In this post, I’m looking at government funding of arts and heritage and comparing it to 2010′s effort. Again it’s a complex and slightly confusing picture, not least because some of the figures reported for the 2008-2009 year do not always tally between the respective reports. For the purpose of this post, I’ve used the figures cited in the 2011 report wherever possible.

First the overall picture of Federal, State and Local government funding:

Comparison of state funding over the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 years (Source: ABS)

As with my 2010 post, I’ve made funding increases over 6% green, and decreases over 6% red.

Cultural heritage and ‘other’ museums had a significant funding boost in 2009-2010, particularly at Federal and Local levels. This appears to have been at the expense of large cuts to Federal environmental heritage funding  (local government funding of environmental heritage is not provided in the report). Meanwhile, there has been an increase of state funding of art museums, partially offset by a cut to local government funding in this area.

As with last year, there are significant (and inconsistent) year-on-year changes in funding at state level:

State by state breakdown of heritage funding: 2008-2009 & 2009-2010 (Source ABS)

The big increase in Art Museum funding in NSW appears to be a return to ‘usual’ funding levels, since the 2008-2009 amount was a 32% decrease from 2007-2008 (see table in previous blog post). The drop in Art Museum funding in Qld is also in the context of a far larger increase in the previous year. The ACT has had large funding increases across the board (again balancing cuts from the previous years in some instances.)

It’s possible that state funding cycles are highly variable when looked at on a year-by-year basis like this, hence the erratic numbers – perhaps comparing three-year averages might give a more clear picture of what’s going on.

Another point to note is that while state funding of environmental heritage is relatively static in the aggregate, the individual state breakdowns show some clear winners and losers. I should point out that no states saw cuts to environmental heritage last year, and a couple had reasonably large increases, so the funding picture for environmental heritage may not be as bad as it first appears. However, when taking the federal funding into consideration too, it does look like environmental heritage has had a pretty severe funding blow.

It looks like the 2011 version of this report was issued just before Christmas, although I only found out about its release a few days ago. So I thought I’d look at the 2011 report and compare it to the 2010 figures I blogged about previously, to see if there are any interesting changes (or conversely, evidence of stable patterns).

The first post I’m revisiting is Who’s visiting?, which looked at participation rates by age. (‘Participation rate’ is defined as the person having attended that kind of venue least once in the previous 12 month period). Now it looks like the participation rates shown in the 2010 report  were based on data from 2005-2006, whereas the 2011 report has more recent figures (2009-2010). So what has happened to participation rates over the past five years?

Firstly, let’s look at the overall participation rates from each year (NB: the ABS report also includes libraries, archives and performing arts, but these are not included in this analysis):

Attendance rates at Australian cultural venues (people aged 15 or over), as a total figure and as a percentage of the population (Source: ABS).

So it appears that participation rates are increasing across the board, albeit modestly (and the report does not say whether this increase is statistically significant or not). This increase appears to be spread across the age ranges:

Attendance rates at cultural venues by age group, comparing 2005-2006 and 2009-2010 (Source: ABS)

So there is no radical change in any particular age group, and the patterns of participation follow broadly the same patterns in both 2006-2006 and 2009-2010. Similarly to previous years, the report also showed that women are still slightly more likely to be visitors than men. So there is nothing earth shattering, but perhaps there is something to be quietly optimistic about if the increased participation rates are evidence of a slow and steady trend.

A couple of weeks ago, while I was in Brisbane, I spent an afternoon taking in the Matisse: Drawing Life exhibition at GoMA. As regular readers would know, it was not my first visit to GoMA and given I’m a bit of a Matisse fan (albeit a lay fan, not one with an MA in Art History!), it was something I was looking forward to.

And before I create the wrong impression, I should say that I was definitely not disappointed by what I saw. There was an impressive collection of drawings, woodcuts, etching and collages spread over a significant portion of GoMA’s ground floor. (Unfortunately I was not permitted to take photos of the works to help jog my memory of specific works, but I suspect this was beyond GoMA’s control and part and parcel of hosting an exhibition of this type.)

I probably spent at least an hour and a half in the exhibition – long enough that I didn’t really get much of a chance to experiment in the interactive drawing room at the exhibition’s exit (by this stage it was nearing closing time). However I left feeling that my $16 entry (student concession – a rare perk of the PhD student!) was money well-spent.

Part of the Drawing Room. Visitors could try their hand at drawing on iPads (shown) or on paper. The iPad images could be shown on the large screen. Surrounding the benches were a wide range of objects similar to those seen in Matisse's works.

But even so, I think there were some missed opportunities with the overall interpretation of the works. It appeared to me that the main exhibition text was directed at experts and art historians, whereas the real nuggets were either relegated to the “For Kids” text or the virtual tour comprising short video clips accessible via QR code. (These clips were very good by the way – I particularly enjoyed the ones made in conjunction with Griffith University / Queensland College of Art that showed how etchings and such like are made (see here). However, as far as I could tell, I was the only person using the QR codes. I wonder how well they are used?)

The “For Kids” text was written in an informal style, often using the second person and active language. It was broken up into short paragraphs, making it easy on the eye. It pointed out features of the works that you may have missed. And while it was ostensibly “for kids”, in some cases it was the only place where a knowledge of art history was not automatically assumed. As an example, there was a whole room of works that we were told were from Matisse’s ‘odalisque’ period. (Obvious, huh?) While from the context you could more or less figure out what it meant, it was only in the kids’ text that it was explained that ‘odalisque’ is a word for a female nude posed indoors, and is derived from the Turkish word ‘odalik’. So I learned something new. To me that’s not kids’ text, that’s interpretation – and it works for all ages!

As a case in point, here is a comparison of the different interpretations of a work commissioned by the Barnes Foundation – in main text, kids text, and the QR clip (with apologies for the shocking quality of the photos – I hope you get the idea).

The main text for "The Dance"

The Kids Text

I found the kids text far more enlightening about what I was actually looking at, and you have to see the video clip to get the kicker – initially, the work was accidentally made to the wrong scale!

I note from the website that the exhibition was curated by a French curatorial team, so it is likely that the exhibition text is from them as well (although the QR clips are obviously a GoMA production; the source of the kids text is not obvious but I’m guessing that’s GoMA’s too). So it’s possible that there is something lost in the translation, however my (limited) experience of French museums is that exhibition text generally assumes far more knowledge than is usual in the Anglosphere (even topics I know well have had labels that sailed straight over my head). I’m not sure if this represents a real difference in what the average Parisian on the street knows, or just different curatorial attitudes to what people *should* know.

Despite these points that are specific to this particular exhibition, I would argue that art exhibitions in general have more formal and less visitor-focused labels. Perhaps this is because other kinds of museums (particularly natural history) are more consciously focused on a family audience (art museums seemingly have no qualms about being mainly for ‘grown ups’). Or perhaps I’m betraying my relative ignorance of art relative to the sciences (but then again, wouldn’t the typical visitor lack specialist subject knowledge too)?

I just hope it’s not because clear, conversational and accessible text is somehow seen as a “kids’ thing”.

As the one-year anniversary has only just passed, it is a very recent event that’s still fresh in everyone’s memories. The exhibition focused not just on what happened, but the resilience of the people who picked up the pieces and moved on in the wake of the disaster. Australians who followed the event on the news will remember this resilience embodied in Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s emotional “We are Queenslanders” speech:

And in the exhibition we get to see a facsimile of her handwritten notes from that day:

Graphic about resilience including Anna Bligh's notes from her famous "We are Queenslanders" speech.

This is very much a story-led, not an object-led exhibition. There is a great selection of images and dramatic footage of rescue efforts. The relatively few objects are everyday items that had been retrieved during the clean-up. I found that there was an understated power to these objects:

A mud-caked record player retrieved from the wreckage

A sizeable portion of the exhibition is dedicated to a space where visitors (many of whom would have been directly affected by the floods) are able to share their stories (I blogged about the role of museums in sharing these kinds of community memories at the time):

Part of the wall that people could stick up their own experiences of the floods. Note the exhibition has only been opened for a couple of days and there are already a considerable number of contributions. The writing table is to the right and the wall continues to the left of this image.

A poignant personal story of survival and loss

The design of the exhibition is evocative of the ‘rebuilding’ theme – the exhibition panels are mostly bare plywood attached to vertical timber supports, with construction fencing and plastic sheeting used to enclose certain spaces (see above). The design of the graphics (white text and straight lines on a blue background) looks like it is intended to represent the blueprints of a rebuilding project – but this is just a guess on my part. Overall the design fits in well with the story being told.

However, I found the exhibition sections that attempted to put the flood disaster into broader scientific context (i.e., natural disasters across geological timeframes) a bit out of place. For me this was primarily a story of human experience and this alone was strong enough – it didn’t need to be placed in a planetary context. I wonder what the rationale for including this additional content was:  To show that this was not an extraordinary event in the global scheme of things? That life on Earth has adapted and responded in the face of disaster since time immemorial? Maybe something a little less remote from living memory and human experience may have been a better choice if this was the interpretive intent (e.g., the cleanup of the 1974 floods in Brisbane).

One absent story (assuming I didn’t miss it) was the experience of the museum itself during the flood – the South Bank precinct was certainly affected and the museum presumably had to make efforts to ensure collections weren’t damaged or lost. Perhaps this ‘inside story’ was more of interest to people like me and my visiting companion (another museum person of sorts). But even so, making the museum part of the story (instead of just the reporter of it) may have added another dimension to the exhibition – the museum is as much a part of the community as any other public institution. As such, it shares our achievements and challenges.

These comprehensive lists show both overall and daily attendance figures for (predominantly) art exhibitions around the world, ranging from the 10,000+ daily visitors to the mega-blockbusters to far more modest ventures. There are also top ten list by category, such as “Decorative Arts” or “Impressionists” or “Antiquities”.

There are several years of data available online, going back to 2003 (links posted below):

• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
• 2006
• 2005
• 2004
• 2003

That represents a fair data set for spotting longer term trends or changes over time. Looking at this data, I was interested to see how often exhibitions in Japan top the list, with exhibitions in Tokyo and elsewhere often dominating the top ten. This is in contrast to the most visited museums overall, which are predominantly the big institutions in London, Paris, New York and Washington.

Looking at the Australian scene, the top exhibition for 2010 was the 6th Asia Pacific Triennial at Queensland Art Gallery (34th overall).  Both Queensland Art Gallery and its sister institution, GoMA, managed more than one entry in the top 100 as well as additional entries under specific categories.  Other Australian exhibitions to make the list were Masterpieces from Paris at the National Gallery of Australia and the Tim Burton exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial attracted some 4,400 people a day. That sounds like quite a crowd, until you compare it to the top exhibition overall - Hasegawa Tohaku at the Tokyo National Museum – which attracted over 12,000 people per day!

While there are tertiary-level courses in interpretation, and some organisations offer accreditation programs, these are not ‘gatekeeper’ qualifications and pretty much anyone can say they do interpretation, regardless of how much knowledge and experience they actually have.

This can make it difficult for experienced interpreters to have their skills recognised and valued in the way that (say) architects and designers can. While the lack of rigid qualifications is not necessarily a bad thing, it can lead to interpretation being relegated behind other (more clearly defined) specialisms, particularly on large capital projects where the people in charge of the purse strings may not really appreciate what interpretation is.

Unlike some professions (neurosurgery springs to mind), interpretation comprises skills that are not necessarily unique to interpreters. I’ve been working in interpretation-related positions for over a decade, but I don’t have any formal qualifications (although I’d argue that my Grad Dip in Science Communication covered many of the skills that interpreters need).  And not all interpretation jobs are the same: if we were to create a one-size-fits-all training and accreditation model for interpreters, how big would it have to be?

Number three of Freeman Tilden’s six principles of interpretation states:

“Interpretation is an art, which combines many arts, whether the materials presented are scientific, historical or architectural. Any art is in some degree teachable.”

My response to Tilden would be that art (like interpretation) can be hard to define. What is art? One person’s masterpiece can be another’s monstrosity! And that’s before you get to the “my four year old could do better” school of art criticism. Thus I would extend Tilden’s definition to incorporate science and craft as well as art:

• Science: the theories of interpretation (what we know through research and applying theories from education, psychology and the social sciences to the interpretation context);
• Craft: the skills of interpretation (for instance practical performance or public speaking skills, or learning how to write good interpretive text);
• Art: the intuition of interpretation (the bit that is hardest to teach – how to instinctively read your audience and know how to hook them in and keep them engaged).

Thinking about interpretation skills this way might make the training requirements for different interpretation tasks easier to conceptualise. We should be able to define the knowledge (science) and skills (craft) that we want interpreters to have.

However (and this is the tricky bit!) it is probably the “art” part that separates the merely competent interpreters from the truly inspirational ones. 

Marina Bay Sands complex with the ArtScience Museum in foreground (image from homedit.com)

It’s a landmark building by celebrity architecht Moshe Safdie, which opened in February 2011 (so still pretty new when we visited). The design was inspired by a lotus flower but it also gets called ‘the welcoming hand of Singapore’, with a total of 10 ‘fingers’ extending from the centre.

Regular readers will know that I have my doubts about ‘statement’ museum architecture. And I was wondering if this one was going to be a navigational nightmare. But surprisingly, it isn’t – mostly because the majority of exhibition space is actually below the lotus / finger structure, essentially at basement level. But before I get into the exhibitions, I’ll give an overview of the museum building itself.

Like several other Singaporean attractions (the Singapore Flyer springs to mind), the building seems geared up for high-throughput crowds. (Given our Singapore stopovers seem to always have us visiting attractions in the middle of a weekday, I have no idea the extent to which these crowds actually materialise.) Operationally it feels more of an ‘attraction’ than a ‘museum’ too – your entry ticket is priced according to the number of temporary exhibitions you decide to visit, and your ticket only gets you into each exhibition once.

The intended visitor flow is ‘waterfall’ style – i.e., you are encouraged to start at the top and work your way down through the 50,000 sq.ft. of exhibition space. At the top is the smallest level with only three gallery spaces; immediately below that is the Upper Galleries that run in a loop through all the 10 ‘fingers’. Each of the 10 spaces link together like pearls on a string. It’s one-way traffic and you enter and leave at the same point, limiting disorientation (and it doesn’t feel unduly constraining but it would depend on the exhibition I imagine). Two floors below the Upper Galleries are the main exhibition spaces and the museum shop (the lobby is sandwiched between these two levels).

The 'finger' structures in the Upper Galleries offer some unusual display opportunities.

Running through the centre of the whole building is the ‘Rain Oculus’, which collects rainwater from the curve roof and channeling it into a pool that is used as the water supply for the rest rooms. Water flows fairly constantly (before I figured out what was going on I thought it was raining outside).

The top floor, inside the tips of the tallest ‘fingers’, is the only permanent exhibition space: Art Science – a journey through creativity. This is divided into three separate spaces: Curiosity, Inspiration and Expression. The exhibition is intended as an introduction to the concept of ArtScience showing it as a manifestation of human creativity. The spaces are sparsely populated and, writing this several months later, my lasting impression is of gobos, lighting effects and projections, along with a couple of touchscreen interactives. Because it sets itself up as an introductory space, I was expecting these concepts to be more explicitly linked to in the rest of the exhibition spaces. However, this didn’t really happen as the rest of the gallery spaces are essentially given over to hosting touring exhibitions brought in from elsewhere (this is what is on now).

Unfortunately, the museum website seems to live in an eternal present and does not link in any obvious way to information about past exhibitions – thankfully, Wikipedia has stepped in to fill this gap. When we visited there were three touring exhibitions: Dali – Mind of a Genius; Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds; and Van Gogh Alive.

Dali – Mind of a Genius

I’ve been to Dali exhibitions before (Liquid Desire at NGV in 2009 and as part of a Surrealism exhibition in the Pompidou Centre in 2002), so I thought I was familiar with his work – in particular his paintings and films/animation. So for me, the surprising part of this exhibition was the number of bronzes on display (an element of Dali’s work I hadn’t seen before) as well as his forays into furniture design and the decorative arts.

One of Dali's bronzes

There were several versions of the infamous  ’Melting Clock’ motif (if anything a bit too much really!) although I thought this use of a wall of regular clocks distorted by fairground mirrors was a cute touch to finish off the exhibition:

Regular clocks rendered Dali-esque by fairground mirrors

Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds

This exhibition was about the mysteries surrounding the wreck of a ninth century Arab trading dhow, found in the Java Sea. Laden with Chinese ceramics, the wreck is proof of a maritime trade route between China and the Middle East from the era of the tale of Sindbad the Sailor.

The scope and significance of what was found on the wreck was interpreted well, along with the concept that such a find inevitably raises just as many questions as it answers. The exhibition was quite dark so I don’t have any good photos, but the website linked to above is very comprehensive. It says that the exhibition is set to tour until 2015, but no additional venues are advertised yet.

Van Gogh Alive

I was expecting this to be a fairly conventional exhibition of Van Gogh’s works (perhaps a tour from the Van Gogh Museum I’d visited in 2000) so at first I was a bit taken aback to be in a large space surrounded by tall projector screens showing Van Gogh’s work and photographs all synchronised to a classical soundtrack. But once I got over that I was able to enjoy this immersive experience (that is hard to describe but maybe these still renderings and this Youtube video gives you a bit of an idea):

It was an exhibition space you moved in rather than through – you could sit anywhere in the space and have essentially the same experience. For some reason, on the day we visited it looked like they were using the usual exit door for both entrance and exit, so it means we didn’t see the interpretive panels explaining the concept until we were just about to leave (and we almost missed it entirely).

So in conclusion? It was a pleasant and interesting way to pass 2-3 hours away from the heat and humidity of mid-day Singapore. Given the unconventional shape, the building is not as visitor-unfriendly as you’d first expect. However, at the moment at least, it feels more like a sophisticated exhibition hall than a museum with its own mission and identity.

It describes itself as “an online platform for sharing and discussing information about museums and their audiences”. So far there is data for over 3000 museums, including some of the world’s most famous such as MoMA, the Louvre, Tate, and the Smithsonian. (But it’s not just the big global museum brands – I counted at least 20 Australian museums, ranging from the major institutions to a wide range of small and regional ones).

The site lists the most visited museum websites (Metropolitan Museum of Art by a fair margin in 2010 it appears) and the top Facebook likes and Twitter follows. Museums are also individually listed and you can see what’s happening closer to home – for instance these are the summaries for Australia and Adelaide respectively. But it’s not just website and social media – the site also has numbers for onsite visitors as well (although it is the data about online activity that makes this site stand out).

On the topic of museum statistics, there has recently been quite a lively discussion on the ICOM Group on LinkedIn (list members only but it’s easy to sign up) about the information and statistics collected by governments and other bodies around the world. If you’re interested in comparing and contrasting museum statistics from around the world (or even comparing which data are collected, by whom, and why), then I suggest you sign up.

One resource I was directed to from the ICOM discussion was a Culture 24′s project about how to evaluate museum success online. You can download a detailed report about the research project as well as tools and metrics for evaluating online and social media presence. It’s a must if you’re getting to grips with tools like Google Analytics or just wondering how best to track your online presence.

The seminal paper in non-visitor studies is “Staying away: why people choose not to visit museums” published in Museum News in 1983 by Marilyn Hood. In a Google search for a link to this paper, I didn’t find it (I’m not sure if it’s available online) but I did find this very helpful summary of non-visitor research (limited as the field is in relation to visitor research).

Hood’s work found that visitors and non-visitors varied in what kinds of experiences they valued in their leisure time, and the extent to which museums offered (or were perceived to offer) these experiences.

I have recently read a paper that offers an interesting complement to Falk’s ‘Identity’ model of Museum Visitors (as described here)  by incorporating categories of non visitors: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert’s “Museum Perceptual Filters” or MPFs*. Stylianou-Lambert describes the MPFs as ‘spectacles of perception’ that frame the way people think about (art) museums. There are 8 MPFs, five of them relating to visitors and three to non-visitors.  The MPF model emerged independently of Falk’s work, although the author acknowledges the parallels. I’ve related the five visitor MPFs to the nearest Identity in Falk’s model (any error in their allocation is mine):

1. Professional – artists or museum professionals who visit the art museum to inform or inspire their work (Falk’s Professional / Hobbyists)
2. Art-Loving – these visitors valued the aesthetic emotional connection to art rather than increasing their knowledge about it. These are the sort of visitors who stop only at a piece of art that ‘speaks’ to them in some way. (Falk’s Rechargers)
3. Self-exploration – people who come to expand their horizons and learn new things; following a personal and introspective quest (Falk’s Explorers)
4. Cultural Tourism – people who visit art museums mostly on holiday, as part of taking in the cultural offerings of a destination (Falk’s Experience Seekers)
5. Social visitation – visitors who come to the art museum primarily in a social context, particularly in the company of art-loving relatives (Falk’s Facilitators)

Stylianou-Lambert extends the Falk model by characterising three main MPFs of non-visitors:

1. Romantic - people who have a positive view of museums, but for some reason decide that the museum is not for them. This MPF includes people who might feel intimidated by the museum or their lack of knowledge about art.
2. Rejection – people who view the museum in a negative light, as places that are pretentious or snobbish and full of incomprehensible things. By contrast to the Romantics, who placed themselves as being somehow inferior to the museum, Rejecters appeared more self-confident in their dismissive attitude to museum’s importance.
3. Indifference – people who felt that art museums had no personal connection or relevance to their lives. This category is probably the one most closely mirrored in Hood’s work about the disconnect between the leisure expectations of visitors versus non-visitors.

*Reference: Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (2009): Perceiving the art museum, Museum Management and Curatorship, 24:2, 139-158  http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09647770902731783

That was my attempt at developing a ‘theme’ for Susan Cross’s “writing with power, precision and passion” training workshop I attended last week. I won’t try to distill all of the day (hard to do when a lot of it was hands-on practice), but I will talk about themes, as these are the cornerstone of good interpretive writing (good interpretation full stop really).

In interpretation-speak, a theme is a core message or ‘big idea’. The purpose of the theme is to act as a bridge between significance (why you think something is important) and relevance (a way for the visitor to connect to it). It’s the main thing you want to leave your visitors thinking about. Themes can branch out into a series sub-themes, although all the sub-themes should in some way support and illustrate the top-level theme.

People tend to confuse themes with topics. A topic is a subject – for instance ‘local bird species’ is a topic not a theme. To turn that topic into a theme, you would need to spell out what exactly you want to say about local bird species, and put it in familiar, conversational language.

Why bother?

Thinking about themes helps to sharpen your focus when you are writing. It acts as a filter for muddled concepts. Crafting a good theme makes you think carefully about what you want to say to your visitors and why. A strong theme will be succinct and use active verbs to bring people into the place and the story. It will usually stick to one key idea.

The theme also sets the tone of what you will eventually write – formal language begets stuffy writing; conversational language sets you on track for a friendlier tone.

Susan gave us plenty of examples on the day and showed how we could turn the dull into the dynamic. It was a good reminder of the centrality of the theme – a tip I’ll be using in my future writing projects.