Articles

On Saturday 18 May  the European Museum Forum will be celebrating International Museum Day in a special session dedicated to this year's theme: Museums (memory + creativity) = social change. Speakers from the European Museum Forum, Best in Heritage, ICOM, Museum of Liverpool and the ground-breaking eCultValue EU project will look at the importance of cultural heritage and the roles museums play in providing access to culture and their increasingly important role of social responsibility.

Kim Inseon has been working for more than 15 years now in the Korean Art Scene and is specialized in Visual Arts. Inseon Kim worked for LOOP, an alternative art space after studying art history in New York. She got her experience from working in many galleries and curating the Busan Biennale, previously called PICAF – Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival. Here Inseon Kim intended to present contemporary art in a more accessible way to the general public. Before opening her own alternative space and working as an art consultant for collectors, private companies and the Korean government, Inseon Kim worked in the Daelim Contemporary Art Museum, which is to promote excellence and achievement in the artistic community of the Seoul City area.

 

More than a year now, that Inseon Kim is directing her own space which provides a field for young artists and their development. She wants to allow the shift of the artist´s focus from commercial driven activities to purely experimental ones. In her opinion especially emerging artists strike to set high prices on their works and exhibit in commercial galleries to become attractive to collectors. However, at the same time young artists fear the commercialization of their art work as well as the limitation the art market sets them. Willing n Dealing therefore does not only offer consultancy but also a space to experiment with art and develop artistic careers.

This study draws on the experiential approach and has two main goals: to explore the different dimensions of the museum experience regardless of whether it is mediated by mediation devices (e.g., audio guides, interactive terminals, SmartPhones, tablets, augmented reality), and to identify the impact of such devices on visitors’ behavioural intentions. The authors conduct a qualitative and exploratory investigation to address the following questions: Does the development of such devices affect both experience dimensions and the audience’s behavioural intentions? Which components of a museum visit are concerned?

The questionnaire deals with issues such as the process of creation of learning facilites & spaces and their integration into the museum, appropriate tools of interpretation and types of innovative learning elements, maintenance of learning spaces, evaluation, reasons for changes... Deadline is September the 21st.

 

Focus on innovative learning elements including examples of creating special learning facilities within exhibitions, as well as interactive learning spaces as separate spatial units, which should be collected and made available for museum staff all over Europe. Every innovative approach which contains the active involvement of museum visitors is of interest for this project.

The Museums Association’s 2012 survey into cuts to museum services has laid bare the devastating impact that budget reductions are continuing to have across the UK. Out of 114 museum services and individual institutions that responded, 51% reported a cut to their budgets and almost a quarter have been forced to reduce public access by closing whole sites or parts of sites permanently or temporarily. 11% have closed whole sites permanently.  42% of respondents said there have been cuts to staff, with almost a fifth saying staffing levels were down 25% or more. Of the respondents that have experienced cuts in 2011 and 2012, over a third have seen a cumulative reduction of more than 35%.

The nature of the site as a storage facility and the ‘behind the scenes’ appeal of the visitor offering require a different approach to the traditional museum visitor experience that captures the rawness, directness and uniqueness of the visitor’s engagement with the site, the Collection and the objects.

Traveling this weekend, I decided to put aside my school work, leave my laptop at home and finally read Nina Simon’s, The Participatory Museum.

 

As an arts management student, I cannot emphasize enough just how relevant this book is for cultural institution administrators, especially future ones. I have decided procrastinating over the weekend was in the name of the future of museums (at least that’s what I’m telling myself…).

 

Nina Simon, the author of the book and Museum 2.0 blog, is the Executive Director of the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz. Simon shares her own experiences of visiting, working and participating (or not) in museums throughout the book.

VIP Art Fair builds new technologies for the world's most prominent contemporary art galleries to showcase available works by the artists they represent, for sophisticated collectors to connect with these galleries, and for the international art community to experience and engage with art.

VIP Art Fair translates the experience of a traditional bricks-and-mortar fair to an online environment, serving as a site for exploration and conversation while empowering the relationship between collector and dealer. VIP Art Fair is a filter to the most prominent contemporary art galleries in the world.

The Council of Europe Museum Prize 2012 goes to the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum – Kulturen der Welt (Cultures of the World) in Cologne, Germany.
 

The Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum is a century-old institution that has recently moved to a new building and developed a groundbreaking new exhibition on World Cultures. Looking for a new mode of presenting its rich collections, the museum has rejected the traditional geography-based scheme and opted for an issue-based presentation. As a result, new contents, interpretation and design solutions have been developed that open new possibilities and set a new paradigm for the museums of anthropology and ethnology worldwide.