H O M E

Jonathan Cooper Manager of Information, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AUSTRALIA

Review: Fine Art Museums of San Francisco Virtual Gallery

First published (as "Museums without walls") in internet.au magazine: Issue 81/July 2002

.At a conference in Edinburgh in 1995 titled "Museums and the Web", various speakers and delegates spoke excitedly about how the World Wide Web would finally make possible the dream of "museums without walls". No need to go to Paris to visit the Louvre, or New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art; anyone would be able to visit them virtually, from the comfort of their own home. In fact, a VR (virtual reality) museum needn't be restricted to the works from just one institution. Why couldn't one be created in which, say, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon appeared side-by-side?

I believe there are a number of reasons why this idea has not taken off. Firstly, no digital representation of an artwork can ever substitute for a real encounter with it (unless the work itself is digital, of course). Secondly, a 'true' VR museum on the Web would require more technology and bandwidth than is available currently (or in the next few years). Thirdly, copyright restrictions have made sharing of artworks between institutions difficult, if not impossible. So -- and this is the final reason -- what could a VR museum have to offer that a real one does not already (apart from convenience)?

The website of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco contains a virtual gallery that provides some answers to this question. It allows you to choose any works from its collections and create your own small exhibition, which then becomes part of the website that others can visit.

When you first arrive, you see a representation of six rooms, each one containing an exhibition:

Each exhibition has four walls with an average of two or three artworks per wall:

You move around the room by clicking the 'view left' or 'view right' button. As you move your mouse-pointer over an artwork, basic caption details appear at the bottom of the screen. Click on the artwork and a new page (from another part of the FAMSF site) pops up that gives extra information about it.

To look for artworks for your own exhibition, you make searches of the collections, using one or more keywords at a time (possibly an artist's name). After a while, the matching works in the collections appear as thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, ten at a time. To choose one, just drag it onto a wall. You can even enlarge it if you want. You can also move the works around or delete them at any time:

When you are finished, you are asked to give your exhibition a title, write a short description and even invite people to your "opening" (by entering their email addresses). Yours then replaces the oldest of the six current exhibitions and remains until it too gets pushed off, into a publicly viewable archive.

What makes this web site special is not its technical cleverness; rather it is that visitors are given the opportunity to create something new and personal out of an existing online resource. And, as per the original vision of the Web, it allows them to share their creations with others, online.

Unfortunately, because any exhibition on this site must be created within one session, most of them look quite hastily put together. If the site used cookies or a registration process, its 'virtual curators' would be able to think more about their choices and even refine their exhibitions over time. The single description field, while better than just a title, is still rather limiting. Extended labels and wall texts, perhaps explaining why two or three works have been put together, would add real value. Another useful feature, to add another level of interactivity, would be a visitors' comments book for each exhibition.

One more quibble: Lengthy processes, particularly displaying an artwork for the first time, give no feedback that something is happening (even a watch/hourglass cursor would help).

Nevertheless, the clean, simple design and visual/spatial interface of the FAMSF Virtual Gallery make it an excellent tool for fostering personal involvement between visitors and individual works of art; and this I believe should be the ultimate goal of any art museum.