Talk to Me is a vastly comprehensive digital innovation exhibit at MoMa NYC featuring a range of works interpreting humans’ interactions with technology, from diagrams and apps to products and spaces. Paola Antonelli, curator of the exhibit describes goal to “explore how objects communicate with us… emphasizing how the need to share information and have a dialogue with audiences is overtaking form and function in contemporary design.”
With QR codes tagging every piece and a rare encouragement to break out your iPhone and interact with the work in a major institution, the exhibit is a smart and engaging look into the closing gap between life and our relationship with more intuitive technology. Antonelli explains the dominant trend in emerging technology design in communication “people need to communicate with each other. But they also communicate with objects, with cities, with the Internet, with literally everything.”
About 20 of the projects were sourced by open submission on the online, live, micro-site facet of the exhibit, Beyond the Galleries, documenting the process of the exhibit as well as a broad database of apps, projects, interfaces, readings, discussions and more. Some notable projects include the Rubik’s Cube for the Blind by Konstantin Datz, Wolff Olins’ own Jody Hudson-Powell’s Hungry Hungry Eat Head, Tweenbot by Kacie Kinzer, along with the popular apps Talking Karl, Chris Milk’s Wilderness Downtown for Arcade Fire and AOL Artist Sascha Nordmeyer’s Communication Prothesis.
Definitely worth seeing, the exhibit runs through November 7th.
Last week, Intelligence Squared hosted a glittering line up of museum leaders and art commentators at the Saatchi Gallery – Sandy Nairne (National Portrait Gallery), Chris Dercon (Tate Modern), Tim Marlow (White Cube), Matthew Taylor (Royal Society of Arts), Ben Lewis, Matthew Collings and Alain de Botton. And as you’d imagine, the testosterone flowed. The statement to be discussed was a good one – ‘Museums are bad at telling us why art matters’. The panel was split into two, debating society style, with strong for and against voices on each side. The points were well made. According to Alain de Botton, ‘museums refuse to tell us what art is for… the modernists view it as a rather vulgar question’, whilst Matthew Collings spoke in opposition: ‘don’t dictate meaning on the audience’s behalf’ – the case for complexity and depth etc. The positions they took however are age-old - should museums create a framework and narrative to help audiences interpret and learn or should their role be to present art as ‘art for art’s sake’, pure and untouched?
At Wolff Olins, we confront this dichotomy all the time as part of our work creating brands – which in my view, help museums themselves speak more clearly – for museums around the world. Against the backdrop of this old fashioned debate, it was only Ben Lewis who took an angle which seemed right up to date, observing that museums gave up the will to decide their own fate, and their own voice a long time ago, assuming instead a role which is acutely tied up with the art market – keeping quiet, avoiding judgements, not offending lenders, upholding the artist’s star system, acting as “PR agencies for art”.
There was a comforting moment at the beginning – a mention of the fact that there are more visitors attending museums and galleries each year than professional football matches. That’s very impressive but the important question must surely be what kind of visitors? Who are they exactly? Debating the motion “museums are bad at telling us why art matters” can’t really be done by museum insiders and an audience of mostly museum enthusiasts alone– who, myself included, look like a pretty typical group of museum goers. The motion can only really be put to the vast numbers of people who don’t go to museums, who feel that museums are for another kind of person, or that they don’t connect to their world. They are the ones that can say whether museums are bad at telling us why art matters. They’re a more important ‘us’ and they set the brief for great museum brands of the future, which should be absolutely focused on ensuring museums stay in tune with the society they exist in. For this, they must surely find their own clear, current and provocative voice. That has to be the core mission of museum directors today, and that’s probably where the real debate should start.
You can listen to the original recorded debate here.
