When the talking’s over…
A belated follow-up to the last posting. The day went well, the audience laughed when I wanted them to, and didn’t laugh when I wasn’t expecting it. I even managed to keep to time, despite having about 55 slides. So job done, and I got to visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery as well on Saturday morning. The fact that owing to part of the Northern Line being closed I missed my train home and had to wait two hours in King’s Cross Station was merely an added bonus.
There were a couple of slightly jarring moments. First when someone from the Tate was talking about a project for which they had been sponsored by BT and mentioned such sponsorship as a way forward for other museums. Errrm, no, not really. Big national institutions may be able to get sponsorship from the likes of British Telecom, but for the rest of us it is neither so easy nor so lucrative. I don’t expect to see major corporate sponsorship of, say, the Inversneckie Teaspoon Museum (© Graham Turnbull). Later, someone else had a flexible attitude as to what constitutes a question. Perhaps making a blatant commercial pitch in the Q&A session is not the best of ideas. Tacking “What do you think?” on the end doesn’t really make it a question, you know.
I was very interested in the digital photography project that the V&A have been running within the museum. People (though I recall that it seemed to be principally aimed at families) were given digital cameras to take round the museum and encouraged to take photographs, which they could then take back to the education centre, download and print. They could also work on the images on a computer (aided by digital artists brought in by the V&A) to create new images which could then be put onto objects such as T-shirts and key-rings. I assume there was a charge for this, but I can’t recall if that was mentioned. The whole project was very staff-intensive and must have been quite expensive, though it wouldn’t be as expensive for us as we wouldn’t have to cope with the number of visitors that the V&A does. It’s a great means of getting people to look at the objects in a different way. One thing I wanted to know was what they did with all then photographs taken by the participants - did they keep them? Certainly no-one got to take away the digital originals as far as I could see, but rather they only got prints (and the other stuff if they had wanted to do that). I’d have thought it would have been nice for people to take away the digital images and put them up on Flickr or on their Bebo or MySpace site. That’s what we will be doing in our John Muir’s Dunbar project - but of course we have no copyright issues with regard to works of art that may be the subject of the photographs.