Jeffrey Rayport, a leading Marketing Consultant and Author, once said, “Trying to imagine the world five years from now is impossible. If you are a marketer or an editor or a media person you are asking what’s here to stay, what are the new realities?” To Rayport, there are four factors, or human necessities, which will continue to have an affect on the growth and development of our world: our need for information, and thus, communication; how we store and remember, and the distribution of our memory across technological devices; the social condition which engenders humans to form connections, or social networking; and how the means by which we connect meaningfully are changing the things we care about. (Kennedy, 2010) It is to be expected that new technologies will continue to move from channel to channel, and create new avenues of communication, allowing the public to transact and interact in increasingly complex ways. In the post-media condition in which we now exist, we have seen that digital is less a channel, and more a condition within which we live.
This paper has shown that new media has become a pervasive cultural instrument, with ever-growing capacity to challenge and shape the way we communicate with organizations and with each other. While traditional marketing continues to have its benefits, the way we share information, network, remember and forge meaningful connections, compels us to reevaluate the way we promote the arts. It has been acknowledged that taking a business-minded outlook towards marketing the arts is beneficial, and we have seen that a reliance on corporate sponsorship can be abated by increased funding due to raised public awareness and interest. While many museums take the approach of Miguel Zugaza, Director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, and are “exploring new avenues for the funding of building work and exhibitions,” by prioritizing “a curatorial program based on scholarship and expertise first, and fund-raising second” (King, 20006) this paper suggests another strategy, which when used well, is particularly advantageous to non-profit institutions: innovative uses of social media.
Social media offers the immediacy and freedom to inspire community involvement by crafting and conveying a brand personality to the public, and connecting consumers and partners with shared interests; it facilitates the creation of relationships, which build support and loyalty by creating brand advocates; it can be a do-it-yourself solution that costs virtually nothing, yet generates a lot of interest; it allows an organization to easily monitor what people are saying about it, competitors, the market, etc.; it creates a channel of information between bloggers and journalists who write about your industry, company or products; and, finally, it allows the organization to shape the conversations that are taking place.
Amazingly, while it is the goal of a museum to “set the stage for a dialogue between the artwork and the visitor,” (Beall-Fontana, 2007: vii) many institutions continue to have a one-way conversation despite the tools available to connect with visitors. In today’s increasingly transnational, global society, it has become even more important to create opportunities for dialogue (not just between the museum and its members, but among members and the public), for it has been recognized that dialogue through the arts is crucial to promoting peace and understanding among cultures (UNESCO, 2010). While it was not always the stated intention of museums to create dialogue among cultures, this has always in some way or another been its purpose. After all, the term museum is derivative of the Greek ‘mouseion,’ which is a place associated with the arts (inspired by the Muses) and “dedicated to learning and philosophical contemplation.” (Beall-Fontana, 2007: 2) Therefore, I recommend that curators, membership and marketing teams work together to utilize commissioned and existing works of art for the task of creating engaging social media campaigns to attract new audiences, who once members, will likely remain dedicated to the organization, and continually engage with the museum both online and offline; in the ‘third place:’ the anchor of community life, which facilitates and fosters broader, more creative interaction. (Oldenburg, 1998)
However, as the author and expert on Internet technologies, Clay Shirky, points out, “A revolution doesn’t happen when a society adopts new tools, it happens when a society adopts new behaviors,” (Us Now, 2009) or at the very least, a new attitude. Art, especially New Media Art, should be recognized as a medium that inspires the public and has the capability to act as (in Hegel’s words) a “sensuous presentation of ideas.” Art engages us through our senses and reason to have a persuasive effect on our emotions, and subsequently, our actions. But rather than telling us why art matters, museums should show us by demonstrating its uses in the most cutting edge capacities.
Rather than retreat into “institutional silence,” museums should find their voice in artists, curators, technicians and communications specialists, to become a part of the conversation that is already occurring, focused on the new visual realm. They should also work to create opportunities for interaction, between museum-goers, members and curators, curators and artists, artists and museum-goers, and every other foreseeable combination. Furthermore, Museums should recognize this realm, which sees no boundaries between contemporary art and media (both old and new), as relevant to their survival; today’s art and media increasingly share formal qualities, travel within the same pathways of distribution, and are discovered (and discoverable) by the same audience. Though, they will always remain distinguishable in their primary function: whether that is to stir the soul and evoke conscious awareness of society through art, or to inform the mind and inspire one to act based on that information through media.
Cultural production that exists in the intersection between art and technology, or art and media, will, as Quaranta puts it, “combat the flattening of culture with complexity, numbness with sensation and standardization with critical thought.” (Quaranta, 2011) By partnering New Media Art and social media, museums could become champions of cultural advancement and incubators of post-media artistic development, and avoid being reduced to stale archives of artifacts from the past, or as the philosopher Alain de Botton called them, “a dead library for the creations of the past.” By fully embracing new media and social media practices, museums have the opportunity to create a ‘third place’ where online and offline worlds intersect; where the barriers between art, media and life dissolve; where customers become constituents. This would situate the museum in the center of civic debate and as moderators of cultural dialogue, and place the curator in position to reinvent the museum space, or in de Botton’s vision, “a safe house for creative exploration and cultural production where artists, curators, academics and the public can engage in its potential.” In short, the museum would regain the authority and cultural relevancy it enjoyed at its epoch; making the museum, once more, the muse.
