Museumize Blog about Museum Reproductions

Even Museums Are Gathering Data About You

This week the Wall Street Journal posted an article titled The Museums Is Watching You which described how some museums assign employees to gather data about its visitors as they wander their galleries. They want to better understand which artworks attract more attention, less attention and whose attention in an attempt to improve the visitor's experience. They are applying data gathering tactics similar to traditional business behavior studies...a sort of "Google-esque" record of your visit.

This article interested me for several reasons. First, in today's world, more and more of our personal behavior is being recorded to better understand our interests. If the company knows about us they can better satisfy us and in the end influence us towards their needs. Second, museums are taking a more business like approach to their operations in an attempt to compete with the vast array of entertainment options available to every one today. And third, simple art -- that is paintings which aren't animated, sculptures which don't become CGI enhanced "Transformers" at the push of a button -- will have a difficult time attracting attention unless the past cultures, ancient histories, and earlier interests of people are read about and appreciated by today's children. Looking at a painting which is "foreign" either through time or culture can be a challenge to appreciate. And with the Twitter approach to life in text messages and quick emails, one wonders if people of the future will take an interest in something old and foreign.

Perhaps the vast data being collected about us will in the end "organize" a history of today which itself perpetuates a continuing interest in the past. After all, comparison is one our primary modes of interpretation...Am I more like or unlike the peoples of the past? Is my world more modern or less modern than their's?...And so on...

Michelangelo's Ink Blot Test

A few weeks back, there was some internet buzz about an article in an issue of Neurosurgery regarding Michelangelo's painting of God in the Sistine Chapel. The authors, Suk and Tamargo, claim that Michelangelo may have intentionally included references to the brain stem in his drawing of God's head. Since he had done this in an adjacent image of Adam a year earlier, as proposed by an earlier scholar, "Michelangelo wanted to once again associate the figure of God with a brain in the iconographically critical Separation of Light From Darkness" wrote the authors. They noted the powerful symbolism of incorporating the human brain into a depiction of "the first act performed by God in the creation of the universe... situated immediately above the altar in the chapel."

Since Michelangelo is known to have dissected human cadavers and drew the human form in a way which emphasized its muscular and structural integrity, the proposition seems plausible, albeit a bit of a stretch. It's like saying Michelangelo was aware of anatomy in the same way we are 500 years later.

I enjoy thinking that Michelangelo may have been humanizing God in a corporeal way which the church might not have approved. But I enjoyed even more reading blogs about the recent authors' conclusions. The blogs humored that "we see what we want to see" in Michelangelo's works in much the same way a child does when he looks at a Rorschach Ink Blot Test and sees his favorite movie star or cartoon character.

Original Article: Michelangelo Hid an Anatomy Lesson in the Sistine Chapel

At Museumize.com: Sculpture adaptation of God from Sistine Chapel; Sculpture adaptation of Adam from Sistine Chapel