Howells.

Yesterday I visited the British Museum, specifically to see the fantastic Grayson Perry exhibition, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. In it, Grayson intersperses his own contemporary work with a curated selection of objects from the museum’s massive archive. You get a sense of his taste, and find out the reasons behind his selections. You can discover objects you’d have normally walked past without a second thought.

This made me think about a service and app that allowed anybody to do the same thing.

Once having registered and connected with your friends/followers, you could pick and choose your favourite pieces from the gallery’s collection (or take a photo of the item), and provide a little or as much detail as you felt was required to give personal context and meaning to the item (as text or audio). Thus you become your own curator; creating mini collections of pieces that align to your own taste or interests. The user can share their selections, and then choose to explore the museum or gallery via their friends’ selections. This would give an extra dimension to the experience; knowing what others think about pieces gives a new context.

It would also help to curate a museum to a more manageable level. There is a statistic floating around that says it would take n weeks to explore the Metropolitan Museum of Art in it’s entirety. So how do you make the most out a 30 minute visit? You can visit the museum’s highlights, but why not seek out the exhibits that your friends have already recommended.

The actual mechanics of such a social site will be a little challenging, however. There may be copyright issues, and pinpointing specific locations might be a little tricky. Further, ensuring an item is on display at the time you visit has its own issues. These issues may suggest the app would need to sponsored and managed by the galleries and museums themselves, which may inhibit how compelling the app could be.

I also like the idea that as you build your collections on the move, you can continue the curation at home on your desktop machine when you have more time to note artist’s names, or attach better image(s). Your collections can become ‘to do’ lists, to give you a framework from which to explore more of a given artist, genres or period.

Here’s hoping this might inspire you to create something like this, or take the idea further.