Day 906 Monday July 1, 2019
490 Days until the 2020 election and 568 days until the Inauguration
Why do art museums have such crappy websites?
I know, you’re asking why am I bringing this up now? We are in such a target rich environment for things to talk about why art museums’ websites and their inherent crappiness?
Well, let’s dispel with everything else first and then move on to the museums. Our president went to a meeting of world leaders where he embarrassed himself and our country in multiple displays of ignorance, stupidity, and thuggery. Ho hum. It’s what we’ve come to expect.
Speaking of “what we’ve come to expect” the 16th woman has come out and accused the president of the 22nd time of sexual assault. (Or is it just 22 and 16 is an old number?) The accusation made a brief blip on the news cycles, but didn’t warrant front page coverage in any major newspaper because – you know – it’s what we’ve come to expect. This time it was rape. I mean if Mike Tyson can be put away for “digital insertion” (that was the charge) certainly a white man can get something for penile insertion? Maybe not.
Okay so this leads right into today’s topic of art museums crappy websites. Look I’m a patron. Not a big time patron, but I give money, I go to shows, I love museums. My love affair with art started when as a nascent freshman preparing to go to Johns Hopkins I had to pick courses for my first semester and I couldn’t decide what to take for a fifth course my first semester. I called down to the university and I still remember whomever I talked to saying, “Take History of Art, you’ll like it,” and I did! Dr. Phoebe Staton was the lecturer. She was great. She cared. She was enthusiastic, not overly so, just enough so you understood her passion. I remember talking to my contemporaries who went to other colleges and took history of art and said it was dry and boring. Not Dr. Stanton, from that time forward I have always veered toward art museums. I typically go alone, because I like to take my time and I typically take longer than most to take in whatever I am looking at.
This interest in art has led me to many places to look at art and to participate, if nominally, in the art scene. I have done a large aerial sculpture in Sheeps Meadow, Central Park, and in the Netherlands. I have been to Burning Man where I reported on the art that was there. I have spent much of my adult life flying kites and participating in that world as an announcer, auctioneer, organizer, flier, and maker. I have gone to art museums around the world.
Art museums are like cars. They are in many ways all the same, yet they have their little differences. However, when it comes to their websites they seem to share a similarity of dysfunction. They look nice when you first look at them, but when you try and use them to order tickets or buy something or sign up for something then you discover that you must be willing to suffer for your art. I don’t think I’ve ever managed – in general – to go to an art museum website and find what I wanted and do what I wanted to do in the first try. I’ve come to realize that you have to make multiple runs at the beast. You have to be willing to try again. You have to go back and find that email that invited you to something in order to get to that part of the website, or you have to abandon your cart and go through ordering all over again (or they might just empty the cart for you.) It’s not easy dealing with art museum web sites.
In my latest attempt I tried to order four tickets for their special exhibit called “Awake” on “Member Mondays” at The Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA) and to make reservations for dinner at their rooftop restaurant “Amuse.” Okay, how hard should that be? (Answer – Moderately hard, only three attempts and one abandoned shopping cart and four separate wanderings around the website – not bad. I managed to get tickets, but not dinner reservations. I’ll give it a score of 7 out of 10 for difficulty.)
Case Study (ie the details): Okay VMFA sends members (me) email notices saying they have “Member Mondays,” which means you can go to the museum on Monday evenings. Actually, anyone could go but they make it sound special, which it is in that if you need tickets to a special exhibit only members can get tickets for those times. So today we, my wife and I, are planning to go to the “Awake!” show with two friends. I went on line to reserve tickets. I logged in as a member and was surprised to only be able to get two tickets. Okay, I got them. Then I went to make reservations at the cafe as the Member Monday email had suggested I might want to do.
Here’s where art, meets graphic art, meets web design, meets advertising, meets human factors, meets industrial psychology. The VMFA website has a lot of information on it, lots of tabs and stuff. In fact, all the art museum websites have a similar look and feel because they all have the same kind of constituent base, or bases. Or maybe it’s because someone went around with a cookie cutter template and sold the same design? I dunno, but I can tell you this. If you don’t know the secret pathway and do it just so you are screwed. (“You are in a maze of twisty passages all different” etc.*)
*Old Unix joke. One of the first games on UNIX was adventure in which you entered a verb and a word to move about a cave to pick up treasures (“Get bird”. “drop rod” etc.) as you moved about you would get one line clues as to where you were two of the most famous clues were: “You are in a maze of twisty passages all different” and “You are in a maze of twisty passages all the same” No, there was no stinkin’ graphic interface. This was a character based terminal. Geez.)
I went to the tab for the cafe, the Amuse Restaurant, and tried to make a reservation for dinner. Well, first I had to realize that the tab marked “Dinner” only showed you the menu for dinner. There was a lot of stuff on the page with the dinner tab. Too much stuff, any ad exec or web designer will tell you to reduce the clutter and keep some blank space.
(A web designer and graphic artist I know has told me they have to constantly tell clients that reducing a full page ad to a 1/4 page ads means you have to get rid of 75% of what you had in the full page ad. “But it’s important!” Yeah, well you ever go to a little league game? You do? Good, let me ask you how many of the signs tacked up on the outfield wall can you read and what do those signs that you can read have in common? Big letters? Imagine that? And not much else, wow. I think you’ve got it Sparky. Yeah, the rest of them have a lot of little type but you can’t read it – too small, too much. Yeah, I know. What? You still want me to reduce your full page to a quarter size? Okay, I’m sorry. I gotta go, Here why don’t you sign up with Go Daddy? Yeah and then in six months you can come back and ask me to redo your whole site because it’s so slow it doesn’t work. Yeah, I know. Sorry, let’s just end it right now. Yeah, bullet to the head and be done with it. You’ve got an eight year old nephew that can do it? Great. Go for it. No, I won’t be available in six months when you come back and say they can’t quite do everything you want. That’s like thinking you can take six guitar lessons and think you can play like Carlos Santana “Know what I’m saying?” What your website is slow? It’s only six pages. Odd. Hey, your cookie cutter easy to get started template opens 4,000 files. Yeah? So why is it slow? Gee, I don’t know. Why don’t you ask your nephew? Oh, he says he’s not interested anymore. Gee, that’s too bad. You want me to fix it? Okay. Oh and you want me to do it for next to nothing because you gave all your money to your cousin and now you don’t have anymore? I see. Hey. I’ll call you back later. Okay? When? I’m not sure. Yeah. Good luck.)
So I finally find “Reservations” and Reservations for Amuse Cafe. Great. Turns out the latest reservation they have is 2:30 for lunch. I don’t want lunch. I want dinner. Click on Dinner – get the menu again. Click on the info page about the Cafe and the days they list for dinner don’t include Mondays.
Question: If you send me something as a member about what’s happening for a Monday, why are you including a suggestion that I make a reservation at a restaurant that isn’t open on a Monday?
Okay back to the VMFA website. I went back to my email program and found a “Member Monday!” email. I clicked on a link in the email and now I was able to order four tickets, not the two as I was only allowed (as a member) to do before. Great!
Hey, maybe if I go via the Member Monday email I can make a reservation at the restaurant?
I clicked the suggested link. Bam, back to making reservations for lunch.
So why is it that this is so hard to do? In other words why is this website so crappy? Okay, if your an art museum staff or director type person you’re probably going to say, “Look, we have a lot of programs and groups to satisfy…” I get that. But then there was the time I was signing up for a drawing class. It was called “Introduction to Drawing.” They referenced a page where you could look up the materials needed for the class. The materials needed for classes page didn’t have an “Introduction to Drawing” class. They had a “Basic Drawing” class. Was that the same thing? Who knows? I had to call in, no answer, Then email, delayed half a week for an answer.
I was a member of the MOMA (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City) for a year. I joined and went up to go to the Picasso sculpture show. The shop would send me email announcements for a FLASH SALE! I’d respond to the email only to be told the sale was over. Wait what? I just opened the email this morning and you sent it yesterday. Oh? It was only for one day. You sent it out at 11am and by 5pm it was over. Got it. Are you trying to piss me off, or is that just the way you operate? Oh, I see. You too. (Now, VMFA is copying them. Great.)
Then there was the fun of trying to order something from the MOMA shop and trying to get my member discount. Many abandoned carts later, and several phone calls I’d get the, “Oh sorry, we aren’t part of MOMA. We’re the shop. If your number doesn’t work you have to talk to membership. By the time you talk to membership the sale is over, but that’s okay because it turns out that you don’t get member discounts on sale items. Hey, couldn’t you have told me that in the first place? Oh, I see. I didn’t ask that question. My fault – obviously.
So then there’s “Monsters and Myths” a show about Surrealism and how the artists of the time were reflecting the disintegration and chaos of the society of which they were a part. 60 Minutes did a piece on it last night. Apparently, the show had been at the Baltimore Museum of Art and was moving to Nashville. Darn it, I’d like to see that show. Baltimore isn’t too far away, but Nashville? Ten – eleven hours by car, 19 hours and $150 by train, 5.5 hours and $451 by plane – further than I want to go. Even knowing the name of the exhibit and knowing it was going to be in Nashville wasn’t enough to find it with a Google search. The museum in Nashville I thought was called the Frisk, turned out it’s the Frist. Once I got the museum name and went to their page, which looks like all the other museum pages I found the exhibit. Call me crazy but the first thing I want to know is the dates it’s going to be at the museum. But museums seem to like to hide that. You gotta really want to know, to dig down and then there it is. Whew.
Okay, done bitchin’ about museums. It seems that the problem, like so many things is, to be good at something you’ve got to care (and know what you are doing.) Hey, it looks good. Who cares if it really works?
In other news, our president thinks “liberal democracy” means the people of San Francisco. His ignorance and disinterest in learning is not only staggering but appalling (or is it the other way around? Appalling and staggering??? Hard to say.)
Kate Mckinnon was on Seth Meyers the other night and gave a wonderful impression of Marianne Williamson – look it up.
Iran has stepped over the line on the amount of uranium it has produced. Good job, Johnnie Bolton and The Donald! One commentator pointed out that this is a “deal” not a “treaty.” So anything can be negotiated.
Samantha Bee’s show, Full Frontal, gave a great historical rundown of the gang MS 13. Turns out it was created by the U.S. government’s ineptitude toward El Salvador. Then our government fortified and trained the kids by sending them to our prisons where they learned more criminal skills and then we shipped 40,000 of them back to El Salvador to terrorize that country. Great job guys.
490 Days until the 2020 election and 568 days until the Inauguration
PS A new level of unreality. (Japanese Anime exhibit – East Wing, National Gallery)