MA 2010 Conference: Bits ‘n’ Pieces #2

A few more notes, comments and observations from the MA2010 conference (see the first chapter here):

  • Audiences are hungry for new perspectives: Kate Spinks from the Victoria Police Museum gave a presentation on their new exhibition “Ambush”, about the Kelly gang’s attack on a group of policemen at Stringybark Creek. This exhibition interprets the incident from the perspective of the police, drawing upon the recollections of the one policeman who survived the attack. Kate reported that visitors welcomed these new perspectives and points of view – they know that the romanticised tales of the Kelly gang are not the whole story, and are keen to hear the other side.
  • Customer service benchmarks are continually moving: Melbourne Museum has recently started selling tickets online for major exhibitions like Pompeii (2009) and Titanic (2010). The proportion of online presales is steadily increasing, as are customer expectations regarding the extent and quality of the online purchasing experience. Many people now view the ability to buy tickets online, etc. as a basic level of service, not an added extra.
  • Watch your language: when visitors use words like ‘interactive’, they don’t necessarily mean what we think. They might mean ‘immersive’ or the ability to get up close to an exhibit. We can’t assume we know the meaning of the terminology that visitors use in interviews. Drawing from her PhD research, Dr Tiina Roppola from the University of Canberra gave out some useful tips for interviewing visitors and drawing out from them what they mean in their own words.
  • Museum by popular demand: Lindsay Richardson from the 6th Floor Museum in Dallas, TX presented at the conference as part of the MA Historians’ network’s global curator exchange. The ‘6th Floor’ refers to the floor of the Texas Book Depository where Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. A museum arose at the assassination site ‘by accident’ – originally the municipality wanted to gloss over this chapter of its history, but the public wouldn’t let that happen. Thus the museum opened in 1989, originally intended just as a temporary exhibition to placate the thousands of visitors who made the pilgrimage to the site. However a huge visitor spike (500,000 people) in the year after the ‘JFK’ movie (1990-1991) was the catalyst for the museum gradually gaining permanence and building up a collection pertaining to the assassination’s aftermath (items relating to the assassination itself are more problematic, given they are criminal evidence).
  • “Dumb blondes of the art world”: David McFadden, Director of the Museum of Art and Design, said this is how craft was often dismissed by the fine arts fraternity. But he described the ‘blur zone’, where the hierarchies and boundaries between art, craft and design are being blurred and eliminated. (Incidentally, David said that 48% of his museum’s collection is by female artists, in comparison to other art museums where the percentage barely gets above single figures . . .)

These tidbits just keep leaping out of my conference notebook – more to come in another installation . . .

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