For old television shows, there's Hulu. For college lectures,
there's iTunes U. And now, for videos about art, there's ArtBabble,
a Web site created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art that offers
videos from sources including the Museum of Modern Art and the PBS-
TV series "Art:21."
In the last few years, as museums have tried to take advantage of
the Internet to connect with young audiences, they have produced an
increasing number of online videos, from artist interviews and time-
lapse shots of exhibition installations to short profiles of
curators, art handlers, and even museum guards. Most institutions
feature these videos on their own Web sites, as well as uploading
them to sites like YouTube or blip.tv. But until now, there has been
no dedicated place on the Web for art videos.
ArtBabble (artbabble.org), which went live this week, is intended
to change that. For the roll-out the Indianapolis museum invited a
handful of institutions, including the New York Public Library, the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to take part. In the
long run, it hopes to add more institutions, so that ArtBabble
becomes "the destination for art content online," Daniel Incandela,
the director of new media at the Indianapolis museum, said in an
interview.
On sites like YouTube, an artist interview can get lost among the
"music videos, blooper videos, and sort of more viral, edgier
content," Mr. Incandela said. There is also no easy way to browse
content from multiple museums, and, until recently, videos weren't
available in high definition.
On ArtBabble the majority of videos are in high definition. The
design of the home page is clean and is meant to draw in
nonspecialists, with speech bubbles featuring punchy quotations
that, when clicked on, jump to the relevant videos. (A mock
dictionary entry defines "ArtBabble" as "a place where everyone is
invited to join an open, ongoing discussion - no art degree
required.")
The most unusual feature of the site is the "notes" that
accompany each video. The notes run down a window to the right of
the screen, offering links to related material. For example, in an
interview with the artist Robert Irwin, when Mr. Irwin mentions the
sculptors Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra, the notes offer links to
the Wikipedia entries for each artist. A reference to the gardens
that Mr. Irwin designed at the Getty Center in Los Angeles provides
links to the Getty Center's Web site (getty.edu) and a YouTube video
of the gardens.
"We can give an online viewer the opportunity to take countless
tangents," said Joshua Greenberg, director of digital strategy at
the New York Public Library, one of several partner institutions.
"It fits the core premise of librarianship, that it's not just about
putting something in someone's hands but contextualizing it."
The hosting fees and other expenses of ArtBabble are being
covered by the Indianapolis museum, with the help of a $50,000 grant
from the Ball Brothers Foundation. (ArtBabble is free to users.) If
the site becomes popular, the museum will look for corporate
sponsorship, the museum's director, Maxwell Anderson, said.
Mr. Anderson said the goal behind ArtBabble is to allow visitors
to "experience the life of museums," whether through employee
profiles, studio visits with artists or videos of conservators
restoring objects. The advantage of making the new video site a
collaborative one was obvious, he said: "The strength and potency of
this as a shared site is much greater than one museum at a time."
The Indianapolis museum has been a pioneer in using the Internet
to provide greater transparency about museum operations. A section
of its Web site (imamuseum.org) called the Dashboard offers current
information about the value of the museum's endowment, the number of
visitors and its average daily energy consumption. The museum also
recently created an online database of works that have been sold or
are, for other reasons, no longer a part of its permanent
collection.
Mr. Incandela acknowledged that the ultimate success of ArtBabble
will depend, at least partly, on what other institutions the
Indianapolis museum persuades to join.
Internationally, one museum that has devoted substantial
resources to producing videos is the Tate. In collaboration with
British Telecom, the Tate has put hundreds of videos on its Web
site, tate.org.uk, from studio visits with Jeff Koons and Gilbert &
George to archival interview footage with Francis Bacon. Reached by
phone, Will Gompertz, the director of Tate Media, the branch of the
museum that oversees its video production, said that he had not
previously heard of ArtBabble, but based on a description, he
thought it was a great idea.
"Tate would be delighted" to put its videos on a site like
ArtBabble, Mr. Gompertz said, adding, "Nothing in this new world can
be achieved alone."
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