Transcript
Speaker: You put a couple of little nodes on my hand.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And you're measuring electrical current between the two of them.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: That's a reflection of your emotional arousal, to use the lingo.
Speaker: Your heart might pound a little bit.
Speaker: Your hand, your palms might start to sweat.
Speaker: Those are all autonomic nervous system responses to your experience.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Hello, welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Just a quick question.
Speaker: Have you ever measured your brain activity while looking at a work of art?
Speaker: Okay, that's not something I ever thought I'd ask myself, but as of a few days ago, I can say that I have.
Speaker: We'll get to that in a minute.
Speaker: If you're listening when this episode is published, two days from now, on September 28th, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts will open its new 40,000 square foot wing to the public.
Speaker: It's a massive expansion for a museum that has a shockingly large and wide-ranging collection, and I thought that was a pretty good excuse for a trip.
Speaker: The folks up in Salem had a pretty interesting idea of what to talk about.
Speaker: A couple years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum hired a full-time neuroscientist.
Speaker: No art museum has ever done that before.
Speaker: The idea was to try to learn something about how people really experience art as they explore a museum, not from the sometimes abstract and idealized curatorial and design perspective, but from real-world data.
Speaker: And I had the chance to strap into the equipment, measure my neural activity, and stroll through their special exhibition on the mid-century painter Hans Hoffmann.
Speaker: Before heading up to Salem, I had a chat with Michael D.S.
Speaker: Griffith to get his take on this concept.
Speaker: That's coming up in just a minute.
Speaker: And after that, you'll hear from Dr. Teddy Asher, the Harvard-trained neuroscientist leading this initiative at the Peabody Essex Museum.
Speaker: And then finally from Brian Kennedy, the museum's newly minted director.
Speaker: First, a word from our sponsor.
Speaker: Curious Objects is sponsored by Freeman's.
Speaker: Since 1805, Freeman's has been part of the Fabric of Philadelphia, helping generations of clients in the buying and selling of fine and decorative arts, jewelry, modern design, and more.
Speaker: Today, they are a dynamic international auction house with a year-round sales season and a team of dedicated specialists committed to personalized service.
Speaker: Freeman's is now welcoming consignments for their December 8th American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Auction.
Speaker: Curious what your collection is worth?
Speaker: Receive a complimentary auction valuation by visiting freemansauction.com.
Speaker: Freeman's, Philadelphia's auction house, sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you, wherever you are.
Speaker: Curious Objects is also sponsored by Reynolda House Museum of American Art, one of the nation's most highly regarded collections of American art on view in the 1917 estate of R.J.
Speaker: Reynolds.
Speaker: Visit Reynolda to experience iconic works that shaped a nation in Lyon, Decker, and the Golden Age of American Illustration.
Speaker: Learn more at ReynoldaHouse.org.
Speaker: Hi, Michael.
Speaker: Hi, Ben.
Speaker: So I'm pretty excited.
Speaker: I'm going up to Salem, Massachusetts tomorrow.
Speaker: Just in time for autumn.
Speaker: I bet it'll be beautiful.
Speaker: There should be some leaf peeping.
Speaker: The Peabody Essex Museum hired a full-time neuroscientist to be on their staff.
Speaker: And I should say they've gotten quite a lot of press attention for it.
Speaker: When I learned about that, I was...
Speaker: caught spinning because I wasn't really sure what the idea of having a neuroscientist on the staff of an art museum was.
Speaker: But the more I've learned about it, the more interesting it seems.
Speaker: And, you know, I think there's going to be a lot to explore up there.
Speaker: So I want to get your take on this.
Speaker: So the museum says that what they really want to do is learn more about the way that visitors actually interact with art, the way that we look at it, the way that we react to it emotionally, the effect that different pieces have on us, what we pay attention to, what we don't pay attention to.
Speaker: And that all sounds pretty interesting to me.
Speaker: I mean, you know, I've...
Speaker: I've never really had an outside critical perspective on like what it is that's happening in my mind when I look at a work of art.
Speaker: So give me a gut check.
Speaker: I mean, do you feel like there's some value in this approach?
Speaker: You know, I think there is.
Speaker: I see two distinct categories that those goals fall into, and I'm more comfortable with one of the categories than the other.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The category of sort of exhibition design, right?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I think is really, is the right one to subject to the test of science.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So that's the question of what pictures do you hang?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Where do you hang them?
Speaker: What order?
Speaker: What walls do you put up?
Speaker: What color?
Speaker: What height?
Speaker: You know, where do people's eyes tend to fall within a particular gallery?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: or with a certain hang, or even in the context of a certain work, you know, knowing where the eye moves, thanks to biometric data, seems like a really useful thing to know.
Speaker: That's where- Because the way the world works right now is if you're a curator putting together an exhibition, it's just a matter of judgment calls and guesswork.
Speaker: And no matter what this, you know, research tells us, it will still be an art, right?
Speaker: It can't tell us anything.
Speaker: that is universally applicable.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It will always be whatever they're testing or researching will be specific to their collection, to specific shows, specific viewers.
Speaker: But I think that there could be insights that lead to interesting, perhaps creative decisions being made in the context of exhibition design that wouldn't be made, you know, that would have a different outcome if they weren't doing research.
Speaker: And so what's the second category that you're more skeptical about?
Speaker: Well, I know that they'll be looking for emotional spikes where, you know, when increased engagement occurs and, you know, this is neuroscience, right?
Speaker: So they're going to be looking at areas of the brain that are activated by works.
Speaker: They'll be thinking about, I think, you know, which...
Speaker: parts of a painting trigger emotional reactions you know that's a that's an area that i'm a little bit more skeptical about and i think that could just be because i'm an arts person i have this sort of inborn skepticism to empiricism anyway right like we are sitting here talking to each other because we're not
Speaker: scientists off earning a sensible living, you know, at a university or corporation somewhere.
Speaker: And art always speaks to the emotional and intellectual complexities of life for me.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like a character from a Henry James novel, when I'm upset, I rush into the Met and I wander the galleries until I see something that moves me.
Speaker: And then I think about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, like,
Speaker: I'm sure you do.
Speaker: I do that just about every lunchtime.
Speaker: And for me, it's all about the emotional exigency of viewing.
Speaker: It's about what could surprise me in a work where
Speaker: you know, the ways that I can be surprised by my own thoughts.
Speaker: And it's not that those dynamics can't be observed through, you know, neuroscientific research, but I don't know what it could tell us that I would want to be reflected back in the exhibition design or the wall labels.
Speaker: Like I wouldn't want to try to
Speaker: to do anything that leads to a common experience.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: At the same time, certainly there are ideas that curators want to communicate and want to make sure are understood and comprehended by viewers.
Speaker: So yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, neuroscience can be a really important tool in mass marketing, for example.
Speaker: And, you know, I have no doubt that Coca-Cola has a great body of neuroscientific research behind both their product development and their marketing efforts.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: you know, Coca-Cola is trying to do something pretty simple, which is to figure out what people react to in the most strongly positive way.
Speaker: But as I think about it, I wonder if maybe we're overanalyzing.
Speaker: I mean, maybe what a museum is trying to do is not so different, right?
Speaker: Is to find works that get people interested and excited and motivated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I think, you know, so right now,
Speaker: museums are investing a lot in programs that encourage diversity, inclusion, new ways of looking.
Speaker: And this is an initiative that leads in a different direction.
Speaker: Certainly, finding out where in a painting people tend to look is valuable knowledge.
Speaker: But what I'm thinking about is, say we're looking at a European masterwork, but there's some element in it that speaks to the history of colonialism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: the painter might not have emphasized through composition or color that colonial element, right?
Speaker: Maybe the subject is notionally a wealthy white aristocratic woman.
Speaker: But maybe a given show wants to emphasize a figure in the background, perhaps a servant, someone who is present but not emphasized by the visual landscape of the painting.
Speaker: I could imagine a context in which we find out that people's eyes are directed, as the painter intended, to the subject of the painting, the sitter, let's call them.
Speaker: But I can imagine a curator in 2019 really wanting people to look away from that and toward the figure of the servant in the background, say.
Speaker: And a wall label will have everything to do with accomplishing that goal.
Speaker: You know, where does neuroscience fit into that?
Speaker: It's an interesting question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, well, and it may, to some extent, it may just be an excuse to take a different approach to thinking about the way that the museum tries to interact with its visitors.
Speaker: Because, you know, we all know the old familiar trope of the exhibition design.
Speaker: You take your exhibition space, you put up some walls, you paint them a certain color, you put some picture hooks on the walls, you hang the pictures, you put some placards next to them, and Bob's your uncle.
Speaker: And it's not often as certainly, and I don't work in a museum, but I'm not familiar with too many exhibitions where that next step has been taken of thinking, hold on a second, what are people actually going to do?
Speaker: When they walk through here, is it going to, are they going to look at, you know, each picture for three seconds before moving on to the next?
Speaker: Are they going to stop and take the time to process certain pictures and which ones are they going to stop and look at?
Speaker: And how do you take advantage of that as a curator?
Speaker: Yeah, no, and it's all about how the data is used, right?
Speaker: Maybe the data reveals that there's a painting that nobody likes to stop and look at.
Speaker: And if that data tells us to throw out the painting, then it's done a disservice to the cause.
Speaker: But if it tells us that painting needs some form of interpretation...
Speaker: to get people to look at it that we're not providing, it could be a game changer for getting people to look.
Speaker: And I do think that, you know, the history of exhibition design is a history of coming to grips with all of those factors and the complex dynamics of, you know, light and sound, et cetera.
Speaker: But this is a data set that we haven't necessarily had.
Speaker: Brainwaves are potentially a new tool.
Speaker: Well, it should be very interesting.
Speaker: I'm excited to find out what I can learn up there.
Speaker: bring back your learnings and a picture of you wearing those biometric data collecting glasses.
Speaker: I'll see what I can do.
Speaker: Thanks, Michael.
Speaker: Thanks, Ben.
Speaker: The Peabody Essex isn't exactly what you'd expect to find in a wander down the streets of historic Salem, nor is a world-class art museum the first association most people have with the famously witchy town.
Speaker: But I made my way past the soothsayers, the throngs of goths, and the year-round Halloween decor, and stepped into this startlingly capacious and ambitious museum.
Speaker: Of course, the first thing I had to do was to strap into Dr. Teddy Ascher's biometric equipment.
Speaker: I wandered through the museum's special exhibit of paintings by Hans Hoffman, wearing Teddy's special glasses and electrodes strapped to my fingers to measure something called the galvanic skin response.
Speaker: When we got back to the office, Teddy pulled up the data on her screen, charts showing, to put it very unscientifically, my brain activity while I was looking at these Hoffman paintings.
Speaker: And we took a deep dive into my subconscious.
Speaker: So should I orient us again?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Talk me through it.
Speaker: So what are we looking at?
Speaker: I see a couple of fancy looking charts.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So the bottom left, we have a small box that has our video feed, which is kind of a proxy for what you were looking at.
Speaker: So that's the, I was wearing a pair of glasses and there was a camera in them.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So this is showing everything that I was looking at.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Or it's showing, technically, to be specific, it's showing your field of view.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But it doesn't show your specific fixations.
Speaker: So within our field of view, we only focus on one point at a time, which is relevant given how our retina is structured.
Speaker: So that's where your eyes are pointing, basically?
Speaker: Yeah, where the center of your eye is pointed, which is important because your retina is structured such that the way that you see at the center of your fixation is different than what's in your peripheral vision.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So at the center of your fixation, you see in very high resolution and in color,
Speaker: whereas in your peripheral vision it's much lower resolution and it's in black and white.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So we don't know exactly what it is that I'm focusing on, but we at least know generally speaking... Yeah, what direction you're looking.
Speaker: Whereabouts I'm looking, yeah.
Speaker: And then at the top here we have the galvanic skin response, again with the galvanic skin response current conductance on the y-axis and time on the x-axis.
Speaker: So you can see that that's showing you were measuring my you put up a couple of little nodes on my hand.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And you're measuring electrical current between the two of them.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: So sorry.
Speaker: So what does that tell us?
Speaker: So that's that's a reflection of your emotional arousal to use the lingo, which is basically how emotionally intense your experience at that instant was.
Speaker: So you can think of, like I said earlier,
Speaker: If you've been in very high intense situations, your heart might pound a little bit, your palms might start to sweat.
Speaker: Those are all autonomic nervous system responses to your experience, which are regulated by your brain.
Speaker: So this is not a direct neurometric, as they're called, a measurement of neural activity, but it's a kind of indirect measurement.
Speaker: Sort of a proxy for what's happening in my brain.
Speaker: In parts of it, yeah.
Speaker: So basically what we're seeing here is that there are peaks over time.
Speaker: So there are changes in the up and down directionality of our signal over time.
Speaker: So you can see, like, here we have many little peaks.
Speaker: But if you look at the general trend of the line, it's going down.
Speaker: So that means I'm getting bored?
Speaker: Not necessarily.
Speaker: So this is where the interpretation, you have to be open-minded and think of all the different... Because, of course, I'm going to want to jump to as many conclusions as possible.
Speaker: Yes, many people do, yes.
Speaker: So this doesn't tell us anything qualitative, really.
Speaker: It just tells us, you know, in two directions, more or less intense.
Speaker: And like I said, particularly if you're studying a group of people,
Speaker: you can look for trends in what causes an increase or decrease in arousal visually and try and establish that correlation.
Speaker: So if there's a particular painting that everybody is reacting to in a strong way, that's an indication of something about it.
Speaker: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: But we don't know what.
Speaker: And it's a correlation.
Speaker: It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a causal relationship.
Speaker: So you'd have to go back and...
Speaker: set the study up differently to establish that there's a causal relationship.
Speaker: So like if the air conditioner is blowing on that spot in the gallery.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So it actually sounds pretty tricky to tease out what people are really looking at or responding or what is really getting their heart rate going.
Speaker: Well, in this case, GSR, but yes.
Speaker: Or the GSR.
Speaker: Sorry, I'm mixing the different signals.
Speaker: Yep, exactly.
Speaker: So you have to, I try to come to it with an open mind, but definitely to look for trends.
Speaker: And what I've been finding over the last year or so that we've been running these studies is that they really generate a lot more questions than they answer.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But it kind of hones in, hones us in in a particular direction.
Speaker: It takes us from, oh, you know, asking questions is helpful to what kind of question and what kind of effect does it have and where do you want to place that in an exhibition?
Speaker: And, you know, kind of leads you further down a path of inquiry.
Speaker: Well, so you want to rely as much as possible on group data.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Right now we have data from me.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Is there anything you can tell me based on this?
Speaker: Let's look.
Speaker: Teddy and I took a look at her monitor where there was a graph with a line going up and down with peaks and valleys that correspond to the levels of emotional intensity that I was experiencing.
Speaker: And because there was a video feed of what I was looking at, we could actually see in real time exactly what part of what painting I was responding to most strongly.
Speaker: So here we're a few minutes into your time in the gallery and you can see that you're coming down.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like I just got really excited there.
Speaker: Yep, there was a peak.
Speaker: You were looking at something in the composition of that painting, it looked like.
Speaker: We could see here from the video that I was really fixated on this picture called Such is the Weight of the Stars that Hoffman painted in 1962.
Speaker: It's going back down again.
Speaker: Right, so by nature it's going to be kind of this oscillating up and down.
Speaker: And as I said, there are lots of different factors that contribute to this signal.
Speaker: There was another one.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a pretty big one.
Speaker: Here I'm looking from a painting by Hoffman from 1947 called Studio.
Speaker: And you're pretty focused on this painting.
Speaker: It takes up your whole field of view.
Speaker: So there's something...
Speaker: I did really like that painting.
Speaker: Well, it's not necessarily always positive, right?
Speaker: Well, I remember liking it.
Speaker: So that's an important part of how we sort of triangulate.
Speaker: What do people look at?
Speaker: What does the galvanic skin response reflect?
Speaker: And what do they say?
Speaker: What do they say, yeah.
Speaker: So you can get the qualitative overlay onto this quantitative GSR signal that way.
Speaker: So let's zoom out a little from my little adventure to the broader conclusions that you're reaching or the results that you're finding.
Speaker: Have you found trends?
Speaker: Have you found things that surprise you in how people are experiencing these galleries?
Speaker: What are the high points of what this method has shown you so far?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So last summer and fall we ran two studies in two different exhibitions, and each study had a hypothesis that it focused on.
Speaker: So the first study was in our exhibition that presented work by the Native American artist T.C.
Speaker: Cannon.
Speaker: And the question there, the hypothesis there, was centered around what kind of textual viewing prompts might help people to engage with a specific work of art.
Speaker: You're talking about the writing on the wall.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: In this case, I'll tell you a bit about how the study was structured.
Speaker: But yes, so this is content that you could theoretically find in a label.
Speaker: And I came to this question in reviewing labels for that exhibition and realizing that embedded in that text, there were what are called in the literature viewing tasks, which is purposes with which to look at an image.
Speaker: So are you searching for something?
Speaker: Are you making a judgment about what you're looking at?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Are you trying to memorize what you're looking at?
Speaker: And the key point here is that it's been demonstrated through eye tracking studies that each task is associated with a characteristic set of viewing behaviors.
Speaker: So, for example, if you're free viewing something, if you're looking at an image without a task in mind, the data reflects that people tend to focus their attention on the center of whatever that image is, regardless of the composition.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: However, the study that I'm thinking of had people look at one set of images while they were free viewing it and then had another group of people look at that same set of images but search for a particular element.
Speaker: And the people who were free viewing demonstrated this central bias.
Speaker: They focused their attention on the middle of the image while the people who were searching interrogated the whole image.
Speaker: Sort of looked around the parameters and... Yes.
Speaker: corners exactly exactly and so I thought well if you're literally seeing different parts of the image how does that impact how you feel what you think about how long you stay looking all of those things so what we did was to give our study participants a packet a paper packet that had nine different works of art featured in the exhibition reproduced on the pages with a certain kind of prompt underneath it and the prompt was either a historical fact or
Speaker: which was not a task, so that was our free viewing control, a search task, like search for this compositional element, or a judgment task, which was essentially it asked you to relate, it asked the subject to relate themselves to the work of art that they were looking at.
Speaker: So that could have been as simple as, do you like this image?
Speaker: Are you moved by this image?
Speaker: And in short, what we found, and then, sorry, then we had a control group that didn't get any prompts.
Speaker: They just went through and looked.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So what we found is that people who got a search task or a judgment task, if they were looking for something within the image or if they were forming some sort of perspective or judgment about the image, they spent twice as long looking at that object as people who either did not have any prompt or who were given that historical fact, so if they were free viewing.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: So there, that we can see there that it's not just having a prompt that causes you to stay longer.
Speaker: It's the kind of prompt.
Speaker: It's the kind of prompt.
Speaker: It's the present, it seems to be the presence of that task, that purpose, that activity to perform while you're looking.
Speaker: And then we looked at the galvanic skin response as a function of what kind of prompt you received.
Speaker: And consistently the participants who received that judgment prompt demonstrated an above average response.
Speaker: galvanic skin response to the object that they were looking at.
Speaker: There was a trend for the search task group to also be higher, and then the free viewing prompt group and the no prompt group were at average.
Speaker: So there we're seeing that dwell time changes and emotional reactivity changes as a function of what kind of prompt.
Speaker: So what do you think that this museum or some other museum could do in response to that to improve the engagement that visitors have with their exhibitions?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So I think, you know, it's not to say that you want to incorporate a judgment task into every label, right?
Speaker: But you can use it to create like a cadence in the exhibition.
Speaker: If there's a point where you think it makes sense for people to spend longer or that is more conducive to an emotional engagement,
Speaker: or something like that, you might incorporate that judgment prompt.
Speaker: And I think in thinking back over the studies we've performed, it seems that this element of interpersonal connection, relating yourself to another person or to what's reflected about another person in an object, really does have these effects on people that enhance engagement.
Speaker: So I think it's that, again, that social kind of relational aspect that seems to really help people to engage.
Speaker: That sounds really promising.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm excited.
Speaker: I have to say, I think insights from that could filter into not just museum presentation, but arts education.
Speaker: I think there are lots of applied applications for that strategy.
Speaker: I have colleagues who use training with works of art to help medical students become better diagnosticians.
Speaker: So I think there are lots of ways that this skill set can be applied outside of a museum.
Speaker: Fascinating.
Speaker: Well, thanks for talking me through it.
Speaker: Sure, thank you.
Speaker: We'll take a break and be back in just a minute to continue the conversation with the museum's new director, Brian Kennedy.
Speaker: Today they are a dynamic international auction house with a year-round sale season and a team of dedicated specialists committed to personalized service.
Speaker: Freeman's is now welcoming consignments for their January 13th design sale.
Speaker: Curious what your collection is worth?
Speaker: Receive a complimentary auction valuation by visiting freemansauction.com.
Speaker: Freeman's, Philadelphia's auction house, sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you, wherever you are.
Speaker: Curious Objects is also sponsored by Reynolda House Museum of American Art, one of the nation's most highly regarded collections of American art on view in the historic Winston-Salem, North Carolina estate of R.J.
Speaker: and Catherine Reynolds.
Speaker: Visit Reynolda to experience iconic works that shaped a nation
Speaker: in Lyon Decker and the Golden Age of American Illustration.
Speaker: Get one step closer to a true experience in American art by visiting reynoldahouse.org slash Lyon Decker.
Speaker: I like to take a moment each episode to say thank you for listening.
Speaker: If you have feedback, questions, or ideas for future episodes, you can reach me by email at podcast at themagazineantiques.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: We really appreciate it when you leave a rating or a review on your podcast app, which helps get the word out and bring new listeners into our world.
Speaker: So thanks so much to those of you who have done that.
Speaker: And don't forget, you can always see photos and bonus material about each episode at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: This episode, to use an Ira Glass-ism, has two acts.
Speaker: You've just heard the first, and coming up is the second.
Speaker: I sat down with Brian Kennedy, who just recently took the reins as director of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Speaker: I wanted to hear Brian's take on Teddy's neuroscience project, but also to ask him some more general questions about the objectives and challenges and roles that museums are trying to fill in today's world.
Speaker: Brian has previously led the Toledo Museum, as well as museums in Ireland and Australia, so it's fair to say he has a wide-ranging perspective on these topics.
Speaker: I was thrilled to hear that perspective, particularly on the eve of the opening of the museum's vaunted new wing.
Speaker: So, without further ado, here is Brian Kennedy.
Speaker: So, but let's start out because I've just walked through the galleries with Dr. Teddy Ascher, who plugged me into biometric scanners and took my data and watched me as I looked at these abstract paintings and measured my responses to them.
Speaker: And it's something that I've never done in a museum before or anywhere else for that matter.
Speaker: But as we were walking through, I had this sense of self-consciousness of, of course, because I was being measured, I was particularly aware of what I was looking at, what I was paying attention to, whether my heart rate might be accelerating, whether I might be getting more excited.
Speaker: But then we had a little chat at the end and I said, you know,
Speaker: I think that in a sense, I'm always self-conscious when I'm walking through a museum.
Speaker: And I am a professional person in the arts world.
Speaker: I'm no stranger to visiting art museums.
Speaker: And yet even for me, there's something a little bit nervous about walking into a big intimidating gallery full of important works of art with a capital I and knowing that
Speaker: that there are people around me and maybe there's a certain way I'm supposed to be looking at art and a certain way I'm supposed to be perceiving it.
Speaker: But tell me about this, the work that Dr. Asher is doing and what that's telling you about your visitors and what your senses of what your visitors need and what they want, what you can give them.
Speaker: What are the big challenges that you're facing?
Speaker: What are some of the approaches that you think are important for a museum like yours to be considering?
Speaker: I think the most important thing is that we facilitate the freedom of our visitors to act whatever way they want.
Speaker: So there's a significant difference between the theatrical and performative values of an art museum and those that apply to, for example, a theater or a concert hall.
Speaker: So in the latter, generally speaking, though there are exceptions, you sit down and you stay there.
Speaker: You might get a break halfway through, but basically that's it.
Speaker: You experience in a static way.
Speaker: You receive it.
Speaker: But you're there alive to it.
Speaker: The art museum is completely different.
Speaker: I mean, you can come in and you can stay as long as you like.
Speaker: You can go wherever you like.
Speaker: You can stop for as long as you like in front of anything that you like.
Speaker: And generally speaking, about 90-something percent of our visitors come with somebody else.
Speaker: So you have a communication going on.
Speaker: So that's on the one hand, that's what we want to preserve.
Speaker: When you start to study your visitors in temporary exhibitions, which is a particular component of our activity because it's for a confined period of three months usually,
Speaker: And you can test it because you've really studied it.
Speaker: So it's less flexible.
Speaker: It tends to be a journey.
Speaker: I mean, you go in at the beginning of the show and you come out at the end.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So you can study reactions.
Speaker: And it's a little bit of a trap.
Speaker: So I've talked with Teddy about that because the trap is this, that once you know that, well, 80% of the people turn right here, and you've literally positioned that work over there to pull them towards, and they go there, what you're doing is you're basically subverting the basic method that you want to preserve.
Speaker: So while you learn a whole lot differently,
Speaker: What you don't want to do is to become a programmer, essentially a programmer of human behavior, when you actually want to preserve individual freedom.
Speaker: So that's a very interesting and palpable result that we're already dealing with.
Speaker: This is really valuable information because we're setting up a temporary exhibition as a flow, and often it is a flow because you're trying to manage a lot of people.
Speaker: But then applying that to permanent collections is quite a different thing.
Speaker: It's interesting, I was talking yesterday with my co-host Michael Diaz-Griffith.
Speaker: We were considering the role of quantitative and analytical approaches to human responses to stimuli, which we don't usually see in the context of the arts and the humanities, but which we do often see in the context of commerce.
Speaker: We talked about Coca-Cola, which I have no doubt that Coca-Cola has a team of neuroscientists on staff who study the ways that consumers perceive their products and their advertisements and so on.
Speaker: And for Coca-Cola, the mission is really simple, right?
Speaker: They want to sell as much as they can.
Speaker: They want the most appealing and addictive possible product, right?
Speaker: But of course, for a museum, the objective is a little bit more complicated because, of course, you want as many people as possible to come through the museum.
Speaker: But that's not your only mission.
Speaker: And so you may have competing interests.
Speaker: It is interesting to me to reflect on the work that Dr. Asher is doing.
Speaker: As you say, how do you take the results of a study like what she's doing and translate that into acts that will really enhance the variety of missions that you're trying to achieve here?
Speaker: Well, I think what Teddy's already got interested in is the type of approaches that we had adopted in Slita Museum of Art before that at Dartmouth in Australia when I was there, which have become quite developed around people's understanding and knowledge of
Speaker: the elements of art and the principles of design, that there are four different visual languages, that they're culturally specific to the person.
Speaker: All that sort of thing then layers on what is essentially quantitative data about a qualitative experience.
Speaker: And I think that that goes more broadly to the function of a museum.
Speaker: So if you take Coca-Cola,
Speaker: Coca-Cola is a commercial company, it's a for-profit company.
Speaker: So they're trying to do all the things that you said.
Speaker: They're trying to build a brand that people will recognize, so more and more that product is consumed, of course.
Speaker: We want people to consume our product, but we have a different end.
Speaker: And so if you think about it in terms of the visitor experiencing what they're doing in a museum, from Teddy's point of view, you extend and say that the museum is most effective in its own view,
Speaker: when it has the most impact on the most people, right?
Speaker: But on the visitor, what we're actually intending is something different.
Speaker: We're actually looking to confer social benefits on the community, and that's a member of the community.
Speaker: So the social benefits are more likely to be long tail in marketing terms.
Speaker: They're going to be long term.
Speaker: And so in measuring as we are using our neuroscience initiative, we're of course measuring essentially momentary activity.
Speaker: but we're not measuring the impact of the memories that are created through that sensory and cognitive process, which will impact behaviors beyond the museum.
Speaker: And that's why I think when we're involved in evaluation, we have to be involved in a multitude of ways of accessing.
Speaker: Just to give you a quick example, when I was engaging the board here, among the questions we started with,
Speaker: where what are your favorite memories of this museum?
Speaker: What do you love most about it?
Speaker: What should we start doing, continue doing, stop doing?
Speaker: Those sorts of things that go to people giving answers like, oh, my brother's wedding.
Speaker: You know, actual experiences.
Speaker: So really to put a point on it, museums are about the activities of people operating in time and space.
Speaker: And that time and space is momentary to the occasion of their visit and actually capable of a huge impact in the space and time of their memory, which is extraordinary because that's lifelong.
Speaker: It's interesting, isn't it?
Speaker: I mean, I think...
Speaker: We tend to think of museums as being composed of individual works of art, which as a visitor, you walk through, you observe them, you learn from them, and then you move along.
Speaker: But of course, the true experience of visiting a museum really doesn't often have much to do, or certainly it's not dominated by the one-by-one experience of one work after another after another.
Speaker: what you take away from a visit to a museum is often something completely different.
Speaker: And there are museums I visited that I would be hard-pressed to name a single individual work that I saw there, and yet I remember having an interesting experience there, or having a feeling of contentment or of curiosity or of exploration.
Speaker: And yet that's a very different psychological goal than the goal of a traditional museum curator who is more than anything else an academic, who is interested in the beauty of things and the history and context of things.
Speaker: So it seems to me like a very difficult responsibility to try to fulfill those.
Speaker: I'm sort of restating my earlier question here.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, it's one sense difficult in the sense that it has a multitude of possibilities, but on the other hand, I think you've highlighted yourself there what you want the outcome to be.
Speaker: The outcome is individual to the person, but it's a cultural experience.
Speaker: It's something that happened to them.
Speaker: It was what they felt.
Speaker: So when you think back to a place where you can't remember any of the works of art there, but you remember how you felt,
Speaker: You're doing the basic human function of moving in time and space.
Speaker: That is what your memory is, among other things.
Speaker: It's an accumulation of all the ways that you moved in time and space.
Speaker: So it's rare that we remember just one thing without actually remembering the sensory circumstance in which we experienced it.
Speaker: And that's, you know, not to be highfalutin about it, but that's the desire of me, certainly, as a museum director.
Speaker: But the responsibility goes, I mean, to many, many, many aspects.
Speaker: But if we're to be meaningful and we have to be relevant, and if we want to be relevant, we have to make a difference.
Speaker: And for each person that's a different thing.
Speaker: So we have to provide the opportunities for people to feel.
Speaker: And that's the essence of a work of art.
Speaker: I mean, a work of art starts as something that has an effect on the emotions.
Speaker: You've served at museums around the world and are just starting here over the last few months.
Speaker: What are you going to be able to do at the Peabody Essex that other museums maybe aren't able to do or struggle with?
Speaker: The reason it attracts me, this museum, is twofold.
Speaker: One, because people make things happen in a museum and what people have done here over the last 20 years is extremely interesting to me.
Speaker: I think it's a very special kind of practice.
Speaker: The types of interests that people have are exaggerated to practicality, in my view, of what's needed in the world today, which is to help multisensory learning.
Speaker: but more particularly perhaps the engagement with the history of the museum.
Speaker: And I've talked a lot about this actually even on my first day in East India Marine Hall talking with the staff at my first staff meeting, is that what's captured me is
Speaker: the early sea captains who gained membership of this exclusive East Indian Marine Society that saw and begat the museum in 1799.
Speaker: Can I just back you up there for listeners who aren't familiar with that history?
Speaker: Can you tell a little more about the formation of the museum?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So just after the mid-18th century in Salem, Massachusetts, the Marine Society...
Speaker: began and that grew from the 70s, 60s into East India Marine Society which was made up of sea captains and supercargos who had basically traveled around the world.
Speaker: And that experience of logging and mapping your journey all over the world is the essence of the Essex Institute which then was fused with the Peabody Museum
Speaker: in the end in 1992, but the gathering of all of these logbooks, journals, books and everything with all of the objects that people brought back, which were contemporary art from the early 1800s, which now, of course, are celebrated art objects of the past and were all put into the Peabody Museum.
Speaker: You know, give us the object history for this museum, but the story history, which of course is logged in these journals and diaries and so on, is what people experience there.
Speaker: How did they feel going to China or Japan or Korea or Zanzibar?
Speaker: And who did they meet there?
Speaker: And what did they hear there?
Speaker: And what did they find there?
Speaker: And now you're getting into the dances and the songs and the languages and the smells on the street, the scents, you know, all of those things.
Speaker: And you are literally right to today in terms of what we're trying to do to educate the community to be essentially more fulfilled sentient beings, which is...
Speaker: what I fundamentally believe in and have said really just from my very first words to the staff that our primary obligations as human beings are first of all to be which is to be present to ourselves and to others and secondly to be humane so there's something about this social communication we've developed which requires us as the highest form of animal having developed the highest forms of communication to be humane to be empathetic and that takes us to the heart of what a museum should do Is that all?
Speaker: Well, that's a bit.
Speaker: Sorry, that was a paragraph.
Speaker: No, my point is just that's quite a high aspiration.
Speaker: I mean, that's a lot for a museum to live into.
Speaker: Well, right now...
Speaker: You know, the world is just crying out for it.
Speaker: My formation really changed from coming from Ireland and studying, on the one hand, Islamic and Oriental art at the Chesterbeadie Library in Dublin, but really European art, painting and sculpture,
Speaker: to going to Australia and experiencing indigenous culture as a non-textual culture, and if we think of text as writing.
Speaker: But I think text and image are essentially the same thing.
Speaker: Text is an image and an image is a text, right?
Speaker: They're different as well, but they're very similar in what they actually do.
Speaker: And so in a non-textual culture like indigenous Australia, I learned a huge amount about people who are highly sensorily aware.
Speaker: And then we had the experience in our family of encountering severe difficulty with textual learning.
Speaker: And so learning how to negotiate that
Speaker: while understanding the hypersensory possibilities of somebody who often has difficulty with abstract learning, which is essentially digits and letters.
Speaker: So if you put the digits and letters world, which has consumed us, especially for the last 500 years since the printer revolution, well, not the original printer revolution, but the Gutenberg revolution, we move away from
Speaker: essentially the practice of being sensorially aware.
Speaker: With the phone and everything that it has on it, we are now providing a knowledge system and a learning system where a lot of that, the Digit and Letters, is provided for us.
Speaker: We can access it.
Speaker: So we're even more required as we move towards a world with artificial intelligence and robotics.
Speaker: to need to exaggerate our own human possibility.
Speaker: So a museum is utterly centered there.
Speaker: That's who we are.
Speaker: That's what we can do.
Speaker: So I firmly believe that the museums that want to take on what is that wonderful role within the changing society will thrive because that role will be more necessary than ever.
Speaker: What do you think are some other museums that are doing good work along those lines?
Speaker: And do you think that success in that regard correlates with success in terms of visitor numbers and donations and that sort of thing?
Speaker: It can do, but it doesn't have to.
Speaker: And I think that's the nature of the not-for-profit.
Speaker: The not-for-profit should not be aspiring to measure primarily by the number of people who consume it.
Speaker: The qualitative aspect is very, very important.
Speaker: And that's not to say that we don't care about who comes or how many comes.
Speaker: Of course we do.
Speaker: But I think that museums, of course, are concerned about the numbers of visitors that they have.
Speaker: But I think they primarily should be concerned about the experiences those visitors have.
Speaker: And around the world, there are so many examples of museums doing fascinating work.
Speaker: In the kind of work that I've been particularly interested in, in terms of visual language, theory and practice, visual learning, there are particular museums that I think have become quite advanced around this.
Speaker: And this has been particularly through my own involvement with the International Visual Literacy Association, which was founded in 1969.
Speaker: And it's interesting, visual literacy only entered the dictionary in 1972.
Speaker: It's kind of extraordinary, really.
Speaker: But since that time, there's been an annual conference
Speaker: and that conference was in universities right through to 2014 when it was first held in Toledo, Ohio at the Toledo Museum of Art.
Speaker: And since that time, actually quite a number of other art museums have entered in San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts, and this year it's in Leuven, right, and the M. Leuven Museum, Museum Leuven, M. Leuven,
Speaker: transformed itself a number of years ago into a museum that you would enter and experience visual language.
Speaker: And actually there you can do eye-tracking exercises.
Speaker: Every visitor can when you go there.
Speaker: Really?
Speaker: Yeah, using machines, not the glasses.
Speaker: So you can use glasses as well.
Speaker: So that's not to say this is just one particular kind of practice, but I think that...
Speaker: What's happening is that art museums are following the work that especially zoos and children's museums have been engaged in for quite a long time actually, to become sensory experiences.
Speaker: I mean why do people love zoos so much?
Speaker: They love zoos because actually you can go for a picnic.
Speaker: You can go inside and outside.
Speaker: You can do things together.
Speaker: You bring people of all ages.
Speaker: and you can have lots of different interests and it's a large expanse.
Speaker: Applying that type of thinking to an art museum of course is quite radical because we tend to be much more controlled in our behaviors and our works of art are worth an awful lot of money.
Speaker: Animals are too, but each individual work is regarded as irreplaceable.
Speaker: like one of a species, it's kind of one of its own kind.
Speaker: And so there's all sorts of mechanics in the art museum.
Speaker: And there's a sense of elevation as well and... Well, we've created that.
Speaker: We have created, certainly, we've created the idea that the art museum is an alternative church and it's, in a sense, it's an aspiration to the greatest capacity that human creativity can aspire to.
Speaker: It seems like a strange place to go as a family and have a light afternoon.
Speaker: Well certainly if that's the way it's characterized I think it should be.
Speaker: But there are places in museums that should aspire to being that because that's what they want to be.
Speaker: But those that are like civic museums, and I've worked in national and college and university museums, but also in civic museums I think we're trying to engage a much broader community.
Speaker: So, the way I just put a point on that is, I like to say to people, you know, what's culture?
Speaker: Well, the best definition for me is culture is what we do around here.
Speaker: Which means, who's we?
Speaker: What are we doing?
Speaker: And where is it?
Speaker: Here.
Speaker: And in our own lives, our culture changes all the time.
Speaker: It's a version of who we are and how we were formed.
Speaker: But there's lots of different aspects to culture.
Speaker: So, in an art museum, we're aiming to respond to many, many different practices by many people from many different cultures.
Speaker: Brian Kennedy, thanks so much.
Speaker: It's been a pleasure.
Speaker: A great pleasure.
Speaker: Thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker: I have to say it was really fascinating for me to hear from both Teddy and Brian about the various ground that they're trying to break in Salem.
Speaker: And even more than that, if I can use the word philosophy of what they're trying to do.
Speaker: The idea of visual literacy as a core principle of curating and managing a museum is a very interesting thing.
Speaker: is maybe more surprising and novel than it really should be.
Speaker: It seems to me like a very apt way of encapsulating what a museum is uniquely capable of doing in our culture.
Speaker: And maybe studying neurological responses to artwork is a way of expanding the museum's toolbox to do those things.
Speaker: In any case, there's plenty of food for thought, and I really hope you enjoyed the conversations as much as I did.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: My co-host is Michael Diaz-Greffitt, and I'm Ben Miller.
