Public participation in museum activities widen thanks to the Internet

For those looking for that ‘stand-alone piece or viewing experience’ on the move, institutions like MOMA have introduced apps for latest mobile devices. One such experiment was done for its show, entitled ‘Guitar Heroes: Legendary Craftsmen from Italy to New York’ in February 2011. Close to 50,000 people downloaded the free iPhone application.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s international network added new meaning and context to the democratization of art last summer with the launch of its YouTube Play project. Any user with a computer and a video camera could vie for a deserving place in its public video-art Biennial that was organized at all its branches in October. (The videos were on display on YouTube and in the museums.) The event was very much successful and attracted almost 23,500 submissions from over 90 countries. The number of viewer on YouTube was 24 million.

Enthused by its success, the Guggenheim is in discussions with the video sharing site about the next edition. The Guggenheim’s chief curator based in New York, Nancy Spector, states: “The event gave us the ability and opportunity to touch people instantaneously. It was a good entrance into a medium, which was always thought to be low culture but is fast emerging as an art form.”

For many museums, sites act as the main entry point. The Indianapolis Museum of Art Attendance figure was 430,000 visitors in 2010, but its site had close to one million users., The Indianapolis Art Museum director, Maxwell L. Anderson, has been quoted as saying: “We’ve to be relevant on the Internet by constantly making our information more and more interesting.''

One way, he revealed, was with what he termed the accumulated power of ‘collective thinking or wisdom’. And so a couple of years ago, the museum unveiled artbabble.org, a site with videos from institutions all across the globe. The museum started with six partners for the venture and now it has nearly 30 around the world.