Crystal Baller
Predictions 2022
Broad adoption of remote work
Outsourcing jobs to cheaper countries in similar time zones
Museum studies degrees will begin to lose their gloss as work specializes to accommodate remote workers (for example, someone to just work remotely on the database)
Once you embrace remote you will look to hire the best anywhere and foster more specialization. Curator of Asian Art for a US museum but based in Asia? Or, outsourcing more exhibitions to traveling exhibition companies. Companies that just manage museum databases in India?
Web3-ing Your Stuff
Our databases that contain the vast troves of knowledge about the cultural heritage we steward analog the difference between web2 and web3. When we catalog an object and upload our knowledge of an object to a database, we mostly aggregate and copy information (literally, ad nauseum for me this week) that already exists about an object and store it with one, centralized company. Thus, that company gains a certain amount of power over our data based on its size.
Hope, Distributed (Part 3)
Surely, you have heard the recent story about the group of people who banded together to raise over $47,000,000 to bid on an original edition of the U.S. Constitution. Well, they nearly won it. Constitution DAO formed with a single goal: to crowdfund enough money to purchase the holy, historic document from auction at Sotheby’s. And while a literal “we the people” ironically lost out in a bidding war with a single billionaire – who at least will loan the document to a museum – the act demonstrates populist power ramifications that can extend to collections stewardship.
The Registrar's Dilemma
As an independent collections manager/registrar, I have this fantasy/nightmare about meeting with a new private collector client, and with the ink still wet on the NDA, I greet a famously stolen object, like the Vermeer from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, in the parlor of their Upper East Side townhouse in New York when I visit their collection for the first time. A decision confronts me: report the work and face a lawsuit for breaking my confidentiality and confidence with my client and who knows what else, versus remaining silent and, consequently, excusing the actions that led to the acquisition of the object.
The Great Migration?
Collection storage grabs the recent headlines as the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen opens the Boijmans Depot in the Netherlands and thus creates a new, publicly-accessible facility while closing its main building in Rotterdam for renovation. In addition, this complaint-disguised-as-an-article in Hyperallergic naively suggests we should have less storage for our institutions and fails to offer a plan for what to do with un-exhibited collections. So, I will offer some ideas. The implication of which suggests a great cascade of object redistribution may have begun.
IRL NFTs FTW
As a lot of “froth” has accumulated around the NFT trend, that they provide scarcity will undoubtedly allow them to weather the fad in the world of collections. Scarcity is the beating heart of the collection, of the museum, of the collectible. We may all have an image of the Mona Lisa, but only the Louvre has the actual work. It epitomizes scarcity despite the flood of reproductions.