The abundance of competing activities offering value suited to my tastes presents an enormous barrier to museum attendance for millennials on its own. Add to that the request that I pay $15, $20, or even $30 just to enter, and without the promise of these same offers, forget it. I’m […]

The heritage industry is an inherently conservative business, trading as it does in the past, and as such it can be wary of change, and relatively slow to innovate. However, faced with a new generation of visitors who’ve grown up using smartphones, computers and various other gadgets demanding an interactive […]

If future archaeologists were to dig up remnants of present-day America, they would likely conclude that our civilization worshipped food and drinks as deities. Their evidence: the culinary-themed museums proliferating around the country. What began in 2016 with the Museum of Ice Cream has become a full-fledged cultural trend that […]

There was a time, not long ago, when museum restaurants were simply a place where you could grab something to eat while visiting the museum. Now, museums may be the place you visit while going out to eat. These restaurants are becoming central to museums not because of the revenue […]

There is something delightfully uncanny about entering the “Two Decades of Memes” exhibit in Queens’ Museum of the Moving Image, and seeing a crisp, supersized print of the famed Expanding Brain hanging on the wall. As citizens of the internet, we exclusively consume memes through ravioli-sized jpegs stretched out on our phones […]

This talk is about identifying specific challenges that come with a Digital First perspective on museum experiences, and I will, through three short cases try to illustrate how the Nordiska museet/The Nordic Museum, with its most recent digital strategy, has started to address some of the challenges that come with shifting focus. […]

Is $30 to get into a room of Insta-worthy backdrops actually worth it?   Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or perhaps caught in the limbo of an extended train delay somewhere on the Q, entirely devoid of data service or WiFi, you probably know about the recent rise of […]

Candytopia, the pop-up exhibit with locations in Manhattan and San Francisco, shares some characteristics with Disneyland—a costumed guide, manufactured fantasy landscapes, giddy kids—but there are no rides. In Candytopia, there’s very little to do but pose, and that’s what everyone’s doing. The installation is organized around a series of rooms with […]

It’s never been more expensive to run an art museum than it is right now. From rising everyday costs for shipping and insurance to the growing need for programming that expands beyond the confines of the gallery space, the resources required to serve our communities are swelling by the day. […]

There are signs that attendance in many museums across the country is slowly falling, but the reasons why are still to be determined. Art and culture museums may be in trouble. Statistical evidence coming out of the scene in Baltimore, which seems to be finding corroboration nationwide, conveys a narrative […]