Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age

Natalia Grincheva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351250986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age explores online museums as sites of contemporary cultural diplomacy.

Building on scholarship that highlights how museums can constitute and regulate citizens, construct national communities, and project messages across borders, the book explores the political powers of museums in their online spaces. Demonstrating that digital media allow museums to reach far beyond their physical locations, Grincheva investigates whether online audiences are given the tools to co-curate museums and their collections to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy. Evaluating the online capacities of museums to exert cultural impacts, the book illuminates how online museum narratives shape audience perceptions and redefine their cultural attitudes and identities.

Museum Diplomacy in the Digital Age will be of interest to academics and students teaching or taking courses on museums and heritage, communication and media, cultural studies, cultural diplomacy, international relations and digital humanities. It will also be useful to practitioners around the world who want to learn more about the effect digital museum experiences have on international audiences.

1

Introduction

When museums go global and digital: new pathways of museum diplomacy

Why this book? Why now?

The active use of digital and social media by museums no longer appears to be revolutionary or groundbreaking. Museum curatorial practices, collection display and design of exhibition spaces are significantly enhanced by augmented or virtual reality. Various web, mobile and game applications created around museums and their resources increasingly advance museum communications and outreach. Additionally, emotional trackers and smart technology sensors within exhibition galleries, as well as digital trail guides with artificial intelligence capabilities, equip contemporary museums with a plethora of highly dynamic and interactive tools. These tools nurture creative interactions among objects, narratives and communities and enable museums to engage, amuse, educate, empower and connect visitors online and on site. This book, though, takes us back to the first decade of the 21st century, specifically to the year 2010. This was a special time when the digital journey of museums reached an important milestone in the history of digital media emancipation. From mere marketing, educational or promotional tools, online museum initiatives slowly turned into dynamic two-way communication spaces connecting institutions and their global audiences.

In the late 2000s, many museums around the world convened and delivered their ambitious global media campaigns, reaching new generations of audiences through extremely popular social media channels. For example, Tate Modern in the U.K. launched the turbinegeneration project in 2009,¹ which created an online hub for international collaborations among schools, galleries, artists and cultural institutions worldwide. In the same year, the Smithsonian Institution piloted its Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life,² an avatar-based 3D virtual world featuring immersive learning activities. The Victoria and Albert Museum started its viral World Beach Project in 2007,³ engaging global publics to share their stories and art creations on the interactive map portal. Europeana,⁴ the largest aggregator of digital cultural heritage across thousands of museums and libraries in Europe, was established in 2010 to celebrate and share European culture in its immense diversity.

These online museum initiatives did more than merely satisfy contemporary audiences’ expectations for cultural production and participation in the age of growing digital interactivity. They also promised cross-cultural sharing and exchange through dialogical forms of communications that opened avenues for new cultural dfiplomacy. Initially, cultural diplomacy was defined by the U.S. State Department in 1959 as “the direct and enduring contact between people of different nations … to help create a better climate of international trust and understanding in which official relations can operate” (U.S. Department of State 1969, iv).

Cultural diplomacy is better known, though, as the “cross-cultural exchanges of ideas, information, art, and other aspects of culture among nations and their peoples to foster mutual understanding” (Cummings 2003, 1). It is still mainly understood as an activity initiated by the government, or within the foreign policy agenda of a particular state. However, in the 21st century, cultural diplomacy has expanded its meaning to embrace exchanges and interactions among people, organisations and communities that take place beyond the direct control or involvement of national governments (Grincheva 2019; Kelley 2014).

Historically, museums have remained key actors of cultural diplomacy, as well as vital hosting spaces of official high-level diplomatic events at which international agreements have been negotiated and signed. “In Europe exporting individual collections of art, as a national policy, had been practiced between monarchs since the Renaissance” (Arndt 2005, 363). Furthermore, exchanges of rare national treasures between monarchs, and eventually multilateral negotiations about cultural property ownership, started with the Napoleonic Wars (Swenson 2016). As educational agencies of “constructing citizenry,” museums have been very effective in projecting their nations’ cultural values and identities (Bennett 1995). Specifically, museums’ travelling exhibitions, cross-cultural museum loans and professional exchanges have always empowered rich and diverse museum collections to communicate political messages beyond national borders (Arndt 2005).

For example, in the mid-19th century, the Russian Emperor Nicholas I made strategic use of the famous collection at the State Hermitage Museum to display and assert a greater role for an emerging Russia to enter the European state system (Digout 2006). During the Cold War, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was secretly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to export its abstract impressionism collection to the countries in the Soviet bloc as a way of protesting against communism (Cockcroft 1985). Following World War II, the Japanese government also employed national museums as an important tool of cultural diplomacy to rebrand its negative image on the world stage and to send messages of goodwill and openness to other countries (Akagawa 2014).

However, in previous centuries, the implementation of cross-cultural exchanges in the world of museums was quite restricted. In a time when travel and communication technologies were quite limited, cross-cultural contact established among museums and their international audiences was a top-down exercise that was controlled and commissioned by national governments. In the contemporary global media environment, these cross-cultural encounters are happening all the time in various online spaces. The “digital age holds the promise of dramatically expanding the reach of interpersonal contact that is at the core of all exchange programs” (Schneider 2010, 103). Online spaces created by museums have become important media channels for projecting cultural and political discourse beyond national borders (Grincheva 2012a, 2012b). At the same time, they promised to provide social spaces for cross-cultural dialogue and negotiations connecting people from different parts of the world (Grincheva 2013). These new digital avenues for international communication could reach much wider and more diverse audiences at the global level. Potentially, they could even offer less expensive and even more engaging tools to exercise museum diplomacy in the age of digital interactivity.

Known as digital diplomacy, diplomacy 2.0 or e-diplomacy, diplomatic practices through digital and networked technologies including the internet, mobile devices and social media channels have become increasingly important and popular since the beginning of the new millennium (Potter 2002; Nye 2004; Melissen 2006). The potential of digital technologies to establish communication in a faster and easier way with a variety of different actors has been recognised by many state governments. Some of them even created new departments in their international relations offices in the early 2000s, to carry out the tasks specifically designed for diplomatic initiatives through digital media. Some examples include the Office of eDiplomacy at the U.S. Department of State and the Digital Diplomacy Communication Directorate at the Foreign Commonwealth Office in the U.K.

The first decade of the 21st century was not only the time when most of the largest museums around the world went viral with their innovative social media projects. It was also a decade that set a pre-context to the unfolding of the Arab Spring, which involved a large social media protest campaign leading to a series of political movements in the Middle East that ultimately resulted in regime changes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. The Arab Spring demonstrated the enormous power of social media, and prompted many governments around the world to reconsider and reinforce their digital diplomacy strategies and policies to “make the most of the abundant opportunities of the 21st century in the networked world,” as the U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague pointed out (FCO 2012).

Indeed, the first decade of the new century heralded numerous digital media initiatives that challenged the way in which diplomatic communication had traditionally been conducted. Previously, it was predictable, highly controlled and concentrated in the hands of governments (Hocking et al. 2012). Social media have given the public immediate access to information, as well as offering global broadcast technologies that enable intervention in international flows of political communication. This made contemporary diplomacy multi-layered, multidirectional and dispersed among many actors (Jora 2013). The most ambitious potential that social media promised was the possibility of democratic dialogue that people could shape by taking an active role in world conversations on the most important, urgent and pressing issues of the day.

In the world of museums, social media promised cultural communities the ability to challenge the museum authority as the dominant agency of cultural knowledge creation. Digitised museum collections enhanced with interactive communication components could open new avenues for audiences to voice their opinions and renegotiate their cultural identities (Srinivasan and Huang 2005; Drotner and Schrøder 2014). Increasingly, museum audiences demanded a higher level of inclusion, participation and interactivity, while forces of rapidly accelerating globalisation expanded these demands across cultural and political museum geographies. It is worth returning to 2010, to the culmination of the social media boom in international activities and the engagement of museums. This reflective journey is useful to explore whether these initial online museum programmes were designed to satisfy the democratic aspirations of the global public. This exploration can reveal whether online audiences were given the tools required to co-curate museums, and their collections, and to establish new pathways for international cultural relations, exchange and, potentially, diplomacy.

Focusing on the digital museum platforms’ structural design, cultural content and public response, this book aims to deconstruct discursive frames and cultural narratives of online museum spaces. It intends to analyse their implications for contemporary diplomacy in order to explore how digital museum experiences affect international audiences. To achieve these goals, the book analyses three online projects developed by major museums around the world in one year – 2010. The next section brings us directly to these case studies, while explaining their selection.

Epicentres of digital museum diplomacy

Before I introduce you to these cases, though, let me quickly walk you through a significant transformation in museum agency over last four centuries. This brief history is important because it helps to flag key milestones that explain my choice of specific online museum programmes for the analysis of the phenomenon of digital museum diplomacy. From their inception, museums have been deeply political agencies (Gray 2015) that are tightly intertwined with cultures of the “other” (Stocking 1985). “Museums are cannibalistic in appropriating other peoples’ material for their own study and interpretation … There is a glass box for everyone” (Ames 1992, 3).

Going back to the Renaissance, one can trace the development of the first European museums that emerged from collections of strange objects arriving from the New World. Most of the collections in the 16th century were housed in “cabinets of curiosity,” called studiolo in Italian, cabinet de curiosites in French and Wunderkammer, or cabinets of wonder, in German (Olmi 1985, 7). They were designed as a response “to the crisis of knowledge provoked by the expansion of the natural world through the voyages of discovery and exploration” in Africa, East Asia and the Americas (Findlen 1989, 68). Under the rubric of museum, a “mosaic” organisation of all these unusual and strange artefacts aimed to surprise and amaze rather than to inform (Findlen 1994, 34). This “confusing juxtaposition of objects and instruments” inevitably established the encyclopedia of nature as the ultimate goal of collecting with “curiosity as a virtue into itself” (Findlen 1994, 36)

The influx of artefacts from the New World reaching Europeans paved the way for new models of knowledge, giving rise to so-called “universal museums” (Findlen 1989, 63). “Rich theatres of objects of the whole universe,” these museums aimed to “tame,” exhibit and explore all possible and impossible forms, shapes and manifestations of the natural world spreading beyond one’s own home location (Schultz 1994, 178). They created “a microcosm of the universe, where intellectual power over the whole, the macrocosm, could be displayed” and exercised (Pearce 2010, 17). However, these early chaotic private displays of collections of curiosities have grown into strategically designed curatorial spaces of “public spectacle” (Findlen 1989, 103).

By the 18th century, the concept of the museum had been established and revealed the trend towards “openness, sociability, and publicity” (Findlen 1989, 117). It rooted itself in the tradition of order and display that could communicate ideas and draw historical parallels and cross-cultural comparisons to project foundational concepts (Moser 2006). Museums came to “procure for themselves a monopoly over the knowledge exhibited in their halls” nurturing pedagogic authority and admitting the public only “as spectators and not protagonists” (Shelton 1990, 98). With a strong colonial legacy, museums became important political actors on the world stage by exercising power in other ways apart from their role as possessors of objects. Most importantly, European museums reinforced their global authority by communicating new meanings of their ethnographic and cultural collections “to carry a true part of the past into the present, but also to bear perpetual symbolic reinterpretation” (Pearce 2010).

Interestingly, by the end of the 19th century the narratives of these collections developed strong links to the idea of the nation. With the concept of the museum as an instrument for the democratic education of the “masses” or the “citizen” (Hooper-Greenhill 1989), at the beginning of the 20th century museums served as “national expressions of identity” (Macdonald 2003, 3). Eventually, from being civilising tools to fulfil “the task of the cultural governance of the populace,” (Bennett 1995, 21) museums transformed into a means of constructing cultural communities through which power is exercised in terms of cultural inclusion or exclusion (Anderson 2006). The idea of a national museum, however, has a strong international dimension, because a nation can be properly defined through its cultural uniqueness, in comparison and, inevitably, in opposition to the “other.” As museum scholar Anthony Shelton rightfully pointed out, museums “are rarely reflexive and neither arrange objects so that their categories question those of the dominant culture” (1990, 98). Acquired by “expropriative processes” museum collections, especially of ethnographic objects, have always been heavily “dependent on the commitment of individual, corporate, or national wealth,” subjecting the “other” to ones’ own power of representation (Stocking 1985, 5). “There is no knowledge of the Other which is not also a temporal, historical and political act” (Fabian 2014, 1).

More recently, the international agenda of contemporary museology has urged these institutions to become responsible social actors. Since the inception of the new museology movement, the development of public and educational programmes has become just as important as the more traditional tasks of cultural preservation (Vergo 1997). It has “promoted education over research, engagement over doctrine, and multivocality ove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• 1. Introduction: When museums go global and digital: new pathways of museum diplomacy
• 2. Digital museum diplomacy
• 3. Failures of digital repatriation diplomacy: The Virtual Museum of the Pacific: The Australian Museum
• 4. Digital heritage imperialism: “A History of the World in 100 Objects”: The British Museum
• 5. Online power of global brands: YouTube Play project: The Guggenheim Museum
• 6. Conclusion: From failures to success: from the material past to a digital future
• Index