|
A Museum Without Walls
Van Gogh's "Starry Night," one of MoMA's most iconic paintings, is often surrounded by a crowd. The canvas shows a swirling blue sky shot through with burning stars and punctured by a dark cypress tree rising like a flame in front of a village church.
MoMA's new website has a feature that lets young art lovers click on different parts of a painting to hear sound effects. The village clock, for instance, tolls boom-boom. One beta user -- Peltzman's 3-year-old daughter -- got positively giddy exploring the multimedia presentation.
"This piece of art means something to her now," Peltzman says. "This site did its job. Five years ago, the Web just provided opening hours and where to park. It was information. Now it's education and community."
Since the building renovation, MoMA's new challenge has been to expand its audience beyond the museum's physical confines. The Web is an obvious channel and important enough that MoMA recently hired an Indian company to monitor the site overnight.
When MoMA began quietly putting its collection online, Web traffic jumped 15%. Today, 40% of visitors to the site browse the digital galleries. Members can find previews of new exhibits online before the general public can view them. There's an archive of recorded events. The site's top download remains the museum's floor plan, and Peltzman hopes to give browsers the ability to create custom guides so folks can tailor a visit to their own desires.
"We're trying to mimic the experience of being here on the Web," Peltzman says. The museum also works to make sure that MoMA reaches as large an audience as possible via any avenue. On iTunes, for example, MoMA's podcast -- which offers audio tours of the museum and special commentary -- reached No. 21 in worldwide popularity one day. And when Wikipedia's entry on the museum didn't feature MoMA as its top link, Peltzman changed that so the official Web site became the next stop for anyone interested in modern art.
"Wikipedia, iTunes, Google -- it doesn't matter what channel it is that gets the museum exposed to people who might not have heard of it," Peltzman says.
With so many channels, one challenge was to make sure that the museum presented a consistent view of itself to the world. A central image database solved that problem by creating a single digital repository of the collection, with color-corrected images and information about the works. "Now we know that every piece of information about this art is consistent, wherever it is," Peltzman says.
|
