samuel bausson's List: * openmuseums

• It started as a joke but jokes, like dreams or sexual fantasies, are often messages from the unconscious and can echo dark and deep
• but my desire to see my own internal culture displayed alongside the great civilisations of history grew stronger the more I thought about it
• I was interested in what a museum such as the Met or the British Museum means, as a hub of learning, a world of wonder, a tourist magnet, a tool of cultural diplomacy, a site of pilgrimage, a place to take the kids on a wet bank holiday.
• I wanted to find out how the context of such an august institution affected the audience's reaction to my art.
• So I sent a proposal to Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. I suggested a show presenting my civilisation alongside objects I would select from the museum collection. I called my idea The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman
• I wanted to get people thinking about what I call the "reverence machine",
• I was aware that the museum had a sporadic contemporary art programme but what I was proposing , I think, is the deepest and most prolonged relationship with a contemporary artist in its history so far, involving nearly every part of the organisation.
• AlixPartners and Louis Vuitton liked the idea and came on board.
• The BM is very keen continually to reassert the relevance of its collection to the contemporary world
• I think my proposal very much fitted into that philosophy
• to feel like an imposter.
• I pluck ideas out of the ether then post-rationalise wildly – a very different thought-process from that of an archaeologist or historian.
• Contrary to my anxieties, though, warm invitations started popping into my inbox asking me to come and view suggested objects.
• online database
• I had been given permission to translate a vague fantasy into an increasingly daunting reality.
• I feared I would be seen as an ignorant interloper by the people who spend their lives learning about and caring for the collection. I thought they might see me as a trendy Thor Heyerdahl, falling into easy but spurious cross-cultural comparisons, misinterpreting objects.
• . In the end, though, I had to face up to the fact that I was there because I was an artist and to be confident about that.
• "I like working with you, Grayson,", she said. "You decide and you deliver."
• was encouraged to have a say in the design, interpretation, marketing, special events, even visually impaired access.
• "where the world meets the world", and I was given it to play with.

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• on a construit la Grande Bibliothèque au moment où l’on inventait Internet ! Ces grandes tours sur la Seine me font penser à l’observatoire qu’avaient fait construire les maharajahs à côté de Delhi, alors que Galilée, exactement à la même époque, mettait au point la lunette astronomique. Aujourd’hui, il n’y a que des singes dans l’observatoire indien. Un jour, il n’y aura plus que des singes à la Grande Bibliothèque.
• Pour moi, la solitude est la photographie du monde moderne, pourtant surpeuplé.
• C’est en tout cas ma réponse aux vieux grognons qui accusent Petite Poucette de ne plus avoir de mémoire, ni d’esprit de synthèse. Ils jugent avec les facultés cognitives qui sont les leurs, sans admettre que le cerveau évolue physiquement.

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• showing the public an unexpected collegiality between museum staffers.
• Padgham changed his museum’s Twitter avatar to the San Francisco Giants logo when they were in the Major League Baseball playoffs
• “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is no longer a place you go to,” says Padgham.”Art can be a part of your hometown spirit. There’s a freedom to no longer be this very proper institution.”

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• Mark will be spending two years at the museum helping support our exhibitions and galleries and taking inspiration form the objects to help design new products and inventions.

• The Museum of Modern Art’s “Talk to Me: Design and the Communication Between People and Objects” is one of the smartest design shows in years — by which I mean that it’s intelligent but also that it’s made for the texting, tweeting, social-networking, app-downloading, smartphone-wielding museumgoer.
• “Talk to Me” introduces design into the conversation.
• “pancommunication — everything and everybody conveying content and meaning in all possible combinations.”
• Buried in the progressive chatter of “Talk to Me,” it turns out, are some tough questions about the way museums talk to us.

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• the museums that most inspire me from a public service perspective--institutions with missions that stretch far beyond their walls.
• fundamentally repositioning what the institution is there to do.
• That's why I'm talking with people like Monica, to understand how the museum can be a partner in how we make progress throughout the community--not just at 705 Front Street.

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• Fans with their scarf collection, with their team mascot, the mole (underground, get it?) fans getting married,  and much more
• why museums can't be so appreciative of what the people who support us do? 
• This was not an exhibit about big donors, but rather featured everyday people, who, in their leisure time, loved the team.
• things that have very discernible "personalities"
• People become fans of things they associate with and want to align themselves to
• And even with this, oftentimes museums don't really focus their brand enough to only be 'for' one particular type of person
• we're much worse at doing is celebrating those people
• Certainly they do. Capitalizing on them, however, is a completely different thing
• Recognizing fans doesn't require an exposition about them. It does require taking them seriously though, and continuously adding real value to their lives.

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