杏吧原创

GO ON, take a closer look. For more than 30 000 years, these stunning drawings
of ancient animals have remained hidden from view, tucked deep inside a cave in
the Ard猫che region of France. It鈥檚 probably the most sophisticated cave
art ever found. Or perhaps you prefer a tour around the Apollo 10 command module
in London鈥檚 Science Museum? What about a spot of shopping at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York or a trip through one of the world鈥檚 nine museums
dedicated to Picasso?

Hang on. I鈥檓 sitting at home in front of my PC.

Of course. And the next museum is 4500 miles away. Hurry up.

So I鈥檓 accessing the Web site of a virtual museum. But surely this isn鈥檛
really a museum experience?

All it lacks is the footache. You get most of your cultural experiences by
virtue of technology. Listening to a CD, watching a movie or hearing an opera on
the radio are all valid ways to enjoy culture. But suggest making all of a
nation鈥檚 paintings available electronically and there would be an outcry: people
would talk of the need to see the real object and the importance of drinking in
the ambience. And don鈥檛 forget the postcards on the way out.

But is a transmitted experience real?

You watched the football on television last night and the view was better
than from the terraces. In any case, when you go to the Louvre, you don鈥檛 see
the Mona Lisa. You see what is probably a copy, behind plate glass. A bit like a
computer screen.

So it doesn鈥檛 matter where things are physically located if they can
still be accessed somehow?

Cyberspace certainly increases availability and access. Does it really matter
that the complete works of Poussin are scattered across many collections, both
public and private? It does today鈥攖here is almost no way to see them all.
But imagine if they were all available electronically. Antonio Canova鈥檚 The
Three Graces could have been scanned in three dimensions and the resulting image
made available for the world to examine and appreciate at a fraction of the cost
of acquiring the real thing. And there鈥檚 no danger of it getting dropped on its
way between London and Edinburgh. A lot of people thought Bill Gates was mad
when he bought up the electronic rights to great art.

This is beginning to sound a little revolutionary.

Museums are revolutionary. They are democratic institutions, only 200 years
old as a concept. French revolutionaries threw open the doors of the Louvre in
1793 and the British Museum opened to the public soon after (with an admission
charge to limit the attendances). Prior to that, most had been private, state or
scholarly collections, unavailable for mass scrutiny. Today, most of these are
still first generation or Platonic museums.

Platonic?

They possess a glass-cased, don鈥檛-touch mentality, with interpretation
restricted to a printed card and a sentence in the guidebook. But another
revolution took place about a century ago when interactive exhibits were
introduced, mostly in those museums which sprang from the desire to show off
Victorian technology. These second generation, or Socratic, museums were the
progenitors of today鈥檚 touchy-feely science centres. Now the arrival of the
Internet and multimedia offer the possibility of third generation
museums鈥攖rue temples of inspiration, palaces of memory or, in the words of
the Fench philosopher Michel Foucault: 鈥減art of the archive of everything鈥�.
Third generation museums will be places where users build their own museum
experience. Some of that will happen in real time with a real visit, and some of
it will happen at a distance.

But can everybody do this?

Forget the phrase 鈥渋nformation-poor鈥�. You can visit Internet museums free
from your local library. Most museums and galleries are out of your reach
anyway, by virtue of geography, opportunity or economics.

Museum directors must hate virtual museums and galleries: surely a
museum鈥檚 success is judged by the number of visitors passing through its
turnstiles?

If museum trustees added an additional measure鈥攙irtual
visitors鈥攖o the director鈥檚 targets, all this would change overnight. It is
a nonsense to base the perceived success of a museum which has no entry charges
on its foot count. Anyway, museum directors are not above counting you twice if
you slip out for a quick cigarette.

But if people can visit virtually, will they ever come for real?

A good Web site increases real visitors, as the Museum of the History of
Science in Florence has found. What鈥檚 more, installing a few decent graphics
workstations and multimedia rooms with screen walls inside the museum will bring
in a whole new audience鈥攖he one that doesn鈥檛 come to museums but sits in
its bedroom playing Doom.

Curators must see the public as a necessary evil, endured only as a
marketing exercise.

So put the entire collection on the Web and allow the public to visit from a
safe distance. It worked for the Palaeolithic cave paintings at
Vallon-Pont-d鈥橝rc in Ard猫che, which can only be visited virtually. The
actual caves are too valuable and fragile to allow in hordes of humans breathing
carbon dioxide all over them. The Web site was put up within weeks of the
paintings being discovered and now scholars are collaborating in cyberspace to
make the most of it. Cyberspace also offers museum directors the chance to
arrange their collections better鈥攖he Japanese coins can be put alongside
the Samurai swords and the netsuke ivories, rather than across different
galleries or museums.

But how do you pay for it?

Freeze all acquisition budgets and spend the cash on making the collection
available on the Web, and on CD-ROMs to give out free to educational users.

An end to the classic museum visit, then? Just rows of nerds and some
wiring.

Don鈥檛 get me wrong鈥擨 am not suggesting that museums and galleries
shouldn鈥檛 be the keepers of the nation鈥檚 heritage, the places where artefacts
are collected, preserved, restored and studied. These are valuable activities.
But you the taxpayer are paying for it and if you want to see it all and see it
now, what鈥檚 stopping you?

* * *

Museums on the web

1. World Wide Web Virtual Library museums page鈥攇ood for starters.
   http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/museums/
2. The Museum Computer Network maintains a hotlist of over 500 museums on the Web.
   http://world.std.com/~mcn
3. Palaeolithic cave paintings at Vallon-Pont-d鈥橝rc.
   http://www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/gvpda-d.htm
4. The Vatican鈥檚 site is one of the five best virtual art museums, according to PC Magazine.
   http://www.christusrex.org/www1/vaticano/0-Musei.html
5. The WebLouvre is at http://mistral.culture.fr/louvre/
6. The Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. Check out the running triceratops!
   http://www.fmnh.org/
7. Institute and Museum of the History of Science of Florence, Italy. Galileo would have liked it.
   http://www.imss.firenze.it/eind1.html
8. See virtual reality fossils at London鈥檚 Natural History Museum.
   http://www.nhm.ac.uk/museum/tempexhib/VRML/index.html
9. The Scottish Cultural Resource Access Network鈥�
   a project to build a networked resource for the study of Scottish culture.
   http://www.scran.ac.uk/
10. Picasso museums on the Web:
    http://www.tamu.edu/mocl/picasso/museos.html