When this New York Times article was written back in May of 2006, many art museums were placing excerpts from their audio tours on the web, sending them out as podcasts. They continue to do so, likely in greater numbers and with coverage from many more galleries and museums than are mentioned in the article.
I find that the podcasts I subscribe to have varied levels of usefulness and I use them as a reminder to visit the website and see what is there to supplement the audio file - after all, a description is useless without being able to see the art work being described. Of course, some of the podcasts are now of video files as well as audio. It is still worthwhile to visit the websites to see what else is available.
SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) podcasts are available with(M4A), or without (MP3), video . If you subscribe to the podcast, you'll get both. You can also download your preferred file format from the site. The wonderful extra content on this page is provided through the little white-bordered box to the right - here you find interactive features - I couldn't get all of them to work, but the ones that do are very well done.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has done 22 podcasts as of February 2008. One nice feature is that you can read the transcript of the interviews. You can subscribe, download or listen to files, and some episodes have extra content. Locating the art or the exhibit being discussed can take some work though so be ready to use Google and then go on some cyber side trips.
The podcasts from New York's Museum of Modern Art require a bit of work to co-ordinate online viewing and listening. Subscribing to the podcasts means that you get short audio files, and can then find the art or artist discussed on the website. MoMa's search feature is quite good but it's likely best to use the advanced search or you'll end up with much more than you want. On the podcast page there is also a list of special exhibitions with information about the exhibit and other audio programs which may, or may not, include in one audio/video slide show most of the short audio files along with images of the art. Whatever way you decide to explore this website, there is a huge amount of audiovisual material to be found.
February 05, 2008
Invasion of the Podcasts - New York Times
December 30, 2007
Bob Dylan - Chronicles, volume one
I've just finished reading Chronicles, volume one, by Bob Dylan. It's a maze of a book - he skips around in his life - covers a period from about 1959 to 1989 (I think), but not in chronocological order, so I had to keep looking for dates to see what decade he was writing about.
In Chronicles, Dylan writes about the singers and writers and artists who inspired him. I'll leave it to you to read the book (check 'World Cat search' to the left to find it in a library near you) to find out who most of them were. Some of them were people who I listened to when I was young (Hank Williams), who I found out about later (Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie), and who I'd never heard of before (Red Grooms).
On Dylan's web page you can find lyrics to his songs - a good thing since my copy of Modern Times has no lyrics in the liner notes. Dylan's Wikipedia page is extensive - there are 234 endnotes.
December 29, 2007
Craft and the Creative Process
Craft and the Creative Process is an exhibit put online by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 2001. If you 'view by artist' you can see sketches, craft works, writing, and other ephemera by various craftspeople. What intrigued me were the oral history interview excerpts - I listened to the one with Anni Albers. Now I'm going to read the transcript. Explore the site until you find something that interests you.
Since there weren't very many audio file links on the exhibit page, I went to the Archives home page to see what else was in their Oral History Interviews web page. Turns out that there is much more than I'll ever have time to look at and listen to. Many of the interviews have transcripts and some have audio excerpts. You can choose to look through all the records, those with transcripts, or those with audio (13 today).
The Archives has excellent and extensive resources: exploring the site is time consuming but very rewarding.
I originally found out about Craft and the Creative Process in the SuperNaturale Newsletter back in 2005.
December 05, 2007
Richard Serra at MoMA
The site has walkthroughs and dialogue between Serra and the interviewer, often providing a feel of what it would be like to be inside the sculpture. Many pictures of the works on the website, no matter the actual location, have an accompanying discussion by Serra, which provides context for the work, and his reasons for using the materials, how he found them and put them together.
The site has fairly good navigation, although I found that titles sometimes stayed on the screen and got in the way of the images. My quibble would be that not all of the images are in colour. I would have been happier to see the colours of the works, especially when Serra talks about texture and appearance.
November 20, 2007
Olia Lialina - My Boyfriend Came Back from the War
This web art has been around since 1996 and is surprisingly (or not) still relevant. The links within the work can lead on and on, or sometimes you end up with a black screen. It's better then, I found, to click back a few pages and start over again.
I like the added touch of the Google ads to the left of the first screen. They may, or may not, have to do with war. I reloaded a few times and got quite a variety of links.
I found the Olia Lialina web work through a list of "Classic Web Works" on Judy Malloy's web page. One of my current plans is to read her book Women, Art & Technology and explore the links on the web page devoted to the book. I've tried this before and didn't get too far. It's very easy to get distracted.
For instance, if you check the main link for the Lialina work, you end up on a page that leads to
many other web pages. Then I had to Google her to see if I could find more information about her works. Her Teleporticia cv page has quite a bit of info. The Wikipedia page is quite short but has some very good, and distracting, links - and great animated gifs.
