MoMA 2.0
By John Paul Benitez, Esq.
The New York Times reports on New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s (affectionately MoMA) plan to unveil its newly designed Web site after five years of an adherence to the classics. Like its name, MoMA is moving into the modern way of doing things online – and that is the interactive way.
Too bring a bit of heresy, and a lot of hypocrisy, onto the Art Law Team’s blog, can I suggest MoMA might want to re-think rushing into embracing the Web 2.0 philosophy?**
The Times reports "[t]he site, which … MoMA officials stress is a work in progress, will now include what its designers call a ‘social bar’ at the bottom, which when clicked will expand to show images and other information that users can ‘collect’ and share after registering for a free account at the Web site (www.moma.org);" and "for the last two years MoMA has been branching out energetically elsewhere on the Web, creating a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed (something the Metropolitan Museum of Art and many other museums also maintain) and a Flickr group, where museum visitors can upload their pictures, some of which will end up on the museum’s Web pages … Museum visitors with cell phones will be able to text the number associated with an artwork to an area on the museum’s Web site."
So where’s the issue?
Since the days of El Prado’s and its contemporaries’ infancy, the "museum" (or so I was taught in an art history class long, long ago) was a place where the masses could gaze upon great cultural artifacts and works that only the aristocracy before them were able to take such pleasures. Opening MoMA’s doors to those outside of the Big Apple so that they may experience – and I use that word lightly – works of modern art certainly carries this "democratic" ring.
However, might there be a value-eroding effect of supplanting MoMA’s mystique by injecting consumer-in-training exercises such as "collecting" works, building a "profile," developing cell phone text-logs and twittering away commentary? MoMA’s efforts here will simply mash against the cluttered array of Facebooks, YouTubes and online shopping malls already available. Conventional wisdom says this is a good thing, and perhaps it is. But since this is a blog written by lawyers, allow me to play the Devil’s Advocate.
Must every institution’s Web site cater to all things interactive? Or might I suggest, in some respects, they should consider positioning themselves as a point of departure or enticement, rather than too much of a virtual substitute? A little skin can go a long way, but too much and "provocative" becomes "pornographic."
Marketing philosophies aside, a museum and its works still exist in the real world – or what’s left of it. An artist’s choice of medium is purposeful, and while web approximations may be useful for illustration, they certainly cannot capture the artist’s expression.
Which is truly what this bit of waxing is all about? Where art, truly "art" the likes of which may be found at MoMA, exist to express the world around it; these "democratic" widgets exist only to express the user. There may be much to praise in this, particularly where incorporated into industries such as music and television which have for too long attempted to define the user through its marketing of products rather than have the user define what such industries produce. However, one would hope an institution with the singular mission of preserving and promoting valuable expression would do what it could to adapt to modern ways without having to play lap-dog to the cacophony of vacant, self(ish)-expression that has become Web 2.0’s unfortunate side-effect.
**Full disclosure, this blog post has been written by an author currently under the influence of Lee Siegel’s, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. If you would rather not rethink everything you love about the Internet and popular art, please do not read this book.
