Some of you may be familiar with the recent discussions about this concerning MoMA and it’s reply to a comment by New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz on Facebook about the very low representation of women artists on the 4th and 5th floors of MoMA.
Being a responsive organisation Kim Mitchell of MoMA sent Jerry Saltz a reply, which he posted on Facebook at her request. Here is her message:
“Hi all, I am (Kim Mitchell) Chief Communications Officer here at MoMA. We have been following your lively discussion with great interest, as this has also been a topic of ongoing dialogue at MoMA. We welcome the participation and ideas of others in this important conversation. And yes, as Jerry knows, we do consider all the departmental galleries to represent the collection. When those spaces are factored in, there are more than 250 works by female artists on view now. Some new initiatives already under way will delve into this topic next year with the Modern Women’s Project, which will involve installations in all the collection galleries, a major publication, and a number of public programs. MoMA has a great willingness to think deeply about these issues and address them over time and to the extent that we can through our collection and the curatorial process. We hope you’ll follow these events as they develop and keep the conversation going.”
MoMA are very active across the social media space, and it isn’t surprising to see them answering criticism and trying to take part in the conversation, but rather then this comment being seen in a positive way, it drew a lot of criticism not only from those participating in the Facebook conversation, but also on Twitter and in blog posts where people commented that the reply seemed impersonal, PR-like and that the institution was not interested in being part of the conversation. Others have defended the tone of Kim’s email saying that dealing with a ’serious and contentious complaint in a less formal way would have been incredibly bold’.
The response that MoMA have recieved to Kim Mitchell’s email could be enough to put any museum off the idea of being proactive in the social media space, if an organization perceived to be ahead of the curb can fall fowl of the conversation, then is it safe for any institution to respond to criticism on the web.
I personally feel that responding to comments about your museum, whether they are positive or not will show that you’re listening, that you want people’s opinions and that this will build trust and social capital in your brand with your audiences.
It is a difficult line for an organisation like MoMA to walk, they want to be active in social media spaces and to do that they must reconcile the human to human informal conversational style of these networks with the fact that they are large institutions who can’t just let everyone say what they want.
I am trying to work this out for myself as part of my research for my talk at Communicating the Museum, how does a museum create an internal guidelines for communicating in such an informal space?
