Divinest Sense

Getting caught up on my New York Times reading after a trip to Italy, I noticed this article about a project to tag museum art collections. It’s called steve.museum and anyone can participate. From the article:

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum’s curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum’s documentation. Joachim Friess’s ornate sculpture “Diana and the Stag,” for example, was tagged with the expected “antler,” “archery” and “huntress.” But it was also tagged “precious” and “luxury.”

“The results were staggering,” said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. “There’s a huge semantic gap between museums and the public.”

True. Regardless of how you might feel about how much cultural education the average person receives in this country, there is a disconnect between what you see when you look at a painting and what the curator chooses to tell you about it on the small placard next to it or in the museum catalogue. A lot of assumptions are made about what the viewer knows or doesn’t know.

As the article goes on to point out, there are obvious descriptors of art works that the experts just aren’t able to see anymore, and on the flip side, there are a lot of things that are known about works of art that aren’t evident in the pieces themselves. I think our awareness of this fact creates a psychological disconnect that prevents open discussion of what a work of art is “about”.

I’m especially aware of these issues at the moment, having logged some serious museum time in the last couple of weeks in Rome, where the older museums don’t really tell you anything about what you’re looking at. The Vatican is the biggest example of this - the collections of the Vatican are immense and overwhelming, and you have to know exactly what you are looking for when you go in, because there is very little information there to help you out.

The Vatican’s collections could really benefit from a tagging effort like Steve to make their artworks more understandable and findable. However, since this particular project is funded by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services, it’s only dealing with American museums.
Tagging the Vatican’s collection would be a much more daunting task than doing the same with any American museum. I wonder how the results of an Italian tagging project would differ from an American one.

Omigod, it’s my very first video podcast! Paste the link into your iTunes to subscribe and view the movie. This is a short series of clips that I filmed using the movie function on my Canon Powershot A80 at the Hagley Museum in Delaware. The museum is the original site of the DuPont gunpowder mills.

The scenes I filmed are from the machine shop and a gunpowder rolling mill, both of which have the original machines in working order, powered completely by water. I took notes so that I can build machines to power my lights and computers when the oil runs out. I was fascinated by all of these machines with their open gearwork and ingenious drive mechanisms - they are unwieldy and elegant at the same time. The immense wheels that were used to crush the gunpowder are 8 tons of cast iron each - but move so quickly and gracefully that they are beautiful to watch. The whole thing is activated by opening a sluice gate - the water rushes down into a turbine, which turns gears that rotate a drive shaft, which extends laterally into the bottom of the rolling mill, and turns an enormous gear to power the wheels. So simple - and accomplished without the use of polluting gasoline or coal. It’s really too bad that DuPont is all about the scary chemicals now.

If you ever find yourself in Wilmington or the greater Phildelphia area with some time on your hands, go to the Hagley Museum and tour the grounds - it’s definitely a must-see if you are interested in pre-industrial-revolution technology.