at the Museum of Modern Art Theatre. From 1995-2002, the artwork was included, along with essays on digital art, in eight issues of Leonardo. A tenth exhibition was held during 2002 at the World Financial Center, along with over twenty events, panel discussions and lectures that were part of the Downtown Arts Festival. In 2013, we celebrated our twentieth anniversary with the “American Algorists: Linear Sublime,” exhibition and catalog featuring Jean Pierre Hebert, Manfred Mohr, Michael Noll, Roman Verostko and Mark Wilson.

John Beasly Greene

This thesis focuses on the life and work of John Beasly Greene, photographer, archaeologist and Egyptologist. I describe Greene's early life, his training in photography with Gustave Le Gray in 1852, his two trips to Egypt in 1853 - 1854 and 1855, his trip to Algeria in 1855 - 1856 and his death in November 1856. I also consider the process and printing of his Egyptian negatives, their number and current location, and whether his book "Le Nil. Monuments - Paysages, Explorations Photographiques Par J.B. Green" (sic) was ever published. In my research I discovered that four separate images of Algeria in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York constitute two panoramas.