Day Two: Making the Most of Modern Media at MoMA

My first exposure to modern art as a child was not in a museum, but through Toy Story, in the scene displayed above. While intended to be satirical, it still imparted a lasting impression on my four-year-old mind that modern art is inscrutable yet emblematic of high culture. Even after taking two classes on art history and art theory ten years apart, I can still resonate with sentiments of frustration or bemusement at contemporary and modern art.

Through my brief yet substantial education in the arts, I’ve heard of MoMA as an esteemed institution that houses some of the most iconic artworks known by AP Art History students and people worldwide. Visiting today, I not only got to see their exhibits, but also to hear from Sara Bodinson, the Director of Interpretation, Research, and Digital Learning at MoMA’s Department of Education. In her position, she oversees the museum’s interpretive planning process, covering aspects such as label copy, podcasts, Massive Multimedia Online Courses, and mobile apps.

While I applaud MoMA’s wide reach in sharing their wealth of resources through platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Coursera, I also greatly enjoyed how they worked to understand their visitors that then guides their programming. Most interestingly, according to Bodinson, visitors’ interest in modern and contemporary art outweighs their self-reported knowledge on that topic. Such an insight would have driven their planning for A Piece of Work, their collaborative podcast with WNYC hosted by Abbi Jacobson and featuring her celebrity friends and MoMA curators. Such a hosting choice moves away from the ivory-tower impression that may intimidate others from museums or asking honest questions about what modern and contemporary art is all about.

Even though, according to the National Awareness, Attitude, and Usage study, 77 to 78 percent of Americans trust in museums, zoos, and aquaria (compared to 67 percent for daily newspapers), a museum can’t bank solely on its curatorial expertise, the weight of its collections, or its preceding reputation to get people to have a quality educational experience, let alone come in through the doors. Knowing their potential audiences and making the most of the various media available to them and their visitors can move that trust from a detached idealism to a behavioral reality.