Art Map now on Facebook
Anyone on Facebook can now get new Saint Louis Art Map posts delivered right to your news feed – just CLICK HERE and become a fan of the Saint Louis Art Map blog’s page.
Art and Social Media
The 75s at the Kemper Art Museum, from Flickr
A lot has been written lately about museums and their presence on Twitter and Facebook and other social media venues; in St. Louis, there is a great variety of levels of social media engagement among the arts institutions. On the one hand there’s the Saint Louis Art Museum, with nary a Facebook page to speak of - and yet, as one of my colleagues there has noted, setting up a simple Google Alert reveals that people are absolutely engaged with them online, whether it be from YouTube videos or blog posts about a class visit or public program - clearly the Saint Louis Art Museum has a social media presence even if it is “unofficial.” At Laumeier Sculpture Park, they now regularly review Flickr to find pictures of visitors illegally climbing all over the artworks-a mildly funny, if troubling, instance of social media exposing visitor behavior. On the other end of things, 2buildings1blog.org, featuring posts from both the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, was an early foray into museum blogging and remains a unique format and viable platform for both institutions. Almost every space associated with this blog now has a Facebook presence of some sort, and a few spots, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum included, now started using a Twitter account.
There reason why every art space in town is taking a slightly different approach to these things, at least in part, is because social media is not just something to do because it exists, but should be used as a tool to help connect existing or new audiences with the art-related experiences and education that we offer both virtually and in real life. When it comes to social media and museums/galleries, the real question to ask is - how do these online activities relate back to the mission, and audience, for each? At the core of the mission of the Kemper Art Museum is the idea of “connecting art to contemporary life,” and I’m sure there are innovative ways to achieve this through social media that we haven’t arrived at yet-while this is something that am constantly trying to refine and improve at the Kemper, I don’t want to claim that I am any kind of expert.
How do you see museums and other art spaces fitting into your life online? Do you have any suggestions for things that we could do to strengthen those interactions? How could this blog even be a hub for arts and social media in St. Louis? What social media applications do you use, and why?…
