Real vs Virtual Museums
Compare and contrast, with the help of the relevant sources, your experience as viewer in a real museum setting such as NUS’s, and a virtual setting exemplified by a museum’s website of your choice: What are the pros and cons of each setting? What are the differences in the way exhibits are presented? Which of the two settings (the physical or the virtual) is more successful in educating the viewer?
—Mid-term Essay question for an Art History module (I scored an A for this ^_^)
Introduction
The traditional museums that we have come to identify with as part of our culture originated in the 17th century[1] in Europe and were constructed for a variety of purposes. A chief function of the museums then was to house the private art collections of rich aristocrats, before they were gradually opened to the public, motivated by social and political circumstances. The concept of the virtual museum on the other hand, is a much more recent development that emerged during the mid-nineties, following the advent of the Internet as a global system of information and communication delivery.
In comparing and contrasting the viewer’s experiences in a real and a virtual museum setting, we must first consider how each of these settings interacts with the viewer. Both these settings have their comparative advantages as well as deficiencies. In order to make light of the differences in the ways exhibits are presented, we will need to explore the limitations of both settings, as the measures taken to overcome these limitations often result in unique ways of presentation. In the following discussion, I chose the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website[2] as an example of a virtual museum setting to contrast against my own experiences as a viewer in real museums that I have visited over the last few years.
Interactions
The physical act of walking through an art gallery can be described as an aesthetic experience[3]. This experience, however, is also determined by the curator and gallery layout planner’s ability to manipulate space and distance. When I visited the NUS Museums’ Chinese art gallery recently, the first artwork I noticed was an enormous work of Chinese calligraphy that framed the gallery’s entrance. It dawned on me that if the artwork was instead placed along a narrow corridor, the viewer’s perspective of the work would be skewed and the experience less aesthetically pleasing: To successfully exhibit a work of art in a real museum, the manner in which physical space is appropriated is a key factor.
Space and distance can add dimensions to an artwork if utilised correctly. The virtual museum however, almost entirely lacks this physical space, depth and size. Digital photography essentially generates two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects. The experience of viewing an artefact in a real setting is a different experience from viewing it through the product of a camera’s lens. No matter how excellent a photograph of an artefact has been taken, certain details, such as the texture of a painting canvas, will be lost; real colours altered through ill-configured monitor hardware settings.
Complications in the notions of physical and virtual space further arise where interactive art is concerned. Interactive art, a concept that was derived from the Futurist movement of the early 20th century and experimented on by luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp, requires some form of physical participation from the audience. While interactive art has generally developed outside the boundaries of traditional museums, these museums have over time incorporated these elements of interactivity into their visual displays. In the NUS Museums for instance, the temporary installation artwork For Whom the Bell Tolls requires the viewer to engage with the artwork by ‘stepping into it’ in order to fully appreciate the audio and visual cues. I found the concept of interactivity even more intriguing in modern museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, which I visited in June 2001, and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland, which I visited in 1999.
In short, the incorporeal nature of the Internet itself creates a problem in exhibiting a museum artefact. ‘Virtual’ space cannot substitute for the experience of navigating through ‘real’ space.
The problems posed by the nature of the Internet however are no detraction from the popularity and prestige of the virtual museum in recent years. Certainly, virtual museums have found ways to reduce, or even overcome these problems.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has found a way to help lessen the problem of presenting a three-dimensional artefact in two-dimension virtual space. In its American Decorative Arts collection of period rooms[4] for instance, it attempts to simulate a viewer’s view of the real room through the use of virtual reality video photography, allowing the viewer to move closer or further away from an object by manipulating zoom buttons. Works of art in the forms of paintings and craft embellish the actual rooms. Some of these artworks are semi-interactive in that by ‘clicking on’ them, the viewer would be automatically transported to a webpage featuring an explanation on its history[5]. Still, the problem of presenting an artefact in its true glory cannot be fully overcome online: the limitations of the size of the computer screen for instance, incurs always, the Alice in Wonderland-esque effect: it is like spying a world from the wrong end of a telescope. Issues of quality of presentation are furthermore made problematic in the attempt to find a suitable balance between bandwidth, file size and download speed.
If simulation is imperfect, ‘distraction’ is arguably a solution to this problem. The Metropolitan Museum ‘distracts’ the viewer’s attention by adding touches of interactivity to the website. In the recent Leonardo da Vinci exhibition for instance, one particular webpage[6] allowed a viewer to move the mouse pointer over a section of a digital photograph of Leonardo’s Head of the Virgin. Black chalk markings were digitally removed as soon as this happened and red chalk markings were emphasised to illustrate Leonardo’s left-handed drawing strokes. This form of interactivity that informs, illustrates the nature of exhibition in a virtual museum, which emphasises more on the narrative supported by pictorial-audio cues, as opposed to a real museum, which relies mostly on the visual aesthetic experiences and interpretations of a viewer.
The Internet is often described as a global repository of information; it transcends geographical boundaries as viewers can easily access the contents of a website that is physically stored thousands of kilometres away almost instantaneously. As such, the one advantage that the virtual museum has over the real museum is its accessibility. Earlier in this essay, I touched on the problems of quality of presentation in a virtual museum. These problems are however, a small price to pay for a viewer who resides in the opposite side of the globe.
A problem of real museums is that much of its collections are kept away from the public because of the space limitations of exhibition areas. Because of this, real museums often have to turn to temporary exhibitions to give the viewer a glimpse of these collections. An advantage of the virtual museum can be found in light of this: since virtual space is substantially more viable to maintain than real space, a collection that has been put on temporary display in a museum can also be permanently archived on the Internet in multimedia form to help make up for this deficiency. This is exemplified in the section of the virtual Metropolitan Museum that has been devoted to archiving its past exhibitions since 1999[7]
Real vs. Virtual Education
Today, the didactic value of the art object has become one of the more important considerations in deciding its overall importance. That the museums of modern times place strong emphasis on this educational aspect is easily apparent in their mission statements[8].
I believe there are two important facets of education. The first is to encourage and develop the individual’s interest. The second is in the imparting of knowledge.
In my opinion, the real museum is generally more successful in realising this first facet. The physical Metropolitan Museum for instance offers daily guided tours[9] as well as conducts gallery talks and lectures led by experts. It also offers family and student programs that help provide social support in nurturing interest. As the saying goes: “enthusiasm rubs off” – this sharing of enthusiasm must be done through mutual feedback and encouragement in a real social setting, which a virtual museum lacks. Adding interactivity to a virtual museum helps only to sustain short-term interest. A second justification is an issue which I brought up earlier in this essay about the experiential benefits of viewing the artefact rather than a photograph of it.
In contrast, assessing the two types of museums with regards to the second facet of education is more problematic. A few years ago, it would have been easy to acknowledge the superiority of the physical museum because virtual museums were sparse and visually plain, making them unappealing to the regular visitor. However, improvements in Internet technology, speed and web design have made virtual museum sites attractive to browse for information.
How then do we decide if one setting is more educational? I believe this depends on what the visitor of the museum is looking for.
A person who is interested in the history of an artefact would probably find the background information of the artefact more important than the physical object. The virtual museum may be better in this aspect because database archival and hypertext links allow the viewer to find the information needed more quickly and easily. The hypertext format arguably makes for a more intuitive presentation of textual information than a museum catalogue can. The history of the exhibits can be compared and contrasted with each other by just entering a few keywords in a database search.
On the other hand, an art student interested in the technique of creating the object may find a trip to the museum more educational. The lectures and workshops may be more interesting for a person looking for a more dialogical approach to learning.
There is one aspect of the virtual museum that I find lacking. This however, has more to do with the politics of education than the deficiencies of the virtual museum on its own. Virtual museums are often set up by real museums with the objective of encouraging people to visit the real thing. They are in a way a subtle mode of advertisement. Because of this, works and collections on exhibit in the virtual museum are often not shown in their entirety, but are merely a sampling. This incompleteness can be frustrating to the viewer who wants to learn more about the exhibit.
Conclusion
Despite the growing importance of the virtual museum, which is propelled by the development of the Internet, the virtual museum has not supplanted the real museum because of certain qualities of the latter that are not substitutable. Instead, real and virtual museums should be regarded as complements that together provide us with a more holistic view of culture, history and art.
Notes
[1] Fisher, John. (1998), mUSEums. Lars Aagaard-Mogensen (Ed.), The Idea of the museum: philosophical, artistic, and political questions. (pp. 46) Imprint Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press.
[2] See http://www.metmuseum.org.
[3] Beardsley, Monroe C. (1998), The Concept of the Art Museum. Lars Aagaard-Mogensen (Ed.), The Idea of the museum: philosophical, artistic, and political questions. (pp. 79-81) Imprint Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press.
[4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Collection: American Decorative Arts: Virtual Reality.
Retrieved February 24, 2003 from
http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/vr_html/vr/
temp_v_thumbnails.htm
[5] The technological slang used to describe this is the phrase ‘Easter eggs’.
[6] The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Special Exhibitions: Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman.
Retrieved February 24, 2003 from
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/
Leonardo_Master_Draftsman/ draftsman_left_essay.asp
[7] The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Special Exhibitions: Past Exhibitions.
Retrieved February 24, 2003 from
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_pastexhib.asp
[8] An example of this can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website at
http://www.metmuseum.org/support/su_education.htm (retrieved February 24, 2003).
[9] See http://www.metmuseum.org/events/index.asp for more information (retrieved February 24, 2003).
