Report on the Future of Museums

THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2013

Another Round of Technology and the Future of Education

Today’s guest post comes from Phil Katz, the Alliance’s assistant director for research and co-conspirator on many CFM research projects.

Tomorrow andBeyond

There’s nothing new about the prediction that technology is going to remake education, soon and dramatically: education reformers and tech entrepreneurs have been making this claim since at least the 1920s. Last week the Brookings Institution – a nonpartisan think tank based here in Washington, DC – joined the long march of predictions with a thoughtful and reference-packed report on Education Technology Success Stories. The report was produced by the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings with support from the Gates Foundation.

Brookings also hosted a public forum on the future of education technology last week, which you can watch athttp://www.brookings.edu/events/2013/03/20-education-technology. (Make sure you stay tuned to the very end, so you can hear me ask a question and introduce the word “museum” into the conversation!) The focus of both the report and forum is formal education, mostly in classroom settings. But the key questions at stake – “How can educators incorporate the latest technologies to improve education and assess what proves effective?” – apply just as well to museum education.

The report features five “education technology success stories.” For each story, theycould have added a museum variant:

• Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL), in the form of kid-friendly interactive robots already being used to teach English to some young children in South Korea. (South Korea is also the world leader in robot docents for museums.)

Robot teachers in Korea

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which nearly everyone these days is describing as a disruptive force in higher ed. (Including the team here at CFM, in our new TrendsWatch 2013 report, which looks at MOOCs through a museum lens.)
• Minecraft, a web-based “sandbox” game that students and teachers are using to create simulated worlds that model the laws of physics, chemistry and environmental science; the game can even be used to recreate historic sites. (The American Museum of Natural History has also used Minecraft to help high school-age visitors explore the science and politics of food.) 
• Computerized Adaptive Testing, touted as the latest replacement for old-fashioned multiple-choice tests, a way to relieve teachers from the burden of correcting bubble sheets or even student essays, and a tool for self-paced instruction. (OK, I’m not sure what the right museum analogy is for this one — any suggestions, readers?
• Stealth Assessments, i.e., formative assessments embedded in games, with no pressure on the players/students. At the public forum, Valerie Shute, an education professor at Florida State, described an experiment that used an off-the-shelf video game (Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion) to track problem-solving skills that are part of the formal curriculum. (How teachers will use the assessment information for student evaluation is an open question, and not every lesson can be turned into a computer game.) 

Gaming and assessment are two areas where the Brookings publication would especially have benefitted from looking at museums and building on the expertise of museum educators and evaluators (who have been tackling the problem of assessing relatively brief and bounded learning experiences for many years). Although the report begins with the traditional claim that “the next generation of education technologies is facilitating substantial change,” I think it makes a good case that the confluence of new presentation technologies, new assessment technologies and new technologies to recognize student achievement (like digital badges) could really amount to something ... well, new.

This became even clearer after the public forum, which still left me with two questions:

• Why are (nearly) all the examples of education technology success stories drawn from STEM subjects? Where are the examples of education technology that improves historical understanding and sharpens moral reasoning? And how would you assess that kind of learning?
• How do these innovations from formal education settings apply to informal learning? And does interactive technology make formal learning more “informal” (even museum-like).

Go to the videotape and watch the answers from the panel at the forum — but don’t get your hopes up. Can we provide better answers?

Terra-cotta pillars of Xi'an community

Leah Garchik

Published 4:02 pm, Thursday, February 21, 2013

There are 100 other treasures that are lovingly displayed in "China's Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor's Legacy," which was celebrated at the Asian Art Museum with a Wednesday night gala, but it's really the warriors themselves that are the showstoppers.

I'm sure many in the crowd had seen the figures in China, where they were found surrounded by thousands of others. But for me, they were a surprise, smooth-skinned, with a variety of facial expressions and naturalistic body poses. There was none of the stiff fierceness of Western military statuary; these figures looked as if they could come alive (there were two humans who were dressed as living statuary) and talk with you, as if the more than 2,000 years between you and the works were inconsequential.

The Asian is usually a serene place. But in the gallery before the dinner (a Chinese masterpiece by McCalls), the speeches, the traditional dances and martial arts performances, was a hubbub of noise. There was no need for hush around exalted figures; rather the figures seemed to be part of vivid conversation, as though they were guests at the gala, too.

Their hands made gestures, their eyebrows conveyed emotions. Welcome warriors, the museum came to life.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/garchik/article/Terra-cotta-pillars-of-Xi-an-community-4298614.php#ixzz2LeoLpVEH

Curator, Tear Down These Walls

“Lake George and the Village of Caldwell,” left, by Thomas Chambers, challenges the perspective of John Frederick Kensett’s “Hudson River Scene.” More Photos »

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: January 31, 2013

 Why don’t you, as Diana Vreeland might have asked, mix folk art in with the more realistic, academically correct kind that has so dominated museums since the 19th century? Despite rising interest in and scholarship about folk art — and even after the wholesale rethinking of several major American wings on the East Coast — the isolation of folk from academic is still the norm. 

This is a problem for several reasons. For one thing, pre-20th-century folk art is every bit as good, as a genre, as academic art of the same period, and in some ways far more original and vital. Its strengths lie not in its adherence to reality but in its enlivening deviations from it. For another, the distinction between folk and academic can be blurry, more a matter of degree than either-or. Third, this segregation results in galleries of academic 19th-century American art that are predictable and monotonous, effectively deadening the works on view and shortchanging the viewer.

The quality of folk art has been recognized enough to be heavily collected by most of these four museums, if not heavily shown. In addition to their formal ebullience, so-called naïve efforts convey the raw desire for art that prevailed in the early years of this country, when museums and art academies were virtually nonexistent. They exemplify an insistent sense of American can-do, the instinctive pursuit of art and, in a way, happiness.

As it stands, galleries of 18th- and 19th-century American art proceed in a highly predictable fashion: Hudson River School paintings in one gallery, genre paintings in another, colonial and Revolutionary period portraits in a third. The goal seems to be galleries as homogeneous as possible, so as not to confuse viewers. “You don’t want to shake the snow globe too much,” was how a curator at a fifth East Coast museum put it to me. Au contraire. The snow globe definitely needs shaking.

Homogeneity dulls the eye and lulls the brain. It is the discrepancies that grab our attention and make us look more sharply and deeply.  .  .

[To read more:  

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/arts/design/american-folk-vs-academic-art.html

Titian: A Life --A New Book and the Review

Titian: A Life

By JOSEPH LUZZI

Published: December 28, 2012

.       If only Titian had left us the scathing letters and soul-baring sonnets of his contemporary Michelangelo, whose image as a tortured genius has enchanted biographers since the Renaissance. In their place we have just a smattering of Titian’s business correspondence and a few official statements. His friendship with the ferocious satirist and pornographer Pietro Aretino is the stuff of speculation. So too are his relations with the models and companions who appear in masterpieces like the “Venus of Urbino,” which transforms one of Venice’s highest-priced courtesans into a goddess of love, taunting us with her half-smile while resting her hand in a forbidden realm.

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

A rare glimpse inside: Titian's "Self-Portrait" of 1562.

TITIAN

His Life

By Sheila Hale

Illustrated. 832 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $39.99.

A void surrounds this artist who lived into his late 80s, painted more than 500 works and rubbed shoulders with kings and popes. He once described to his wayward son the “pain and distress, . . . sacrifices and sweat” he had endured to set him on the path to riches. Titian dictated these words to a scribe in 1568, a few years before he died; they represent perhaps the only raw emotion he recorded for posterity.

Sheila Hale’s “Titian” takes on the heroic task of reconstructing this largely undocumented life, but she devotes much of her book to other matters, especially Venice’s growing commercial empire. While meticulous and fluid, her account succumbs to a parade of forgettable patrons and politicians. A better title for a book that is too long by a third might have been “Titian and His World.”

At its best, Hale’s biography captures the energy and colors of everyday Venetian life as brilliantly as a Canaletto painting. The author of a well-received guidebook to Venice, she locates La Serenissima at the center of a global network whose spirit suffused Titian’s palette. In the haunting “Flaying of Marsyas,” one of Titian’s visual poesie(poems) based on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Apollo’s removal of the satyr’s skin reflected a harrowing development in Venice’s foreign affairs: the flaying of the military officer Marcantonio Bragadin by Turkish troops in 1571. Yet Titian was too subtle an artist to sacrifice beauty in the metaphorical depiction of a current event. Hale points out that his Apollo, holding his knife “as though it were a painter’s brush,” radiates a delicacy and innocence at odds with his gory task. Perhaps the otherwise unliterary Titian was evoking Dante, who begged, as Hale notes, Apollo to “enter my breast and breathe there as you did when you tore Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.” This rare ability to fuse the political and the poetic explains why the European elite were so keen on commissioning a man who was, according to Hale, “the greatest portraitist of the ­Renaissance.”     [To read more, see below]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/30/books/review/titian-his-life-by-sheila-hale.html?ref=review&_r=0

Royal Excess Of Kings and Queens

'Royal Treasures From the Louvre' review

Kenneth Baker

Updated 7:34 p.m., Friday, November 16, 2012

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VIEW: LARGER | HIDE

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  Jewel-encrusted shell-shaped cup circa 1650.

   Photo: Daniel Arnaudet / SF

"Royal Treasures From the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette," which opens last Saturday at the Legion of Honor, brings into view an array of decorative art objects that have seldom, if ever, left France.

The exhibition serves as "a kind of prologue, an overture," Louvre director Henri Loyrette said in conversation, to a five-year programming agreement between France's greatest museum and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

"Royal Treasures" and the long-term agreement arose, Loyrette said, from discussions with John Buchanan (1953-2011), when he was director of the Fine Arts Museums.

"When you do a big exhibition, it's almost always a one-shot," Loyrette said. "A few curators work a lot together for a long time, and that's it. It's not long lasting and not very significant for the institutions themselves. It's more interesting to have this process on a regular basis, which involves all the staff, not only the artistic questions, but education and publications, all that makes a museum today. ... So we had this idea of a five-year partnership."

Refurbishment of the Louvre's 18th century decorative arts galleries occasioned the substantial loans that "Royal Treasures" entailed. But the five-year agreement between the Paris and San Francisco institutions will mean modest projects at first.

The two already planned involve bringing together companion works by single artists owned by the respective museums: paintings by the British Romantic John Martin (1789-1854) and portrait sculpture by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828).

Anticipating public curiosity about the possible loan of Louvre's greatest hits by artists such as Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Jacques-Louis David, Loyrette said, "We hope to go through various techniques and departments over time. In the far future, we will have a large exhibition. But we have just begun to discuss it."

"Royal Treasures From the Louvre" will have its constituency, but that does not include me.

I am as much in awe as anyone of the feats of craftsmanship presented here with unexceptionable stagecraft. Consider the 1756 "Figure of a Naiad," with its porcelain figurine stranded beside a gilt-bronze palm tree on the gilt-bronze island of a base. As fantasy landscape sculpture, as well as a product of expert collaborators, the "Naiad" is hard to top.

Plenty of other things here, including the stone-inlaid "Mosaic Tabletop With Emblems of Louis XIV" that serves as one of the exhibition's signature images, will have jaws dropping.

But is yet another "treasures" exhibition the best use of a city museum's straitened resources? The question ought to reverberate though museum culture today. "Royal Treasures" and its ilk on the exhibition front reduce museum-going to the higher window shopping: No, you couldn't afford this - though today's robber barons could - but why, apart from the sting of injustice, should you care?

"Royal Treasures" tries gingerly to make the case that Louis XVI, who lost his head to history in 1793, had more public-spirited bones in his body than his executioners credited. He, after all, first established what became the Musée du Louvre as a public exhibition space.

But the excesses of pre-modernist courtly taste play poorly in postmodernist retrospect. (Startlingly, Marie-Antoinette looks like a minimalist of her day in the account of her affinities given here.)

"Royal Treasures" might seem to have anticipated a Romney presidency, had it not been planned years earlier. Instead, it merely rekindles the Reaganite vision of private wealth and public squalor that has polluted not just politics but also American imagination for decades.

Royal Treasures From the Louvre: Louis XIV to Marie-Antoinette: Decorative arts. Through March 17. Legion of Honor. Lincoln Park, S.F. (415) 750-3600. www.legionofhonor.famsf.org.

Kenneth Baker is The San Francisco Chronicle's art critic. E-mail: kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Royal-Treasures-From-the-Louvre-review-4044284.php#ixzz2Cbg2WAe1

Norman Rockwell Exhibitiion at Crocker Art Museum

American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell, Triple Self-Portrait, 1959. Oil on canvas, 44 1/2 x 34 1/3 in. Cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960. ©1960 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, IN. From the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum.NOVEMBER 10, 2012 – FEBRUARY 3, 2013

This exhibition celebrates the full range of Norman Rockwell's artwork, including rarely circulated works from the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Included in the presentation are original oil paintings of some of his most famous illustrations, drawings, war bond posters, and numerous covers that Rockwell created forThe Saturday Evening Post over nearly five decades. In addition to the artworks on view, personal correspondence and archival photographs offer insight into the life of one of the country's most beloved illustrators.

Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

American Chronicles has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Masterpieces Program.

Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This exhibition is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Masterpieces Program; the Henry Luce Foundation; Curtis Publishing Company; Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Company; and the Stockman Family Foundation.

I See Beauty In This Life

'I See Beauty' - Rural California photos

ART

Patricia Yollin

Published 12:59 p.m., Wednesday, November 7, 2012  S.F. Chronicle

A young man gathers mulberry leaves on a silk farm in 1907. "Miss Wool California" of 1968 poses with a sheep. Forty-three years later, cowboys warm up at a rodeo in Salinas.

These people come alive in a new exhibition at the California Historical Society in San Francisco, titled "I See Beauty in This Life: A Photographer Looks at 100 Years of Rural California." Their images are among 150 or so pictures that show a side of the state that is little known and rarely seen.

"We're happy to buy our oranges from Esparto (Yolo County), but nobody even knows where it is," said writer and photographer Lisa M. Hamilton.

The exhibition she created represents a new direction for the 141-year-old nonprofit, inaugurating a "Curating California" program that invites accomplished state residents, such as Hamilton, to delve into the vast holdings of the historical society.

"What we really want to do is bring the collection out of the storage area," said Jessica Hough, managing curator of exhibitions. "We send somebody in and see what stimulates them."

Hamilton spent six months exploring the archives, which contain about 500,000 photographs, and a sister collection with 23,000 more images housed at the University of Southern California. The historical pictures she selected date back to a shot of a flour mill in 1880. She also included 24 large color photos she took last year - traveling 10,000 miles around the state - for her "Real Rural" multimedia project.

"When you picture rural California in your head, some very familiar images come up," Hamilton said. "The Central Valley and that landscape, maybe the timberlands in the far north or the deserts in the south. But those images are pretty limited."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/I-See-Beauty-Rural-California-photos-4016960.php#ixzz2BeuR15H5