I look at the headline of this very serious story on the cultural impact of technology and all I can think of is a damn movie logo and the comment of one of the boys in the band:
"Ït's lïke ä päir öf ëyes. Yöu're löoking ät thë umläut, änd ït's löoking ät yoü."
— Dävid St. Hübbins, This Is Spinal Tap
Museums are mining detailed information from visitors, raising questions about the use of Big Data in the arts
One morning last week, a team of experts at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum searched for hidden spots in the rotunda to conceal tiny electronic transmitters. The devices will enable the museum to send messages about artworks to visitors via their smartphones while at the same time collect details about the comings and goings of those guests.And no, püppchen isn't puppy, it's sweetie (doll). And yes, the umlauts in the quote are gratuitous.
At today’s museums, all eyes aren’t just on the art. They’re on the visitors.
Across the country, museums are mining increasingly detailed layers of information about their guests, employing some of the same strategies that companies like Macy’s, Netflix and Wal-Mart have used in recent years to boost sales by tracking customer behavior. Museums are using the visitor data to inform decisions on everything from exhibit design to donor outreach to gift-shop marketing strategies.
At the Dallas Museum of Art, a frequent-visitor program asks guests to check in at spots around the building via their phones or on kiosks. By doing so, members win points toward rewards, like free parking, special-exhibition tickets or private use of the museum’s movie theater. The museum then filters the data to better understand guests’ behavior, like how often they visit, which shows they flock to and what art they ignore.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts analyzes data from tens of thousands of visitor surveys to help make certain curatorial decisions. If the numbers indicate people aren’t so interested in a coming show, it might be reworked, postponed or moved to a smaller gallery. “It’s really a culture shift in museums for the curators to pay attention not just to what’s significant art historically, but also what’s perhaps on trend,” says Kristin Prestegaard, the museum’s chief engagement officer.
The moves have some critics questioning whether the “Big Data” revolution that is transforming American corporations has a place in the nonprofit arts world.
“When you’re looking at the art, you don’t want the art looking back at you,” said Marc Rotenberg, a Georgetown University law professor who heads the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy research group. “It’s not as if people going out of museums say, ‘Jeez, I wish that museum knew a lot more about me, I would’ve had a lot better experience.’ It’s being driven by the possibility of increased sales, advertising and better marketing.”
As museums collect more personal information from their guests, privacy advocates warn, they’re opening themselves up to the same kinds of security breaches and potential lawsuits that have roiled companies like Home Depot and eBay. And with data-mining tools able to calculate a show’s most popular artworks, some museum observers worry that curators will choose exhibits that are the most crowd pleasing instead of the most challenging or artistically significant.
But museum directors say it’s about time the art world catches up to the private sector in retrieving basic information about their visitors to make informed decisions.
“If a mall developer knew how many people crossed the threshold into the mall but didn’t know what people were buying or sales a square foot or sales per customer, their enterprise would be considered fatally flawed—but we’ve accepted that lack of information for over a century,” said Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Dallas Museum of Art. “All we know is who walks through the door. We don’t know who they are, what they’re doing or what they’re learning.”
In a world where statistics used to be gathered by a guy in a gallery with a clicker, the big-data push is a potential game-changer....MORE
