SCALES #66: porcelaneous
Hello!
For me, wandering around an art museum is a great way to relax. In grad school moseying over to one museum or another over lunch was always a helpful break to clear my head, and I made good use of the (amazingly!) free admission my student ID gave me to a pair of others.
With museums closed I was curious to see how accessing collections virtually might open up new perspectives on the art. I found the Cleveland Museum of Art is leading the way in releasing images and data for as much of their collection as possible under a completely permissive Creative Commons Zero (CC0) open access designation, even automating the process for artworks that become newly eligible when the year ticks over January 1. The museum has a public API that lets you retrieve records, both open access and not, for, say, sculptures made by African American women after they turned 40, or ceramics currently on view that are dated sometime around 1000-1100 CE.
This is all pretty exciting! Sixty-three thousand digital records for artworks, thirty-five thousand of which are entirely open access—compared to a paltry four thousand and change that are currently on display at all.
However, seeing this freedom and access made clear to me that a museum, obviously, is more than just an art warehouse. It’s curated. At a museum you don’t have to craft a clever API request or navigate the endless scroll of the results from a (elegantly designed) search page that, like Netflix, presents as overwhelming abundance from which it’s impossible to choose any one thing. There’s a reason museums aren't designed like the dry cleaners, watching a mind-numbing stream of canvases loop in front of you.
Which is all to say, curators organize museums into galleries. You can walk into a room, and if a Dutch still life catches your eye you can expect the works to the left or right on the wall to reveal some sort of affinity. Examining the display case behind you provides more context about the time and place. If you want more after exhausting the room, you can check out similar galleries next door. Or if slowly decaying flowers and fruits aren’t your jam, you can walk down to the other end of the hallway and find something entirely different. You navigate the four thousand works on display not piece by piece, but room by room, wing by wing.
Of course, it’s possible to put together a virtual museum tour that’s a one-to-one recreation of the physical space. (Poking around Street View being one approximation of this.) And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I wonder, what would a virtual museum visit look like that combines the affordances of the digital—the boundless, endlessly reconfigurable space, the ability to hang the same work in multiple galleries, the possibilities opened up by using algorithms cutting across a collection in unexpected ways as a provocation to human knowledge and taste—with the structure and curatorial insight embedded in how physical museums organize space? (If you know of anything reaching in this direction I’d love to hear about it!)
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You’re reading SCALES, a newsletter by me, Adam Birdsall, who lives on the very old American frontier, works in the Rubber City, and has thought a lot about particles in the atmosphere. The title is capacious on purpose. You can unsubscribe at any time (link at bottom), forward, subscribe, or reply!
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A reminder of the massive health disparities thrown into relief by the current crisis: Summit County Public Health released an analysis on April 15 showing that in the county black residents account for 48% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 36% of cases, despite being 15% of the population (pdf). This week, Ohio House Democratic Leader Emilia Sykes of Akron has been appointed to the state’s newly formed Minority Health Strike Force.
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A few minor and strange higher-order effects of today’s world:
- a New York Times pop music critic not covering live shows but instead delivering a straight-faced, extremely close reading of the music genre landscape portrayed in new Trolls movie, which he describes as “like a position paper written by someone extremely, perhaps unreasonably frustrated about how the dark side of pop history was erased by the first film”.
- Thao Ngyuen et al. absolutely nailing the “Zoom call as music video” conceit.
- Studio Ghibli releasing video chat backgrounds (h/t Kottke).
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If you are looking for Nell Zink picking a jaw-dropping number of literary fights in a single early January piece nominally about Dostoevsky, Robert Walser, and translation, have I got something for you.
I learned in Sam Anderon’s profile that Weird Al’s creative process falls extremely on the “revise-revise-revise” end of the scale:
“Looking through the “White & Nerdy” file felt like watching a supercomputer crunch through possible chess moves. Every single variable had to be considered, in every single line. The song begins with a simple sentence—“They see me mowing my front lawn”—and even here Yankovic agonized over “lawn” versus “yard” and “my” versus “the.” He sifted through phrases in gradations so small, they were almost invisible.”
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Yard news
Surprisingly snowy last Friday! More of a mixed precip sitch since then.
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Thanks for reading! Take care,
—Adam