At lunch yesterday, I ran into one of the few Visitor Experience designers the museum world has to offer. He's a rebel: believes in the data-driven reporting and the calling back and the finding out what people remember about various events, about museums and about how they make their lives up out of things they've done. He likes interactive things, and he says the data supports it. This is a good thing! This is who you want in charge of your Visitor Experience. Someone who has their eye on the prize of more attendance and more people talking about your museum. So, as this is an internet hate machine blog, why I am I mentioning it?
I'm mentioning it because Marvel Comics is now releasing their Comix for Free on a lot of platforms, in order to get more people into Marvel Comix. This is a wonderful thing also. I like comics! Comics are an excellent outlet for people, who are inclined to like pictures and reading and literacy. Here is what I did not particularly like about the announcement, at least
on CBC:
"The project is an attempt to make reading a more immersive experience, like being inside a video game, according to Marvel executives."
Now, that the CBC made that the final line of the announcement is telling: I suspect the Ceeb reporter involved did not much like that line, either. A lot of people won't. Reading is not like a video game, after all: Reading is substantially better than most video games, the best of which require a great deal of writing, which requires, in turn, a lot of reading. Reading likely done in private without a lot of noise. Perhaps some jazz. Maybe some heavy metal. Making things requires concentration, which requires privacy and space.
The part that both my coincidental meeting and the Marvel announcement have in common is that they are geared towards taking introverted pastimes and public spaces and turning them into places that extroverts feel more comfortable. This is something I had not previously identified as a trend I loathe, and yet here we are. Definitive statement coming up, this is a full-on Personal Preference in public.
I like libraries and art galleries and museums
for themselves, and while I believe they are indeed in desperate need of more market share, their marketing is ass-backwards, because they keep fucking chasing Cool Millenial Money or maybe Boomer Money and in doing so are losing out on the things they offer that no-one else does.
Every time an art gallery or museum declares itself a night club and then sets about
losing gobs of money on trying to
be a nightclub, while not damaging their precious items, they are reducing themselves from the church-like buildings they
are, and they are losing out on the only unique thing they offer, which is their collections and the experience of being in the building with those collections. The collections, their display, research, and availability for interaction and remix; this is the unique thing. This is the product. It is what they sell. They sell
access to the unique. The reproductions are useful, to an extent, for real... but the unique is
unique. Which is another column, with people like Walter Benjamin ducking in to talk about what boils to a weird fetishism for religious paint and also Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which is art that is about experience of art, duh, that's what you have there. Back to the main point.
Introverts need to have public space of their own to do things like go on a quiet date, or read a book, or be involved with people while seeming smart to their friends.
There are ways to make immersive experiences that are memorable for these places that do not involve huge quantities of noise and people, but
fuck I am offended that
all the marketing directed to my demographic assumes we love a noisy night out.
Note: I am not opposed to an Extrovert Night once a month or whatever, you do you, it could work, I am open to New Things. Should my photo be up on compromat.ru, it would reveal many things, including my love of raves in former churches. Sadly, it would also reveal that I love churches period.
Anecdote is not the plural of data
Smartness, the public
appearance of smartness, is hugely important to most of the introverts I know. Showing off smartness and good taste to potential partners is what we get in place of understanding how to talk to girls at parties. Instead of outgoing people-give-us-energy comfort, we get
facts. Museums are full of facts and artifacts, and they are
social spaces for
quiet people. That's what they do well, much like comic books do the movies well for
people who hate movies (Personal preference general statement #2: I fucking hate movies. Expensive, too short, too long, can't watch them in chunks and be absorbed momentarily, too many people involved in creation, probably I hate one of the actors, almost certainly there aren't enough girls, the theatre smells and I can't sit still long enough, I also hate YouTube videos over 1min, TV is better but not by much because Too Expensive. I like theatre, though. More humane, you get to show off your good taste to people, if it's terrible it's still fun).
The trend that I see that I hate most in the new economy is that no-one has figured out that there's money to be made letting people have quiet time in public, because noisy time in public is easier to sell to the people who are outgoing. Let me tell you this. There are not as many actually outgoing people as you think there are. That's why the event sucks. There are only so many actual party people, and only so many actually quiet people, and
both sets of people need things to do in an evening.
This is, incidentally, the entire point of the first season of
Slings and Arrows. That it's okay to love a cultural thing for being what it
actually is, with the public smartness and the quiet bits left in, also that it's okay to have fun because you spotted the in-joke. That you don't need to trick people to like things and to sell them, even though sometimes your success
will not be huge. That sometimes small is okay. Yes, this
is a hugely privileged, elite position. But you know what?
After the Revolution, the imperial theatres were not, initially, a priority for the Bolshevik leadership. “It is awkward to spend big money on such a luxurious theatre,” Lenin said of the Bolshoi, “when we lack simple schools in the villages.” In 1921, Lenin told Anatoly Lunacharsky, the cultural commissar, to “lay all the theatres in the grave”—to destroy them—and focus on the urgent needs of the workers and the peasants: literacy, food, medicine. But Lunacharsky noticed that, even with civil war consuming the entire country, peasants and workers were happy to fill the seats of the Bolshoi. And it wasn’t revolutionary theatre that captivated them. It was, in part, ballet. They lacked, at first, a certain connoisseurship. Some workers, Ezrahi writes, were so ignorant of the mute art of ballet that they asked one another when the performers would begin to sing. Nevertheless, Lunacharsky insisted that the workers “ceaselessly demand opera and ballet.” The Bolshoi, in the end, was not razed.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/18/130318fa_fact_remnick#ixzz2NKyyFkFa
People need something to aspire to, as much as they need a signifier of their own class status. That is how you get the middle class in the doors. You
compliment their tastes. You give them
hope. You give people
something they can feel good about. Make people feel like they are
part of the scene, whatever it takes, and
they will pay your bills, even if you are curiously repellent in person and have a mad gift for skeeving out the mainstream.
Now, which is more expensive? Hosting an enormous fucking party or paying some security guards to keep your building open to an hour when people who work 12 to 14-hour days can take their date there? Making your audience feel wanted, included, exclusively in possession of good taste?
Marvel doesn't have to make this choice. Their interactive comic books will twist in the wind of weird sales numbers and will make them enough money, give or take. No bet there, although the core will remain people who like reading things quietly a bit at a time. Unfortunately, museums - by and large not backed by Disney - are going to have to sort this out. Interactive experience is
absolutely valuable to us in this regard, and there are
ways to have those which are not, inherently, inimicable to the actual experience of being in a museum.
People need quiet places to go and be with other people without having their life sucked out. Particularly teenagers, particularly bookish teenagers, and broke twenty-somethings, or thirty-somethings, or sixty-somethings. They will pay for this. They will pay small amounts for this, for the ability to gently fall in love with someone in front of your incredibly boring religious paintings and very interesting but under-displayed Shari Boyle sculptures. They will not necessarily pay $20 for it to start with, but eventually, they will, because they will have fallen for you and you will still be there when almost nothing else remains. This is the value of massed capital. You can starve them out.
Doctor Who Season One New Series says "Banks prefer a long game." As banks of
massive scarcity and
astonishing cultural capital, museums need to grasp their own true value. We
make you look good to your peers. That, in a world filled with screaming movie theatres, is worth something. Time to take advantage.
