Museum Marketing

Regular Museum Marketing reader Gustavo Macedo Pérez in Mexico was kind enough to drop me a line this week with a few projects which I really love.

ArtMobs remixes MoMA
ArtMobs is a few years old, but I think it was a little ahead of it’s time. It asked members of the public to create audio guides to artworks in MoMA and share these through the ArtMobs website. Though not created by professional curators, these amateur guides give a different perspective on art.

The project which ran in 2004 – 2005 seems to have produced just 10 guides, so perhaps others didn’t share my enthusiasm for the idea of creating alternative audio guides, but I guess while it is easy for me to say I like the idea, would I really record a guide myself?

I know that N8 in The Netherlands tried a similar project and found that creating audio commentaries was a lot to ask of visitors.

Overated?
Slate Magazine produced it’s own audio guide under the headline ‘The commentary museums don’t want you to hear’ in which it’s art critic guided visitors around MoMA and the Metropolitan museum of Art.

This unofficial audio tour looked at the most overrated and underrated pictures on display, giving another alternative (and an intriguing) view of the collections of these great art museums.

Going Mobile
With the growth in mobile technology, perhaps now is the time for a platform which allows visitors to share audio commentaries through the web rather then podcasts, so a visitor could instantly access a choice of audio guides on the go.

I’d be interested to hear about any other Audio Tour projects which you are aware of, and whether you think the public could be bothered to create something worthwhile.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 8:27 am and is filed under Crowd-sourcing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.