Art professionals and aficionados use social media and Meetup.com to keep in touch about arts events and socialize with each other. photo: Victor Blue for The New York Times
With so many museums, exhibits, art galleries and lectures to choose from every day, how does a busy young arts professional keep up? [source: nytimes]
For Francesca Merlino and about two dozen of her colleagues who work for museums and arts groups in New York City, it’s following each other’s 140-character updates on Twitter,
Unlike some people who never step outside of their online Twitter streams, members of this group use the micro-blogging service to help them follow each other in real life.
“We use Twitter to not only to connect with one another, but to share what we feel brings value to a larger online arts community,” said Ms. Merlino, 26, senior marketing manager at the Guggenheim Museum. “It has enabled us to form both professional and personal relationships that has provided countless opportunities for learning and collaboration.”
On a recent Saturday afternoon, their exchanges on Twitter helped lead the group to the I.B.M. THINK Exhibit NYC, an interactive display at Lincoln Center in honor of I.B.M.’s 100th anniversary. The night before, they attended a lecture by Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, on digitally “connected consumption” at the BMW Guggenheim Lab downtown on Houston Street. Then there was the opening of a new exhibit on architecture at the Brooklyn Historical Society earlier in the week.
“This is a crowd that is pretty active about letting people know what they are doing,” said Sean Redmond, 43, a Web developer at the Guggenheim Museum, as he strolled with about a dozen members of the group through the I.B.M. exhibit that incorporated live data visualization displayed on a 123-foot wall leading to the exhibit, which includes 40 seven-foot interactive touch screens.
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been helping people discuss art online and discover events at museums and galleries. And in the last year, several museums, among them the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum and the American Museum of Natural History have been using social media to expand their audiences.
For those who want to see art and discuss it in person, there’s the power of another platform, Meetup.com, through which millions of people around the world schedule all kinds of events.
That is what prompted Scott Douglass, 42, to set up the Met Museum Meetup on Meetup last August, to find other people who enjoy walking through the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on weekends and watching the sun set over Central Park from the museum’s rooftop cafe on Friday nights.
“I love going to art museums,” said Mr. Douglass, who grew up in a family of artists and has been attending museums regularly since he was a child. “I’m a computer engineer. Not many people I work with are excited about art. Instead of wandering the galleries by myself, I thought it might be a way to find people to go with so I can talk to them about the art.”
After Mr. Douglass set up the museum group, more than 100 people registered to keep informed of the visits to the Met that he regularly schedules. So far, only a handful of people have shown up, but he is hopeful more people will join in time.
More than 45 similar groups in the New York metropolitan area and 300 around the world are either exclusively focused on helping organize visits to museums or include museums on their list of outings, according to Kathryn Fink, who is responsible for community outreach at Meetup. She said that in the last 30 days, some 1,000 visits were scheduled at museums or art galleries through the Web site.
In London, there’s Culture Seekers, which has 4,482 members and has held 204 meetings, including guided walks, explorations of historical buildings and trips to museums and art galleries. Philadelphia has Got Culture in Philadelphia, with 1,285 members. That group recently visited the Mutter museum, established in 1858 to display medical oddities. The Chicago Museum Meetup Group also has more than 1,000 members. There are other robust groups in Toronto, Seattle, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and other cities around the world.
“I find it difficult at times to find friends who are interested in art or who have the time to go to museums,” said Andreya Vivaldi, one of a dozen organizers for a group that describes itself as the New York Brainiacs on Meetup. Started in 2008, the group has 2,810 members and has scheduled more than 500 events in the last few years, including museum visits, lectures about philosophy and screenings at the New York Film Festival.
“It works because you end up being with a group of people who are there because they want to be there,” said Ms. Vivaldi, who teaches art at a public high school in Queens and helps organize the group’s museum and art gallery visits.
On the same Friday night that the young museum and arts professionals found themselves at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, Ms. Vivaldi’s group was at the Morgan Library and Museum. About two dozen people came to view 17 drawings and some letters of the artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Several people from the group remained together to have dinner after exploring the museum.
“It was very successful,” she said. “Art is culture. Art is communication. It is about how you respond to it and it is important to be able to have a voice and a forum. And then over dinner, that’s where people could really connect.”
Julia Kaganskiy, 25, started the Arts, Tech and Culture and Technology group on Meetup to help bring together people working for museums and arts organizations in New York who shared her interest in social media. She started the group in 2008, not long after she arrived in New York City as a new college grad to work for an Internet start-up.
She said she was fascinated with how museums and arts organizations were using the Web to produce interactive exhibits and beginning to use social media to help build relationships with visitors. She began to blog about it, and along the way, she realized that many people knew each other online but not in real life.
The group now has almost 2,000 members and has become a forum for people working in the arts and technology roles to come together and share the projects they are working on.
“At our very first meeting, we invited a bunch of people who were running the Twitter accounts at their museums and arts organizations but had never met in person, even though they live in the same city and interact with each other,” said Ms. Kaganskiy, who is global editor of the Creators Project. “What the meet-up did was give them a chance to come together professionally about once a month to network, exchange ideas and develop friendships. It has helped create this wonderful network and community.”
And now, members of this network, including Ms. Kaganskiy, Ms. Merlino and others, use Twitter to keep in touch with what is happening at each other’s arts organizations and let each other know what other arts events they are attending that week.
“I see someone from the group four or five nights a week, either by plan or fluke,” said Rebecca Taylor, 28, who oversees the communications and marketing areas at MoMA PS 1 in Long Island City.
After the visit to the I.B.M. exhibit, (which got mixed reviews from the group, with some people thinking that despite the impressive interactive displays, it was a bit too self-congratulatory), Ms. Taylor and other members gathered for one of their frequent postevent discussions over coffee at an outdoor cafe at Lincoln Center. Ms. Taylor said her online Twitter relationships had helped smooth her recent move to New York. Before taking the job at MoMA PS1, she had worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles but was acquainted online with many people in the New York museum and art world because of Twitter.
One of her first calls was to Lucy Redoglia, 27, who works on the Web site and Facebook page for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They arranged to meet at an exhibit late last spring for Art 21, the nonprofit group that produces the PBS series “Art in the Twenty-First Century.”
When Ms. Taylor arrived, she said she checked into FourSquare, the geo-location social tool, and soon discovered that she knew at least eight people at the exhibit as digital friends. “Then, the second I got here, I was bumping into them,” she said. “Four months later, those eight people have become some of my closest friends.”
The group’s online relationships are for more than socializing. Several of the people in the group, who represent the wide array of arts institutions and organizations in the city, said they believed their social media relationships had brought tremendous value to their work. For example, they said they no longer had to figure out whom to contact or how to negotiate a museum administration bureaucracy when there was an opportunity for collaboration.
“If we have a program and the Whitney has a program, I just go on Twitter and I send a direct message to that person and we are on the phone in 10 minutes,” said Ms. Merlino, the marketing manager at the Guggenheim.