1stfans: a socially networked museum membership

1stfans Twitter Art Feed for September 2010: Museum Nerd

Nitasha Kawatra on September 1, 2010

This month on the 1stfans Twitter Art Feed artist, we're thrilled to have the opportunity to feature one of our very own 1stfans: the anonymous, yet notorious, Twitter personality known as @MuseumNerd. If you're one of the over 24,000 followers of this feed, you've probably already experienced Museum Nerd's insightful commentary and contagious love of all things related to art, art history, and museums.



Whether it's through tweets, photographs, or ruminations that sometime exceed 140 characters, this character is intriguing not only because of the seemingly omnipresent reports on art and museum happenings around the world (though primarily focused on New York), but also because it reflects a highly personal, and unadulterated, take on everyday experiences with works of art. For the Twitter Art Feed this month, Museum Nerd launched a community project that is an ode to-what else?-museums that will unfold throughout the month for our followers. I'll let Museum Nerd explain further:

"This month, I'm extremely excited to be Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans digital artist in residence. Initially I conceived of this project as a collective "love letter" to "museums." I posted a message on twitter asking if anyone who "loved museums and could lick a stamp" wanted to be involved in an art project and used the hashtag #MuseumArt. Since the 1stfans artists are kept under wraps until their project launches, I wasn't able to explain exactly what #MuseumArt involved, but people were excited nonetheless. I asked them to send me postcards showing museums and to write what they loved about the museum on the back.

Since @MuseumNerd is a secret identity, I enlisted the help of museum world friends who tweet for their museums. They received the postcards on my behalf and I went on several #SecretMission operations to meet them and attain the postcards. On one #SecretMission I visited four museums in four NYC boroughs to pick up postcards. In part I wanted to give recognition to the real people behind museum twitter feeds and remind folks that museums are not monolithic unapproachable institutions.



This project falls into critic Ben Davis's "Greimasian Semiotic Square" as a "social art collaboration," and was partly inspired by artist An Xiao's explorations of the relationship between digital and analogue communication, especially in her 1stfans twitter art feed. What started as a brief digital message evoked dozens of analogue communications (postcards) which will now be posted again as digital scans, but with my own creative intervention. These will be in the form of simple word bubbles which reflect my obsession with words and words in art (e.g. Ed Ruscha). This is part of a body of work that celebrates "museums" themselves as the wonderful inspiring places they've been for all the participants in #MuseumArt and millions of others."

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1stfans Twitter Art Feed Artist for August 2010: Danny Tuss

Nitasha Kawatra on July 30, 2010

This month on the Twitter Art Feed, we're presenting the work of Brooklyn Museum staff member, Danny Tuss. Danny is assistant to the Chief Curator and, on a daily basis, works as a curatorial assistant for all of the curatorial departments, managing projects that range from object research to new acquisitions and everything in between. While Danny's work at the Museum is primarily collection-focused, he's continually thinking of unique ways in which the Museum can continue to share undiscovered materials, engage visitors with the objects, and reveal the individuality and varied interests of our staff. Recently, Danny and I were chatting about the Brooklyn's Finest segment on the blog-which spotlights a staff member every month-and he proposed a somewhat related photography project of his that will allow a completely different perspective on the people that work here. I'll let him explain:

Despite popular belief, museums are not proverbial ivory towers situated high upon hills, filled with curators and staff meticulously tending to their objects in sterile offices worthy of forensic crime television. In fact the truth is quite the contrary: the offices of a museum are crowded, cluttered and storied places often as interesting and convoluted in appearance as objects in the collection.  Throughout August I will conduct an exposé, wherein "portraits" of various museum offices will be posted to twitter.

Danny's "self-portrait"

This idea came about through a conversation with a friend about the Brooklyn Museum.  Without a museum background, this friend assumed, as I think many people do, that museums exist in a bubble.  It was clear that people's perception of museums as clean whitewashed spaces full of beautiful, pristine objects protected by high security extended to the perception that curators and staff work in similarly pristine conditions. This project is an opportunity to show that the reality is quite different and that often the work spaces of the collectors can be as interesting as the objects they collect."



Please feel free to tweet your own desk to compare.

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