The museum art blog is having a renaissance. It may seem preposterous that a technology less than 20-years-old is already having a resurgence of value, but recently museums and large arts institutions, particularlyin the Bay Area, have found their footing in this online topography by either augmenting their current programming with an online presence or creating an independent exhibition space within their websites.

No space is safe from the funding chopping block but more ominously; no space is safe from falling into the cacophony of everything else the virtual and physical world has to offer. Art spaces are all furiously working to seem more open and inviting to all types of arts enthusiasts from academics to the most casual of visitor. And using their websites seems to be the most popular strategy today. 

When reading through the blogs of Bay Area arts organizations some immediately present themselves as accomplishing something new and engaging, others seem to be still dipping their toes in the water, trying to find their voice and balance how much and what kind of content should be appearing on their sites. The functions of blogs in the art world seem largely to augment existing programming or as another site of programming in and of itself. Either way, both approaches are designed to inspire an increase in visitors.

SFMOMA's Open Space blog is one of the most visible Bay Area art space blogs. The independent exhibition site is based on the 1964 Bay-Area focused Open Space publication that published art and writing by some of the most compelling artists and thinkers of the time. (See Open Space covers here.)The blog invites writers to create their own programming, from curating online exhibitions from the museum’s collection to posting personal musings on the art world. The results are terrific and have produced some long-lasting effects on the zeitgeist of the community: from Renny Pritikin’s now infamous post about artists who leave, to Christine Wong Yap’s current drawings, Positive Signs.

Other blogs like The Oakland Standard on the Oakland Museum’s website, the Blookon Berkeley Art Museum’s website and the Clog on the SFAC Gallery’s site (full
disclosure, I am the editor of the SFAC Gallery Clog) are using the online forum as extensions of the social networking tools that have become essential in marketing, publicizing events, and the reach of their respective programs.

Some spaces are forging their own identities on other sites outside of their institutions’ websites. For example, YBCA (whose site can be cumbersome to navigate) has an alter ego on Facebook named Art You as well as a warm and clever YouTube channel that is not necessarily creating new programming but aims to get people inside the gallery gates.

So if Open Space and the other museums’ blogs are garnering such success, why isn’t every art space using the blog format? The short answer is, they can’t. It takes a lot of work to create and maintain a blog dependant on perpetual generation of content that it can be as intensely time consuming as building a physical exhibition. This strategy may or may not fit into the missions of all spaces but as the popularity and relevancy of these blogs intensify, what will that mean for the smaller art spaces that do not have the means or support to generate this kind of online presence? How will they compete with the insatiable growth of online programming?

Nationally, the Walker Art Center, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, MOMA and the Brooklyn Art Museum have all been held up as national models of how a museum can create content that augments the programming of the museums. As blogs and websites enter their second decade of existence they have evolved from information portals to digital versions of what is happening inside the museum to something that is perhaps becoming nearly independent of the museum.

These blogs are all experiential; something to consume outside of the museum walls, away from the art objects whose totemic power made the building and civic support of museums possible. Will these blogs really get more people to engage in a museum’s culture or will it simulate an experience that renders a physical museum trip unnecessary? Perhaps this question will not be resolved by the museums or even the visitors; but by the artists themselves and how they can also evolve to create work that incites responses that can exist on multiple platforms.