Hiya - are you an average person? If so, Steve's just dropped by and he's very keen to interact with you.
Steve will probably be visiting Europe before long, but for the moment he's based in the States. Being outside the US needn't stop you dropping by and shooting some breeze with Steve, though, because he lives on the internet.
He, of course, is actually an it, more specifically a publicly funded project aiming to broaden access to the many US art museums putting their collections online.
The project, being coordinated by the Indianapolis Museum of Art but drawing on other collections including the Guggenheim, is an exercise in what they call "social tagging" (which I think is the same thing as collaborative tagging) whereby users, Flickr-style, will be able to add tags to works of art to aid searches.
You might think this was what curators were supposed to do, but that's not how it works these days, apparently. As Jennifer Trent, a partner at the Archives and Museums Informatics, tells the Indianapolis Star:
"Everyone looks at a work of art in a different way. What the curator sees and thinks is important may not be what the average person sees and thinks is important".
I'm unclear about what the purpose of this exercise is. If somebody tags a Singer Sargent portrait with the words "hot chick", is the museum really going to incorporate that into its search terms?
And it's certainly a peculiar experience if you experiment with the project, because the art works presented to readers for classification have no information given about themselves. Plus they're presented in small, low-resolution images that give you no sense of the pastel-on-paper wizardry of Seurat's drawings, say.
Research suggests that nearly half the web searches of existing online museum collections fail because of misspelled artists' names - so maybe this is the point of the exercise, and I guess that's useful.
The site promises that it will enable museums to "transcend traditional distinctions by department or medium so you can better serve your publics". Ultimately, though, I'm not sure that distinctions emerging from an online free association exercise ("What does this image say to you?") will really be of that much use.
