Twitter need

Our Facebook friend Meresamun is almost 3,000 years old. We haven’t corresponded with the Egyptian temple singer much, partly because she’s a mummy. But Meresamun’s tech savvy changed our perception of the Oriental Institute, where she’s on display through December 6.

During the last six months, we’ve noticed an explosion in the number of museums, artists and critics using Facebook, Twitter and other online resources. This month, the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) launches ArtBabble, a website dedicated to art-related videos, says Daniel Incandela, the IMA’s director of new media. The collaborative site will feature content from leading art museums and institutions. Although Incandela won’t reveal specifics, he promises “six to seven really big names.”

We called up Incandela because the IMA is the nearest Midwestern museum art critics routinely cite as a new-media pioneer. He explains that the IMA began raising its online profile in 2005 after focus groups revealed some Indianapolis residents considered the museum “stuffy and conservative.” Staff members believed technology offered “new ways to reach out to audiences, provide new experiences at the museum and create new connections to works of art,” Incandela says. They started small, developing audio and video guides to exhibitions.

Such content is now available on most Chicago museum websites. In January, Patti Smith visited the Block Museum in conjunction with “Polaroids: Mapplethorpe.” We missed her sold-out event, so we watched it at the office—or rather, at home. The Renaissance Society has its own YouTube channel. The Art Institute produces Musecast podcasts (available through iTunes U) that include brief presentations by curators and announcements about special events. Other initiatives enable visitors to explore the encyclopedic museum’s collection in depth. But they’re clustered on a page that’s buried under the heading “Education,” whereas the IMA, the Brooklyn Museum and Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center give their new-media projects prominent placement on their home pages or entice visitors with headings like “Community” and “Connect.”

“People talk about how the Internet is really about sharing,” says one of our favorite art bloggers, New York–based Paddy Johnson. “I always thought that was the underlying principle of museums.”

While Incandela appreciates the way museums distribute information through the Web, he’s particularly impressed by how institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum and the Getty “reach out to specific individuals to give them a personalized message” with applications like Twitter. Loyola University Museum of Art, the Spertus Museum, ThreeWalls and a handful of other local museums and galleries have Twitter accounts, but the city’s largest art institutions don’t. The Art Institute’s associate director of museum communications, Elizabeth Boyne, informs us the museum recently acquired an account and plans to tweet the Modern Wing opening. Angelique Power, the MCA’s marketing director, says via e-mail, “It is not good to just be in the mix of online chatter to just be there.” Both institutions have active Facebook pages, though: When we checked the Art Institute’s page recently, we saw some of its fans bitching on the museum’s wall about the admission hike. The Hyde Park Art Center’s Facebook page links to its Flickr photo galleries, another tool the IMA embraced early.

Until ArtBabble launches, the IMA’s blog arguably remains its best-known online initiative—at a time when few other museums bother to have one. When asked why he thinks the IMA blog garners international attention, Incandela replies that the museum’s staff members spent a lot of time thinking about how to “make an institutional blog not seem institutional.” He adds: “Instead of the marketing department or the PR department overseeing the blog, new media is in charge of that. We reached out across all the departments to find people who’d be willing to share their own stories in their own voices…instead of us controlling their voices or shaping how the blog would be.” The IMA bloggers’ personal stories elicit equally personal responses from commenters. Johnson identifies that kind of engagement as the key to using social media effectively. “There’s no point in maintaining a Facebook or Twitter account if you’re not connecting to people,” she says. “If you have 1,000 followers but nobody cares, it doesn’t mean anything.”

E-mail your favorite online museum resources to art@timeoutchicago.com and check our blog for continuing coverage of this issue.

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