Meet the Art Amateurs...

Not everyone “understands” art. Some people have difficulty spending even a few minutes in an art museum, nevertheless spending multiple hours. Sometimes trying to understand an art piece feels like looking at a blank canvas.

You see this all the time in art museums: certain people spend hours walking around, examining each painting; others wander the rooms more aimlessly, eventually growing tired or bored and finding themselves searching for the nearest bench or cafe.

The Problem

The real problem is that art museums often do not cater to the art amateurs. In WCMA, for example, the small plaques next to each work of art display the name of the painter, the rough time period of painting, and information about the medium: information that is interesting to an artist or an art student, but does nothing to help and “art amateur” better appreciate the art.

Further Motivation

In a HuffPost article called How You Expect To Feel at An Art Museum vs How You Really Feel, Katherine Brooks describes the phenomenon of feeling lost in an art museum even if you thing art is beautiful and enjoy a certain amount of art in your life. Here are some of the arguments Brooks makes:

"Lots of people feel intimidated by today’s art in particular, with its incomprehensible “masterpieces” and slightly disturbing figureheads. We want to understand it, be accepted into it, but even the act of visiting a museum can be less than ideal. With formidable columns and elaborate floor plans, entering a modern art haven can just as easily take the form of a dreamy afternoon jaunt or a nightmarish descent into the netherworld."

Experiencing art in isolation is often part of the issue. Social appreciation of art is crucial to its understanding and utility. In an article for Davos 2016, World Economic Forum Crystal Award winner Olaf Eliasson writes,

“...engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action… Engaging with art is not simply a solitary event. The arts and culture represent one of the few areas in our society where people can come together to share an experience even if they see the world in radically different ways. The important thing is not that we agree about the experience that we share, but that we consider it worthwhile sharing an experience at all.”

Art experts constantly try to "teach" art amateurs how to appreciate art. But sometimes people don't want an art lesson: they just want a community that will understand their experience.

Our Idea: Art As a Social Experience

For an art amateur, walking around an art museum on their own can be an isolating and frustrating experience. You don’t understand the art, you have questions, you feel like everyone around you is more of an art connoisseur than you are. What most people really want in that kind of situation is to be surrounded by people like them: not art students or museum experts or art museum frequenters, but other “art amateurs”.

Thus we can understand the need for a casual, real-time social aspect of art engagement for museumgoers. Such an experience allows for exciting sharing of thoughts and ideas. Currently, museum visitors each experience the exhibitions in their own respective bubbles. Merging these bubbles would greatly increase both the emotional engagement of visitors and the impact and reach of the artwork to its viewers. It should be noted that isolated, solitary pondering is also important to the growth of a relationship with and understanding of an artwork. Thus, it may be important to retain this aspect of experience in designing a solution to this problem.

Using WCMA as our foundation we would like to design an app that would create an immersive community experience: This would open up a new world...

...Questions

...Observations

...Stories

Potential features would include: *a community forum to view and post short-form comments about works of art *art detection either through GPS or using the phone camera *Discussion of specific art pieces as well as broader topics *Potential incorporation of audio (real "voices")

The goal is to connect all the art amateurs and help them feel less alone in an environment they feel out of place in, and one of the best ways to do this is to create a community that they can carry in their pocket and access when they most need it. It's time to bring those people in the museum shadows to the forefront. It's time to make art museums for the art amateurs.

Source: Cover Photo