Everything that is wrong in museums starts with wall labels

Super heady.

> Linguistic indirection is something of a hallmark of the cultural heritage sector and while it may sometimes be necessary for financial or budgetary reasons it is, in most cases, profoundly harmful or at least a counter-productive distraction and a waste of time.

If linguistic indirection is a term of art, I'm not familiar with it, but it seems like a great way to describe this:

> Digital transformation is the manifestation through commercialization — which is to say financial means and industrial availability — of tools and processes whose introduction shines a light on issues and challenges which were always present but otherwise able to remain unseen.

I may eventually get to the wall label part but this is tough.

> If we assume that large language models are being used to generate these texts and if those models are able to faithfully and believably parody our long-standing assumptions of what those texts are expected to sound like then does it call in to question the entire practice of intellectualizing an artist's work in their unique voice?

I would say no. Authenticity is always in question. If the artist pasted LLM output wholesale, that was the choice they made to represent their work. Maybe they felt they expressed themselves in the prompt. What if they used a thesaurus, or a ghostwriter, or plagiarized something, or overheard someone say something they liked? It's up to the viewer to decide whether they find it meaningful or resonant.

That's the beauty of art. Intent matters, in that it can affect the interpretation, but ultimately any interpretation is valid.

Pretty interesting. My takeaway is that you can’t assume viewers will know why curators thought a piece was important. The wall label might say what it is and when it’s from but the why (which is the most interesting part) is often missing. And it’s not something LLMs can fix.

What distinguishes an Eames chair on display at the Cooper Hewitt from the same chair on display at MoMA or countless other museums in the world? What distinguishes it from the same chair on display, and for sale, at the Herman Miller showroom?

What, if not the stories that the institutions who collect these objects tell about them?

One of them is near enough to be a visited by me on a day trip. I can understand design museums being essentially franchised showrooms for contemporary culture objects, but I think he asks some reasonable questions about the point of curation and the role of museums in moden society.

”The Cooper Hewitt is a design museum and, like all design museums, it basically has all the same things that every other design museum has.”

Hah, touché.

Cooper Hewitt also happens to be inside Andrew Carnegie’s 19th century mansion on the Upper East Side, E 91st St. It reopens later this week with new exhibitions alongside the amazing house itself, the first floor of which is free entry while installation works are ongoing.

Hearst Castle but with an OG blue-candy iMac in it looking over the Jackie O reservoir instead of the Pacific.

I must admit to having had an interest in AI for more than 20 years, and an attraction to museums and their nature for at least 10. I read this article from beginning to end and think it is really interesting. The idea that entertainment gets turned into culture by revisiting? Wow. The idea that museum curators decide what gets revisited (exhibitions with wall labels) and that we just don't keep the data you'd want to train an LLM, and that the very process of training would turn the whole thing beige. There are however lots of uses for ai tools.

My local museum had a room of poorly labeled and unlabeled objects that I loved and so I went down the rabbit hole of identifying and investigating most of them. Then I wrote the missing Wikipedia page for my favorite. If they had provided good labels I would never have gotten so knowledgeable about them.

He kind of lost me with the part about every object having a social media account, every plane at SFO having a social media account.

I started reading, then shifted to skimming, then abandoned it because it has said NOTHING in the first few screenfuls. is this a joke?

[dead]