Past exhibits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The exhibition archives for the Metropolitan Museum of Art go back to 2000 [1999, actually, as of March 2011]. While not all archived exhibits have accompanying online media, most of them do. The Met has a generous and clear "terms and conditions" policy so that I can, for instance, show this sketch of Franz Liszt by Ingres

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French, 1780–1867)

Franz Liszt, 1839
Graphite with white highlights on paper; 12 1/8 x 9 in. (30.9 x 22.8 cm)
Richard Wagner Stiftung, Bayreuth

as long as I cite it properly and include the complete caption - which wasn't as hard to do as I thought it would be. The website for the Ingres exhibit, which ran from October 5, 1999 to January 2, 2000, is http://www.metmuseum.org/explore/ingres/ingres/html/el_ingres_inter.htm. This exhibit has 16 images of art by Ingres, with details of each, along with supplementary material.

Other archived exhibits have audio files as well as images. For example, Richard Avedon: Portraits has sound for some of the photographs along with the transcripts.

The Met is one art museum which takes its online presence seriously. There are comprehensive exhibits in many cases, and there's no searching around for image files, like there is with sites which provide only podcasts of the audio which a viewer would hear if she or he were in the art gallery. The Met's podcasts allow you to subscribe, listen on site, download episodes, and read the transcripts.

Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings / Lords of Creation

This exhibit has two online web pages - and two titles. According to the New York Times review by Holland Cotter "Mayan Treasures at the Met: Passing Strange Communications From the Beyond", the show first appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as Lords of Creation. The online exhibit is excellent, although I would have wished for larger images, or a magnifying tool. The presentation is in Flash, and once you enter a section, the only way to get back to the main page is the little curved arrow to the left of the exhibition title.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art called their exhibit Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings and it's presented in their standard format - some text and some pictures. It's not fancy but their Past Exhibitions start in 2000, with images of the works appearing mid-year. The pictures can be enlarged, but not magnified.

The end (?) of Netscape

Netscape has been officially discontinued, or will be by March 1. I like Netscape, especially Netscape Composer that was available up to version 7.2. I've been using Firefox for some time and find that it is very similar (of course), even has the same tendency to refuse to work when I've viewed one too many videos or played one too many interactive games.

Wikipedia has several good articles on Netscape, the company, and Netscape, the browser. Just don't click on the Netscape.com link unless you want to visit AOL.com with it's numerous cookie windows.

Invasion of the Podcasts - New York Times

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.

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.