compare regular museums with visual museums stating the pros and cons of each
Answers
Answer:
museums
Explanation:
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Answer:
Compare and contrast, with the help of the relevant sources, your experience as viewer in a real museum setting such as NUS’s, and a virtual setting exemplified by a museum’s website of your choice: What are the pros and cons of each setting? What are the differences in the way exhibits are presented? Which of the two settings (the physical or the virtual) is more successful in educating the viewer?
—Mid-term Essay question for an Art History module (I scored an A for this ^_^)
Introduction
The traditional museums that we have come to identify with as part of our culture originated in the 17th century[1] in Europe and were constructed for a variety of purposes. A chief function of the museums then was to house the private art collections of rich aristocrats, before they were gradually opened to the public, motivated by social and political circumstances. The concept of the virtual museum on the other hand, is a much more recent development that emerged during the mid-nineties, following the advent of the Internet as a global system of information and communication delivery.
In comparing and contrasting the viewer’s experiences in a real and a virtual museum setting, we must first consider how each of these settings interacts with the viewer. Both these settings have their comparative advantages as well as deficiencies. In order to make light of the differences in the ways exhibits are presented, we will need to explore the limitations of both settings, as the measures taken to overcome these limitations often result in unique ways of presentation. In the following discussion, I chose the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website[2] as an example of a virtual museum setting to contrast against my own experiences as a viewer in real museums that I have visited over the last few years.
Interactions
The physical act of walking through an art gallery can be described as an aesthetic experience[3]. This experience, however, is also determined by the curator and gallery layout planner’s ability to manipulate space and distance. When I visited the NUS Museums’ Chinese art gallery recently, the first artwork I noticed was an enormous work of Chinese calligraphy that framed the gallery’s entrance. It dawned on me that if the artwork was instead placed along a narrow corridor, the viewer’s perspective of the work would be skewed and the experience less aesthetically pleasing: To successfully exhibit a work of art in a real museum, the manner in which physical space is appropriated is a key factor.
Space and distance can add dimensions to an artwork if utilised correctly. The virtual museum however, almost entirely lacks this physical space, depth and size. Digital photography essentially generates two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional objects. The experience of viewing an artefact in a real setting is a different experience from viewing it through the product of a camera’s lens. No matter how excellent a photograph of an artefact has been taken, certain details, such as the texture of a painting canvas, will be lost; real colours altered through ill-configured monitor hardware settings.
Complications in the notions of physical and virtual space further arise where interactive art is concerned. Interactive art, a concept that was derived from the Futurist movement of the early 20th century and experimented on by luminaries such as Marcel Duchamp, requires some form of physical participation from the audience. While interactive art has generally developed outside the boundaries of traditional museums, these museums have over time incorporated these elements of interactivity into their visual displays. In the NUS Museums for instance, the temporary installation artwork For Whom the Bell Tolls requires the viewer to engage with the artwork by ‘stepping into it’ in order to fully appreciate the audio and visual cues. I found the concept of interactivity even more intriguing in modern museums such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, which I visited in June 2001, and the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland, which I visited in 1999.
In short, the incorporeal nature of the Internet itself creates a problem in exhibiting a museum artefact. ‘Virtual’ space cannot substitute for the experience of navigating through ‘real’ space.