Is Art Really Asynchonous? What About Museums?

Recently, marketing guru Seth Godin posted this chart on his blog:

Godin explains how to read the chart:

Here are a dozen or so forms of communication, arranged on two axes.

On the horizontal, they rank from asynchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are separated in time--like a letter) and synchronous (meaning the creator and the responder are in real time proximity to each other--like a phone call).

Up and down, I've charted the quality of the medium. Quality in terms of density of information exchanged. The 140 characters in Twitter is about as low density as you can get other than a stop light. A movie, on the other hand, is loud and bright and two hours long and there's audience reaction and it is edited and designed to evoke a response.

To be clear, then: movies take a long time to make, but they're high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there's not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it's 400 years old.

(To read his entire blog post, click here.)

When I saw this, my initial reaction was to think that museums need to move themselves into that upper right quadrant.  But, is that the right place for a museum to move?  Is the role of a museum to provide transformative experiences for its audience (transformative in the sense that one’s beliefs or understanding or knowledge about the world is changed as a result of the visit)?  And, if a museum seeks to be a place for transformative experiences (for those who seek such experiences) how much of the experience needs to be directed by the museum and how much of it can people accomplish on their own through their interactions with the museum’s objects?  Godin places one type of museum object, art, in the lower left quadrant (and nowhere near my initial thought) - do you agree with that?

Where do you think museums should fall on the chart?  Does it vary by type of museum?  Or type of museum experience?  To share your thoughts click on “comments” below (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment). 

- Sally

Comments

[Ken Bubp]

What if the "right" answer is that a museum ought to occupy as many of the quadrants as possible?

As my (brilliant) CEO Ellen Rosenthal likes to say, we want to create a symphony of experiences: emotional highs and lows, times of rest and times of high physical activity, high touch and low touch, etc. People with limited leisure time want some variety in their visit, the assumption goes. That's why people attend mediocre sit down shows at theme parks. (?)

What if a museum was purposeful about having some low density experience that involved instant feedback interaction (lower right), coupled with transformative high bandwith change-your-life sort of experiences (upper right), with some rich texture but passively received experiences (upper left)? In a museum visit, I'm not sure I'd want three hours of any of those experiences alone, but a "smorgasboard" with each might be good. Especially so if I was visiting with a group who had diverse interests and information/experience-intake preferences.

Great post.

Ken Bubp
COO
Conner Prairie Interactive History Park

[Guy Hermann]

This very interesting study

http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/modern-art-more-likely-to-stir-the-heart-1462

suggests that people's experiences vary by the type of art in the museum--older art engenders more intellectual engagement, newer pieces more emotional engagement.

The important thing is to be talking about a variety of potential experiences. Too often museums are pigeonholed as "contemplative" or "interactive" (or some other descriptor) when they could be both, or neither.