Thursday, August 26, 1999
Art museums try to draw Web audience
BY OWEN FINDSEN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
There is a new wing at the Cincinnati Art Museum. It's called the “High Bandwidth Wing.” You'll find it on the Internet.
Most museums have Web sites. Some sites are basic, providing little more than hours and admission prices. Others are grand, presenting multimedia versions of what's on exhibit.
While the CAM's site cannot compare with the complex sites of major museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Smithsonian Institution, it's one of the most complete and interesting I've found for a regional museum. It's fun, informative, kept up to date, and it has some nice personal touches.
The “High Bandwidth Wing” includes a short movie tour of the European painting collection, access to a virtual tour and a panoramic picture of the museum's Great Hall.
Click on the left or right edge of the picture and it rotates through 360 degrees.
You can explore the museum's various departments, including European painting, American painting, African art, decorative art, photography and so on. There are 13 categories, and new artworks are added frequently.
Links on each site will send you to other museum sites that are strong in the same category. Artworks from current exhibitions can also be viewed, and if you have lots of storage space on your computer, captured for your own on-screen art collection.
Unlike some museum sites, the CAM site includes the museum store, where you will be able to purchase CAM posters and catalogs.
It costs nothing to send online postcards to friends' e-mail featuring artworks from the Cincinnati collection. Just type in your message and click on “send.”
The CAM site also has a personal touch. Each month a docent is featured with a picture and a short profile, and a curator gets a page to talk about his or her special field of expertise and select a favorite object.
The CAM site is linked to other local sites, including the Contemporary Arts Center. It takes you on a virtual tour of the new Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, to be built in 2001. Architect Zaha Hadid has created an animated “Fly through” that swiftly takes you through the door, up the ramps and through the galleries as if you were flying.
State of the art
Few museums have tapped the potential of the Internet as much as the Whitney Museum in New York. It uses its site not just as an introduction to an exhibition, but as an integral part of it.
The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900-2000-Part I opened at the Whitney in April. Part two of the exhibition begins Sept. 26.
The first half of The American Century covers 1900-1950. On line there is a video and audio tour conducted by Whitney director Maxwell Anderson. Viewers can scroll through a timeline, showing art and events for each decade. Clicking on a painting, photograph or sculpture brings up a larger image and text about the art and artist.
Part II will be even more extensive, as the survey of the second half of the century includes more film and television. Even commercials will be treated as art. The exhibition will include 700 works, including many late 20th century icons, such as Jasper John's “Three Flags,” Robert Rauschenberg's “Erased deKooning Drawing” and Robert Indiana's “Love.”
Tools for education
The Smithsonian's many sites are well designed for educational use. One of them, The National Museum of American Art, may be one of the largest on the Web, with 3,000 artworks accessible.
The National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., is a leader in creating exhibitions exclusively for the Internet. There are 15 online including Posters: American Style; Metropolitan Lives, Painters of the Ash Can School and Their New York; American Kaleidoscope, Trends and Perspectives in Recent Art and four exhibitions of 19th-century American photography.
The Smithsonian has 18 other museum sites, each with many exhibits to explore.
For museum lovers, the Internet is a cornucopia that can never be emptied.
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