Abstract
In the mid-1990s, when many museums were beginning to take their first hesitant steps toward building online personae, the worry still holding many back was that if a collection or experience were available online, in-person visitation would invariably decline (Anderson 1996; Cody 1997; Wallace 1995). In the 25 years since, that fear has largely been dispelled even as our technical ability to digitally capture and disseminate cultural collections has improved exponentially, even to the point that the online experience in some ways exceeds the in-person experience. Indeed, museums have moved far beyond the ability to show a few images of the major works in a collection, adding opportunities that mirror almost all the offerings of the in-person experience. But even this “Mona Lisa” effect has not driven in-person visitation down. Rather the opposite. Anyone who has elbowed through the crowds at many of the world’s best-known museums can attest to that. Indeed, having been among this ubiquitous press of people, I could not help but think on such occasions that it would take an act of God to reduce the numbers and improve the quality of viewing.
Highlights
In 2017, I defended my dissertation on this topic (Hoffman 2017), engaging the question of the post-object nature of digital culture or, rather, if the cultural object no longer exists, will the digital dimensions we have created for it be sufficient? In 2017, the answer was quite resoundingly “no.” In 2020, the pandemic corollary to this question—online exhibitions replacing in-person exhibitions— comes up short
What quickly became clear is that the same truism for in-person exhibitions holds for their online counterparts: they are essentially all the same, with their own unique spin
Google Art Project ( Google Arts and Culture) has partnered with many museums to bring a professional level of this technology to museums around the world, simultaneously highlighting works in the collection
Summary
In the mid-1990s, when many museums were beginning to take their first hesitant steps toward building online personae, the worry still holding many back was that if a collection or experience were available online, in-person visitation would invariably decline (Anderson 1996; Cody 1997; Wallace 1995). Museums have moved far beyond the ability to show a few images of the major works in a collection, adding opportunities that mirror almost all the offerings of the in-person experience. Even this “Mona Lisa” effect has not driven in-person visitation down. Traditional museum exhibitions are all the same, and yet each is unique They all generally take on the same characteristics around the globe, their key components being the arrangements of artifact, specimen, or cultural object in a physical space with interpretation designed to give new insight or knowledge—an essay or treatise written in three dimensions. And in opposition, searching for specific works in the collection often still requires going directly to a museum’s own website.[8]
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