It’s strange to picture an art museum empty. To think of the Metropolitan Museum of Art without its joyous hubbub, or the Frick Collection without its respectful hush, is to think, in practical terms, of an enormous liability. When, in March, the swift advance of COVID-19 closed museums across the country, some predicted losses of tens of millions of dollars. “Our primary responsibility, and our most valuable asset, is creating a condition for human beings to be in the same space as works of art,” Gary Tinterow, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, tells Vogue. “That first physical, visceral, emotional experience. It’s going to the stadium and watching the football game with 60,000 people, versus watching it at home with some of your friends.” Great art, like any great event, demands that you show up in person.
Yet as the Met, the Frick, MFAH, and other institutions have demonstrated this spring, even a categorically, irrefutably different experience of these collections can also be singularly rewarding. Forced to quickly reconsider how they functioned online, many museums are now reaching more people—and in more intriguing ways—than ever before.
“One of the things that museums do so well is they offer a space for contemplation,” says Nancy Ireson, deputy director for collections and exhibitions and Gund Family Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. “At a time that can be quite upsetting, we wanted to make sure we didn’t disappear.” If quippy commentary from scholars and artists was already de rigueur at many museums and galleries, under lockdown, it acquired a compelling new immediacy and intimacy. In “Barnes Takeout,” a new YouTube series, members of the museum’s staff discuss a favorite work from the collection for ten minutes, mixing needful art historical context with more personal musings. “We can’t be the candlelit dinner, which might be the museum on an ordinary day,” Ireson says, “but we can still be a place that offers you sustenance. ‘Your daily serving of art’ is our little tagline.”
Since the museum closed, the Barnes’s YouTube subscribers have increased 900%. “People are saying, you know, ‘I make a point of stopping my day at lunchtime and listening to talk about art for five or 10 minutes,’” Ireson continues. “We realized that lots of people are still working from home, or they’ve got childcare commitments, so it wasn’t about disrupting your day entirely. Just that point of contact is crucial.”
Tinterow has observed much the same of MFAH’s largely local following, who have dialed in for events like “Coffee with a Curator” and the “MFAH on the Mat” weekly yoga class in droves. “Our members, our supporters, our donors, our community members miss us and they want to stay in touch,” he says. “Previously, our website was very transactional. Most of our visitors wanted to know, when are we open? How do I get a ticket? What film are we showing tonight? And so now that none of that is available, I expected the traffic to our website to fall. But they’re now checking to see what we might have on offer while they’re in quarantine.” And it’s as good a time as ever; at a juncture like this, art history has a great deal to say. “Going through our galleries, you could see that people have lived through plague. Even when there’s tremendous death and destruction, civilization can endure. There’s a lot to be learned from the evidence of works of art about getting through the times that we’re in now.”
A similar curiosity has followed the Frick’s “Travels with a Curator” and “Cocktails with a Curator” series, along with the Museum of Modern Art’s wonderfully layered “Virtual Views,” part of its online magazine—but the challenges of producing both remotely are not insignificant. “My team has been given a deep sense of purpose trying to deliver programs the best that we can despite the constraints of not being in the gallery, not even necessarily having access to all the files or the equipment for editing that we might have, and certainly cash being at a premium,” says Leah Dickerman, director of editorial and content strategy at MoMA.
For her own part, Aimee Ng, a curator at Frick, describes the unqualified weirdness of trying to connect with a digital audience. “[‘Cocktails with a Curator’] was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to prepare for,” she says. “I was barricaded in my bedroom with three chairs in front of the door so no children would come in, but because it’s recorded by staring into a little lens, if I crack a joke, there’s nothing coming back.” Nevertheless, she’s excited by the potential that exists online for a small, private museum like her own. “I feel like March 12 was an end date for some of us in New York. Things just kind of shifted,” she says. “The idea of, ‘Hey, everybody, get yourselves to 70th and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, register, meet me here…’ is a completely different thing from, ‘Hey, here’s a link to this.’ No matter where you are in the world, what you’re wearing, what you know about the arts, you can participate.”
Opportunities to create and share art have also resonated with would-be museum-goers, from parents seeking diversions for their children, to adults seeking diversions for themselves. One of the Met’s quirkier quarantine initiatives has been the #MetTwinning challenge on Instagram, which encourages followers to physically recreate a work from the museum’s collection; and at LACMA, a slew of art-making classes and videos have proven especially popular. “There are certainly advantages to seeing a work of art in person, but I think it’s been important showing folks that they can still experience art and creativity from their own homes,” says Naima J. Keith, the vice president of education and public programs at LACMA.
“There are two things we’re seeing right now that are really interesting,” says Max Hollein, director of the Met. “One, I think there is an increased appetite for deeper learning, and for really educational offerings—that might be because people have a little bit more time, and they feel the need to make better use of that time. The other thing is, with everybody currently being sheltered at home, it also means that everyone in the last couple of weeks has learned how to receive information digitally. Whereas before the time of closure, a lot of our digital offerings were more for the younger audience, that has been dissolved immediately.”
With greater digital dexterity, Hollein posits, will come greater expectations from the medium at large. “After our reopening, our audience will expect us to continue disseminating information in all the different engaging ways that we are doing it now.” Dickerman also sees the gears of the museum-world apparatus turning. “There are many things we’re going to take away from this moment, and things that I think will help us to be a more fully 21st-century museum—to really embrace what it means to deliver our mission within a digital ecosystem and to a global audience. There’s not really a divide between digital and bricks-and-mortar in the same way anymore.”
Still, Ireson advises, our museums as we’ve known and loved them aren’t going anywhere soon. “We’re in a new world, but we’re going to be there,” she says. “The art will be part of our lives. That is a non-negotiable.”
vogue.com/article/how-art-galleries-museums-adapting-coronavirus