unbundling museums

Unbundles of Joy - New York Times

Daniel Akst writes today in the New York Times about the tensions between aggregation and disaggregation in the world of Web content.

He says, "In the unbundled age, we will get a clearer look at what we - and our work - are worth in the marketplace, with some social and financial implications." If content is available at an atomic level, and payment is possible for the page, not the book (just like it is for the song, not the album) then, yes, we might get a different kind of indication of just what part of our work people value ... but what will they be missing?

We've been talking for a while in the museum community about how meaning is derived from context, about how artefaces (and works of art) don't so much embody meaning as provide a focus for ocllectively assigned significance. But what happens to culture when you can cut right through context? On the one hand, it seems empowering to assume that people will be able to go right to the source of content that's interesting. But what will this do to authorship?

Maybe we're talking about two different things here...  and forcing an artificial choice betwen the facts, and the interpretation. I shouldn't have to choose just the page I want to cite, without the ideas in the book as a whole that got me thinking in the first place. I may want to reproduce or reference a particular work, but that won't stop me from being interested in exhibitions (in the meaning someone knowledgable communicates through selection, sequencing, juxtaposition and analysis).

Once again, it's not an either/or; we can have it both ways, and should strive to be accessbile in both manners.

jt