MW18 Lightning Talk: “But Is It Art?”: Validating Visitor Viewpoints And The Making Of “A Piece Of Work” Podcast
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By Sara Bodinson, The Museum of Modern Art, USA A bicycle wheel attached to a stool; a giant canvas splattered with paint; dozens of soup cans…for many museum visitors, works like these prompt a ton of questions. The Museum of Modern Art regularly conducts qualitative research about what visitors want to know about the art they encounter in our galleries and tailors its interpretive resources to address these topics and questions. Despite that, recent analysis of visitors’ online reviews of MoMA revealed that many still have poor experiences at the Museum as they struggle to engage with modern and contemporary art—often eager to dismiss it. Armed with this candid visitor feedback, the Education Department seized the opportunity to take a more creative and irreverent approach to developing interpretive content, while aiming to expand the range of voices and perspectives included.
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MW18 Lightning Talk: “But Is It Art?”: Validating Visitor Viewpoints And The Making Of “A Piece Of Work” Podcast
- 1. But is it art?! Validating visitor viewpoints in making A Piece of Work podcast Sara Bodinson, MoMA @sarabod
Notas del editor
- Hi, I’m Sara Bodinson, Director of Interpretation, Research and Digital Learning at MoMA and today I’m going to talk about how and why we decided to make A Piece of Work podcast.
- If you’ve ever walked through MoMA’s galleries and seen a bicycle wheel attached to a stool...
- A giant canvas splattered with paint...
- Or a text-based work of conceptual art... You can understand that for man, works like these understandably prompt a lot of questions and strong reactions. At MoMA, we conduct research about what our visitors want to know about the art they encounter in our galleries. And we aim to tailor the content of our labels, audio guides, and other resources to address these topics and questions.
- Despite that, our analysis of online reviews of MoMA on Trip Advisor, Yelp and Google reveal that many visitors are still frustrated with or completely dismissive of modern and contemporary art. In fact, not “getting” the art is one of the top complaints cited in negative reviews. Armed with this candid feedback, a team in the Education Department seized the opportunity to take a more creative and irreverent approach to our content. One that would meet visitors where they are—namely beyond the walls of the museum—and engage them without assuming their inherent love or even like of art! We wanted to capture a range of voices and perspectives, so we decided to make a podcast. And after making a pilot in-house, we realized we desperately needed some outside perspective and expertise!
- After fleshing out our goals for the project internally we partnered with WNYC Studios, a subsidiary of NPR that produces and distributes podcasts. We admired how they have strategically diversified the voices and topics of their podcasts, and embraced a more informal tone in effort to expand their audiences over the past few years. We knew they would not only bring an abundance of experience with audio production, but a broader listener reach.
- We worked with their producers for several weeks to map out the topics and works of art we wanted to cover in 10 episodes. At first, we strictly adhered to the works citied with vitriol in our visitors’ online reviews, but we agreed that it would be a disservice to all to just address works by dead white males. So we broadened the range of makers and mediums covered to include performance art, video art, and design. One of the most significant decisions we had to make was who would be the host. WNYC stressed the paramount importance of a compelling host – ideally one with their own following – and we came up with a list of people who were “visual art adjacent” – AKA: not in the art world, but interested in the arts.
- And man did we hit the jackpot. To our great delight, Abbi Jacobson, who many of you know as a creator and star of Broad City, signed on. She also went to art school and is an illustrator and big fan of MoMA. From day 1 she got the mission. She didn’t brush up on her art history in advance, as she wanted to be an empathetic stand-in for the curious but skeptical visitor.
- Instead, she put her energy into to having thoughtful and often hilarious conversations about the art – with curators and educators, with artists -- and with some of her celebrity friends. It was awesome and unexpected to listen to her talk to Questlove about escaping into the blue of Yves Klein’s paintings or describing and reacting to iconic 1960s performance art with RuPaul. We punctuated these conversations with vox of visitor reactions and insights on many of the same works.
- As with all digital projects, I cannot overstate how important it is to have a launch plan. Our marketing and communications teams worked on a coordinated press and social strategy for maximum impact and I can say in all my 18 years at MoMA, I think it’s certainly the only Entertainment Weekly exclusive I can recall. During the launch period, we topped the charts on Apple’s top podcasts and Arts & Culture Podcasts. And since July we’ve had 1.2 million downloads. But more importantly, listeners love it!
- The podcast has a positive reviews from art lovers and skeptics alike. Many talk about it as “Abbi’s podcast” suggesting that we succeeded in stepping outside of our institutional voice.
- We learned a lot from this project, but a few things things stand out: Listen to the scathing feedback from your visitors, even if it hurts, to get a sense of where you are failing them or not resonating with their needs. Consider the benefits and tradeoffs of collaborating across organizations While it took longer to communicate and establish shared goals upfront In the end both MoMA and WNYC agreed that neither could have created this particular content or achieved this great of reach independently More importantly, given listener response, we learned the power of making space for irreverent perspectives, non-expert voices and real visitor reactions to art. So to conclude, I’ll play a short trailer for the podcast to entice you to listen if you haven’t already! [UPDATE: This project won a 2018 Webby for Best Arts & Culture Podcast]