The Picasso at the Museums and the Web Conference

For the third year running the Museu Picasso will be taking part this week (in Denver this time round) in the top-level international M&W conference, a real generator of knowledge and ideas about interactive museography, digital communication, mobile applications for museums, social media, the creation of content by the public and a host of related subjects.

In 2008 we ran a session at the Usability Lab presenting the then just revamped Picasso website. In 2009 we were asked to be part of the International Program Committee, which is responsible for, among other things, assessing and orienting the review of papers to be presented at the conference. And as we were going to be in Indianapolis, we decided to make a CRIT Room presentation of some of the improvements we made to the site in its first year of operation. This was an excellent way of publicizing the site — we even found comments on a blog from Sweden — and to cap it all we were given a prize for one of the best posts on the conference’s blog. You can read a report of MW2009 in Patrimoni Gencat blog. Read more »

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The Digital Museu Picasso in the World

Two notable activities have recently come along to assist the growth of the Museum’s Internet project. First of all, the Museu Picasso has been invited, for the second year running, to take a place on the International Program Committee of the worldwide conference on Museums & the Web and take part in the evaluation and selection of the proposed papers, forums and workshops. The forthcoming conference will be held in Denver, Colorado, and the committee includes representatives of such prestigious institutions as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center and the Museum Studies Programme at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, with the Museu Picasso the only Spanish art centre on the committee. Visit the Museums 2.0 blog for a detailed account of the 2009 conference.

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Some thoughts from the director on the museums of the future

There has been a lot of discussion recently about the current debate surrounding the future of museums.

Of particular interest in this regard is this summer’s debate between the directors of the British Museum and the Tate, Neil MacGregor and Nicholas Serota, and now that the Museu Picasso has just presented the new programme and new lines of action, which are beginning to become a reality, I would like to offer one or two of my own thoughts on the subject.

The museum as a centre of production and space of dialogue. The first thing that is needed is an exercise of self-criticism, in order to move on once and for all from the simplistic conception of the museum as a repository of heritage and offer more heterogeneous and more complex proposals, in keeping with the diversity of today’s public(s). In recent years, society has been evolving increasingly rapidly while museums have changed very little; they have not kept pace, many are still offering cultural products that are too static and rigid.

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5 ideas from “The Museum of the 21st century” talk between Directors of Tate & British

Yesterday in London, Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum and Nicholas Serota, director of Tate, discussed about the Museum of the 21st Century in front of an audience of 500, at the London School of Economics. The event was coorganized with Thames & Hudson. While the announced podcast is not yet available, here are 5 ideas I’ve chosen from the excerpts publishes in Guardian and in Social media and Comunications:

1. Museum’s future lies on the internet: the relationship between institutions and their audiences would be transformed by the internet. Museums would become more like multimedia organizations.
2. The Museum will address audiences across the world and will be a place where people across the world will have a conversation. Those institutions which take up this notion fastest and furthest will be the ones which have the authority in the future.
3. The future has to be the museum as a publisher and broadcaster: there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more effectively working as commissioning editors working on material online.
4. The growing challenge will be to look for online capacity and encourage curatorial teams to work there as much as they do in the galleries.
5. In the past, there has been an imperfect communication between visitors and curators. The possibility for a greater level of communication between curators and visitors is the challenge now.

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