Today is World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development. To celebrate:

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) in partnership with UNESCO and various other partners from corporations to civil society is launching the world campaign “Do One Thing for Diversity and Inclusion”, aimed at engaging people around the world to Do One Thing to support Cultural Diversity and Inclusion.

How much do you love the fact that museums is number one?

Edit: Quelalexandradit quite rightly points out:

All of these are great EXCEPT #7.  Holy shit.  The “stereotypes” game?  That’s really not okay.  

How about if we replaced that with the “facts game.” You put a post-it note with a country on your head, and then everyone else gets to check Wikipedia and tell you facts about the country and its culture.  Then you win if you guess the country correctly.

I got so excited about #1 only scanned the rest… 

The UK Museums Association has released guidelines on internships. Taking a ‘positive view’ of the potential of internships, they do however recognise that there should be value for both the museum and the person doing the interning. That is to say, that making coffee or filing is probably not what an intern has in mind when they apply for museum experience. 

It goes on to to state:

The MA believes that all internships should:

• Pay reasonable work-related expenses and give interns reasonable access to staff benefits (such as free tickets to exhibitions or events).
• Be planned and structured with a clear brief, specific job content and a named line manager or supervisor.
• Give a clear outline of what is being offered to interns, and what is expected of the intern.
• Offer an agreed training and development plan with the intern, setting out what learning opportunities will be offered.
• Ensure that potential interns are told whether there is a realistic chance of the internship leading on to employment.
• Be of a minimum of eight weeks and a maximum 12 months (if paid) and a maximum of three months (if unpaid).

However, elsewhere on their site, they have an article that also highlights some of the problems - such as the threat to workplace diversity (those who can afford to work for free and the real possibility that people will end up feeling ‘exploited and undervalued’). And this in a climate where paid traineeships and internships are wildly oversubscribed (five places at the British Museum attracted 1533 applications and 3200 graduates for 20 places in Scotland). 

Here in Austria, the situation isn’t any better. Routinely, longer-term, unpaid internships (or those with a small degree of funding - roughly €300/£240/$380 per month) are advertised in the jobs section with the sort of required candidate qualifications to be expected of entry-level and above jobs and job descriptions to match.

I know, museums are underfunded and rely to some degree on the willingness of well-educated people to work for less money than they would get in other sectors, if they get paid at all. However, it is exclusionary practice. I work part-time (30 hours per week) to fund my way through my PhD. It makes the PhD a very slow process and so I wanted to gather some practical experience at the same time. Keep my hand in, as it were. I have one full day per week that I wanted to give to a museum on a long term basis. Perhaps I could proofread English materials for them? Do tours for them? I don’t want something really that relies on the fact that I am a native English speaker - especially when I have spent so much time learning German! -  but I was prepared to help out. No takers. I know the downside of having someone who only comes once per week, but no one was even prepared to meet me and discuss the possibility. 

And so, the cycle of having to work (anywhere) to fund studies to get a museum job hinders the actual studying and interning that would help me get said job. Does anyone know of any schemes or museums that have found a way to alleviate the situation? Have you worked out a way out of this conundrum? 

The book liner notes read that ” Letting Go? investigates path-breaking public history practices at a time when the traditional expertise of museums seems challenged at every turn – by the Web and digital media, by community based programming, by new trends in oral history, and by contemporary artists.”   The book is divided into sections or themes, each containing a diverse set of thought pieces (method and theory), case studies, and conversations (application dialogues).  The authors are leading authorities actively engaged in their subject area.  Letting Go? is a very applied presentation.

• The first theme Virtually Breaking Down: Authority and the Web
• The second theme Throwing Open the Doors: Communities as Curators
• The third theme of the volume addresses popular oral history projects such as Story Corps.

The man who stole the Mona Lisa

In this July 10, 2009 file photo, the original glass-topped coffin of lynching victim Emmett Till is seen rusting in a shack at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Ill., after it was found by investigators at the cemetery where four workers were accused of digging up bodies to resell plots. On Aug. 28, 2009, officials from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington and members of Till’s family announced the casket’s donation to the museum’s planned National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington when it opens in 2015. M. Spencer Green/AP

The groundbreaking for the the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC will take place soon. The Washington Post has slideshow on their homepage showing the plans and several of the objects in the collection, accompanied by commentary like that above. It does seem to wander off into other museums on the Mall after photo 15 or so. 

This graph comes via Colleen Dilenschneider’s Know your Bone blog:

I’m pleased to have the opportunity to share a tidbit of data uncovered by IMPACTS Research & Development (the company for which I work, folks)! The data below was first published by the National Awareness, Attitudes and Usage Study (NAAU) and, since April 2011, it has been re-confirmed in six, separate, proprietary studies on behalf of various visitor-serving organizations with which we work. The image below shows unprompted responses to the question and are displayed with the index value for each response. The bottom line? People don’t go to a museum to see the newest exhibit… people go to a museum to see the newest exhibit with people they care about.

Read the whole article here. 

queenofmango:

OH, CHARLES SAATCHI, HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

£20 for an exhibition – are museums fooling the public, or themselves? | Charles Saatchi

There’s no point in museums being free if the cost of special exhibitions is prohibitively and unnecessarily expensive

It’s lovely to stroll around our museums for free. Not so nice to find that, once you have been sucked in with no admission charge, the exhibition you want to see costs a tenner or more to enter. It’s irritating for the visitor, and perplexing.

Are museums being elitist, and feel that only people who are prepared to pay the £10, £12 or £14 admission fee are worthy of seeing shows by their selected artists?

No, no, museum directors would argue, we have to charge for admission to exhibitions in order to finance the running costs of the museum, the transportation and insurance of the exhibited works, the cost of installing the show and so on.

But even London’s leading museums, admirable in so many ways, only earn about 7% of their annual costs from ticket sales – the rest being provided by the public purse, and sponsorship. For example one of the museums I love visiting, the Tate, raises just £6.9m from admission charges across all four of its galleries, set against its running costs of £98.5m.

Why bother fleecing the public for such a piddling contribution when the taxpayer is already funding the great bulk of your costs? It’s simply double taxation on paying visitors.

I may not know much about finance, with a Fail in GCSE maths, but I do know that attendance at our own gallery could drop by 50% if we charged admission. Perhaps this is because our audience is often young, and not always affluent. Being free-entry for all exhibitions has allowed us to offer five of the six most-visited shows in London over the last two years, according to the Art Newspaper’s survey of museum attendance.

I may be a full-blown egocentric, and deeply self-serving, but I do not believe that this is because people flock to share my taste in art. Neither do I believe that more people are interested in seeing our shows of new art from India, or the Middle East, or Germany, or even the UK, than they are seeing a Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern. Or Picasso at the National Gallery. Or David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery. We attract many visitors because people don’t wish to fork out the whacking entry charges to these important shows. It is a generally held view that had these spectacular exhibitions been free, attendance would have probably quadrupled.

If, for example, the Rothko retrospective had open admission, sales of catalogues, posters, keyrings, notepads, calendars, tea towels and other knick-knacks, would surely have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled – there is a good chance that the income produced could have been as great as that raised by charging for entry. It’s an estimate that is shared by a number of managers of the vast retail outlets at our leading museums.

It may also be true that if museums weren’t featherbedded by state funding, and instead focused on maximising their public appeal, they would discover income from sponsors would be easier to attract. Sponsors like to back popular, well-attended exhibitions; the promotional budgets they hand over to museums then offer greater, more tangible value.

Of course one of the drawbacks of heavily attended exhibitions is that visitors feel short-changed by the crowds; the experience of viewing a big-name show is often unpleasant, claustrophobic, and destroys any hope of experiencing the works in any thoughtful way.

Museums would find that if they stay open until 10pm, a lot of overcrowding evaporates and people are able to enjoy the works at times that suit them; we use after-hours to give our 500,000 gallery members, Facebook and Twitter followers, their own late nights.

The worst of all museum sins, in my view, is to charge schools for their pupils to see their shows. From our own experiences, state schools have no budget to pay for their students’ entry. Only private schools can manage it, often by asking parents to cover the cost of school trips.

The Tate’s standard rate for school pupils is £5 a head for groups of 10 or more, and the National Portrait Gallery charges £9 a head for pupils in groups of 20.

I’m not trying to pick a fight with the Art Gods. I simply think something got screwed up with a policy of keeping museums free – and then frustrating visitors by charging them for entry to the shows they most wish to see.

I like to think that museum directors are not elitist, would like to attract the widest possible audience and are up to the challenge of managing their museum’s affairs so that the widest number of us can benefit. Of course I could be wrong; perhaps they are just snooty types, who don’t want a lot of riffraff around. Or, worse, they could be so removed from reality that they can’t quite follow that £20 is a bit much even for a professional couple to part with every time they want to take in a show.