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Getting Wired at the Peabody Essex Museum
62 Plays6 years ago
There’s a tried and true method for curating art exhibitions: paint walls, hang pictures, write labels, and Bob's your uncle. But what happens when a neuroscientist gets involved? This month, CO examines how researchers at the Peabody Essex Museum are analyzing the ways people look at art.
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Transcript
Exploring Emotional Responses in Art
00:00:00
Speaker
You put a couple of little nodes on my hand.
00:00:02
Speaker
Yes.
00:00:03
Speaker
And you're measuring electrical current between the two of them.
00:00:06
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:00:06
Speaker
That's a reflection of your emotional arousal, to use the lingo.
00:00:10
Speaker
Your heart might pound a little bit.
00:00:11
Speaker
Your hand, your palms might start to sweat.
00:00:13
Speaker
Those are all autonomic nervous system responses to your experience.
00:00:18
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Fascinating.
00:00:18
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Yeah.
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello, welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:30
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I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:31
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Just a quick question.
00:00:32
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Have you ever measured your brain activity while looking at a work of art?
00:00:35
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.
00:00:40
Speaker
We'll get to that in a minute.
00:00:42
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.
00:00:53
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.
00:01:00
Speaker
The folks up in Salem had a pretty interesting idea of what to talk about.
00:01:05
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A couple years ago, the Peabody Essex Museum hired a full-time neuroscientist.
00:01:09
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No art museum has ever done that before.
00:01:11
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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.
Innovative Museum Practices with Neuroscience
00:01:24
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.
00:01:33
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Before heading up to Salem, I had a chat with Michael D.S.
00:01:36
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Griffith to get his take on this concept.
00:01:38
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That's coming up in just a minute.
00:01:39
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And after that, you'll hear from Dr. Teddy Asher, the Harvard-trained neuroscientist leading this initiative at the Peabody Essex Museum.
00:01:46
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And then finally from Brian Kennedy, the museum's newly minted director.
00:01:50
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00:02:00
Speaker
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00:02:03
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00:02:49
Speaker
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00:02:50
Speaker
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00:03:00
Speaker
Hi, Michael.
00:03:01
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Hi, Ben.
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So I'm pretty excited.
00:03:03
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I'm going up to Salem, Massachusetts tomorrow.
00:03:06
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Just in time for autumn.
00:03:07
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I bet it'll be beautiful.
00:03:08
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There should be some leaf peeping.
00:03:09
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The Peabody Essex Museum hired a full-time neuroscientist to be on their staff.
00:03:16
Speaker
And I should say they've gotten quite a lot of press attention for it.
00:03:19
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When I learned about that, I was...
00:03:23
Speaker
caught spinning because I wasn't really sure what the idea of having a neuroscientist on the staff of an art museum was.
00:03:33
Speaker
But the more I've learned about it, the more interesting it seems.
00:03:35
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And, you know, I think there's going to be a lot to explore up there.
00:03:38
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So I want to get your take on this.
00:03:41
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.
00:04:00
Speaker
And that all sounds pretty interesting to me.
00:04:03
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I mean, you know, I've...
00:04:08
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.
00:04:18
Speaker
So give me a gut check.
00:04:20
Speaker
I mean, do you feel like there's some value in this approach?
00:04:24
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You know, I think there is.
00:04:27
Speaker
I see two distinct categories that those goals fall into, and I'm more comfortable with one of the categories than the other.
Neuroscience Goals in Art Exhibitions
00:04:34
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Okay.
00:04:35
Speaker
The category of sort of exhibition design, right?
00:04:39
Speaker
Right.
00:04:41
Speaker
I think is really, is the right one to subject to the test of science.
00:04:47
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Okay.
00:04:47
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So that's the question of what pictures do you hang?
00:04:49
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Yeah.
00:04:49
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Where do you hang them?
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What order?
00:04:51
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What walls do you put up?
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What color?
00:04:53
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What height?
00:04:54
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You know, where do people's eyes tend to fall within a particular gallery?
00:04:58
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Mm-hmm.
00:04:59
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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.
00:05:12
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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.
00:05:21
Speaker
And no matter what this, you know, research tells us, it will still be an art, right?
00:05:26
Speaker
It can't tell us anything.
00:05:28
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that is universally applicable.
00:05:30
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Right.
00:05:30
Speaker
It will always be whatever they're testing or researching will be specific to their collection, to specific shows, specific viewers.
00:05:40
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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.
00:05:55
Speaker
And so what's the second category that you're more skeptical about?
00:05:58
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?
00:06:07
Speaker
So they're going to be looking at areas of the brain that are activated by works.
00:06:13
Speaker
They'll be thinking about, I think, you know, which...
00:06:17
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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
00:06:40
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scientists off earning a sensible living, you know, at a university or corporation somewhere.
00:06:46
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And art always speaks to the emotional and intellectual complexities of life for me.
00:06:55
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Right.
00:06:55
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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.
00:07:03
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And then I think about that.
00:07:04
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Yeah.
00:07:05
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Like, like,
00:07:07
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I'm sure you do.
00:07:09
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I do that just about every lunchtime.
00:07:11
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And for me, it's all about the emotional exigency of viewing.
00:07:16
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It's about what could surprise me in a work where
00:07:20
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you know, the ways that I can be surprised by my own thoughts.
00:07:26
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.
Ethical Considerations in Art and Neuroscience
00:07:46
Speaker
Like I wouldn't want to try to
00:07:49
Speaker
to do anything that leads to a common experience.
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:54
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.
00:08:04
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So yeah, it's interesting.
00:08:06
Speaker
I mean, neuroscience can be a really important tool in mass marketing, for example.
00:08:12
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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.
00:08:26
Speaker
And...
00:08:28
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.
00:08:37
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But as I think about it, I wonder if maybe we're overanalyzing.
00:08:41
Speaker
I mean, maybe what a museum is trying to do is not so different, right?
00:08:45
Speaker
Is to find works that get people interested and excited and motivated.
00:08:50
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Yeah.
00:08:51
Speaker
Well, I think, you know, so right now,
00:08:56
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museums are investing a lot in programs that encourage diversity, inclusion, new ways of looking.
00:09:02
Speaker
And this is an initiative that leads in a different direction.
00:09:06
Speaker
Certainly, finding out where in a painting people tend to look is valuable knowledge.
00:09:13
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.
00:09:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:23
Speaker
the painter might not have emphasized through composition or color that colonial element, right?
00:09:32
Speaker
Maybe the subject is notionally a wealthy white aristocratic woman.
00:09:39
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.
00:09:51
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.
00:10:02
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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.
00:10:13
Speaker
And a wall label will have everything to do with accomplishing that goal.
00:10:17
Speaker
You know, where does neuroscience fit into that?
00:10:20
Speaker
It's an interesting question.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:22
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.
00:10:35
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Because, you know, we all know the old familiar trope of the exhibition design.
00:10:42
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.
00:10:54
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?
00:11:09
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?
00:11:17
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?
00:11:22
Speaker
And how do you take advantage of that as
Biometric Analysis in Art Experience
00:11:25
Speaker
a curator?
00:11:25
Speaker
Yeah, no, and it's all about how the data is used, right?
00:11:28
Speaker
Maybe the data reveals that there's a painting that nobody likes to stop and look at.
00:11:33
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And if that data tells us to throw out the painting, then it's done a disservice to the cause.
00:11:40
Speaker
But if it tells us that painting needs some form of interpretation...
00:11:46
Speaker
to get people to look at it that we're not providing, it could be a game changer for getting people to look.
00:11:52
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.
00:12:05
Speaker
But this is a data set that we haven't necessarily had.
00:12:09
Speaker
Brainwaves are potentially a new tool.
00:12:11
Speaker
Well, it should be very interesting.
00:12:12
Speaker
I'm excited to find out what I can learn up there.
00:12:15
Speaker
bring back your learnings and a picture of you wearing those biometric data collecting glasses.
00:12:19
Speaker
I'll see what I can do.
00:12:21
Speaker
Thanks, Michael.
00:12:22
Speaker
Thanks, Ben.
00:12:24
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.
00:12:35
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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.
00:12:45
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Of course, the first thing I had to do was to strap into Dr. Teddy Ascher's biometric equipment.
00:12:51
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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.
00:13:01
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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.
00:13:12
Speaker
And we took a deep dive into my subconscious.
00:13:17
Speaker
So should I orient us again?
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:20
Speaker
Talk me through it.
00:13:21
Speaker
So what are we looking at?
00:13:22
Speaker
I see a couple of fancy looking charts.
00:13:24
Speaker
Yes.
00:13:25
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.
00:13:33
Speaker
So that's the, I was wearing a pair of glasses and there was a camera in them.
00:13:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:13:37
Speaker
So this is showing everything that I was looking at.
00:13:39
Speaker
Yes.
00:13:40
Speaker
Or it's showing, technically, to be specific, it's showing your field of view.
00:13:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:13:46
Speaker
But it doesn't show your specific fixations.
00:13:48
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.
00:13:54
Speaker
So that's where your eyes are pointing, basically?
00:13:55
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.
00:14:06
Speaker
Okay.
00:14:07
Speaker
So at the center of your fixation, you see in very high resolution and in color,
00:14:12
Speaker
whereas in your peripheral vision it's much lower resolution and it's in black and white.
00:14:17
Speaker
All right.
00:14:18
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.
00:14:25
Speaker
Whereabouts I'm looking, yeah.
00:14:26
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.
00:14:37
Speaker
So you can see that that's showing you were measuring my you put up a couple of little nodes on my hand.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yes.
00:14:44
Speaker
And you're measuring electrical current between the two of them.
00:14:47
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:14:48
Speaker
So sorry.
00:14:48
Speaker
So what does that tell us?
00:14:49
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.
00:14:59
Speaker
So you can think of, like I said earlier,
00:15:01
Speaker
If you've been in very high intense situations, your heart might pound a little bit, your palms might start to sweat.
00:15:08
Speaker
Those are all autonomic nervous system responses to your experience, which are regulated by your brain.
00:15:15
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.
00:15:22
Speaker
Sort of a proxy for what's happening in my brain.
00:15:24
Speaker
In parts of it, yeah.
00:15:26
Speaker
So basically what we're seeing here is that there are peaks over time.
00:15:30
Speaker
So there are changes in the up and down directionality of our signal over time.
00:15:36
Speaker
So you can see, like, here we have many little peaks.
00:15:39
Speaker
But if you look at the general trend of the line, it's going down.
00:15:43
Speaker
So that means I'm getting bored?
00:15:45
Speaker
Not necessarily.
00:15:46
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.
00:15:54
Speaker
Yes, many people do, yes.
00:15:56
Speaker
So this doesn't tell us anything qualitative, really.
00:16:00
Speaker
It just tells us, you know, in two directions, more or less intense.
00:16:05
Speaker
And like I said, particularly if you're studying a group of people,
00:16:10
Speaker
you can look for trends in what causes an increase or decrease in arousal visually and try and establish that correlation.
00:16:16
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.
00:16:24
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:16:24
Speaker
But we don't know what.
00:16:26
Speaker
And it's a correlation.
00:16:27
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily mean that there's a causal relationship.
00:16:30
Speaker
So you'd have to go back and...
00:16:32
Speaker
set the study up differently to establish that there's a causal relationship.
00:16:35
Speaker
So like if the air conditioner is blowing on that spot in the gallery.
00:16:38
Speaker
Exactly.
00:16:39
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.
00:16:48
Speaker
Well, in this case, GSR, but yes.
00:16:49
Speaker
Or the GSR.
00:16:50
Speaker
Sorry, I'm mixing the different signals.
00:16:53
Speaker
Yep, exactly.
00:16:54
Speaker
So you have to, I try to come to it with an open mind, but definitely to look for trends.
00:16:59
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.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:07
Speaker
But it kind of hones in, hones us in in a particular direction.
00:17:13
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?
00:17:22
Speaker
And, you know, kind of leads you further down a path of inquiry.
00:17:25
Speaker
Well, so you want to rely as much as possible on group data.
00:17:30
Speaker
Yes.
00:17:31
Speaker
Right now we have data from me.
00:17:33
Speaker
Yes.
00:17:34
Speaker
Is there anything you can tell me based on this?
00:17:36
Speaker
Let's look.
00:17:37
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.
00:17:47
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.
00:17:54
Speaker
So here we're a few minutes into your time in the gallery and you can see that you're coming down.
00:18:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's like I just got really excited there.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yep, there was a peak.
00:18:03
Speaker
You were looking at something in the composition of that painting, it looked like.
00:18:06
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.
00:18:12
Speaker
It's going back down again.
00:18:15
Speaker
Right, so by nature it's going to be kind of this oscillating up and down.
00:18:19
Speaker
And as I said, there are lots of different factors that contribute to this signal.
00:18:22
Speaker
There was another one.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a pretty big one.
00:18:25
Speaker
Here I'm looking from a painting by Hoffman from 1947 called Studio.
00:18:29
Speaker
And you're pretty focused on this painting.
00:18:32
Speaker
It takes up your whole field of view.
00:18:34
Speaker
So there's something...
00:18:36
Speaker
I did really like that painting.
00:18:38
Speaker
Well, it's not necessarily always positive, right?
00:18:41
Speaker
Well, I remember liking it.
00:18:43
Speaker
So that's an important part of how we sort of triangulate.
00:18:47
Speaker
What do people look at?
00:18:48
Speaker
What does the galvanic skin response reflect?
00:18:50
Speaker
And what do they say?
00:18:51
Speaker
What do they say, yeah.
00:18:52
Speaker
So you can get the qualitative overlay onto this quantitative GSR signal that way.
00:18:58
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.
00:19:07
Speaker
Have you found trends?
00:19:10
Speaker
Have you found things that surprise you in how people are experiencing these galleries?
Impact of Neuroscience on Art Engagement
00:19:15
Speaker
What are the high points of what this method has shown you so far?
00:19:22
Speaker
Sure.
00:19:22
Speaker
So last summer and fall we ran two studies in two different exhibitions, and each study had a hypothesis that it focused on.
00:19:30
Speaker
So the first study was in our exhibition that presented work by the Native American artist T.C.
00:19:35
Speaker
Cannon.
00:19:37
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.
00:19:49
Speaker
You're talking about the writing on the wall.
00:19:51
Speaker
Yes.
00:19:52
Speaker
In this case, I'll tell you a bit about how the study was structured.
00:19:55
Speaker
But yes, so this is content that you could theoretically find in a label.
00:19:59
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.
00:20:12
Speaker
So are you searching for something?
00:20:14
Speaker
Are you making a judgment about what you're looking at?
00:20:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:17
Speaker
Are you trying to memorize what you're looking at?
00:20:19
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.
00:20:30
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.
00:20:43
Speaker
Okay.
00:20:44
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.
00:20:54
Speaker
And the people who were free viewing demonstrated this central bias.
00:20:59
Speaker
They focused their attention on the middle of the image while the people who were searching interrogated the whole image.
00:21:05
Speaker
Sort of looked around the parameters and... Yes.
00:21:09
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
00:21:36
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.
00:21:51
Speaker
So that could have been as simple as, do you like this image?
00:21:54
Speaker
Are you moved by this image?
00:21:56
Speaker
And in short, what we found, and then, sorry, then we had a control group that didn't get any prompts.
00:22:00
Speaker
They just went through and looked.
00:22:01
Speaker
Sure.
00:22:03
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.
00:22:24
Speaker
Interesting.
00:22:24
Speaker
So there, that we can see there that it's not just having a prompt that causes you to stay longer.
00:22:30
Speaker
It's the kind of prompt.
00:22:31
Speaker
It's the kind of prompt.
00:22:32
Speaker
It's the present, it seems to be the presence of that task, that purpose, that activity to perform while you're looking.
00:22:38
Speaker
And then we looked at the galvanic skin response as a function of what kind of prompt you received.
00:22:43
Speaker
And consistently the participants who received that judgment prompt demonstrated an above average response.
00:22:49
Speaker
galvanic skin response to the object that they were looking at.
00:22:53
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.
00:23:03
Speaker
So there we're seeing that dwell time changes and emotional reactivity changes as a function of what kind of prompt.
00:23:09
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?
00:23:18
Speaker
Sure.
00:23:18
Speaker
So I think, you know, it's not to say that you want to incorporate a judgment task into every label, right?
00:23:23
Speaker
But you can use it to create like a cadence in the exhibition.
00:23:26
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,
00:23:34
Speaker
or something like that, you might incorporate that judgment prompt.
00:23:37
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.
00:23:53
Speaker
So I think it's that, again, that social kind of relational aspect that seems to really help people to engage.
00:24:01
Speaker
That sounds really promising.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, I'm excited.
00:24:03
Speaker
I have to say, I think insights from that could filter into not just museum presentation, but arts education.
00:24:09
Speaker
I think there are lots of applied applications for that strategy.
00:24:15
Speaker
I have colleagues who use training with works of art to help medical students become better diagnosticians.
00:24:23
Speaker
So I think there are lots of ways that this skill set can be applied outside of a museum.
00:24:28
Speaker
Fascinating.
00:24:28
Speaker
Well, thanks for talking me through it.
00:24:30
Speaker
Sure, thank you.
00:24:40
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.
00:25:00
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.
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:25:19
Speaker
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00:25:25
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.
00:25:36
Speaker
and Catherine Reynolds.
00:25:38
Speaker
Visit Reynolda to experience iconic works that shaped a nation
00:25:42
Speaker
in Lyon Decker and the Golden Age of American Illustration.
00:25:45
Speaker
Get one step closer to a true experience in American art by visiting reynoldahouse.org slash Lyon Decker.
00:25:52
Speaker
I like to take a moment each episode to say thank you for listening.
00:25:55
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.
00:26:05
Speaker
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00:26:12
Speaker
So thanks so much to those of you who have done that.
00:26:15
Speaker
And don't forget, you can always see photos and bonus material about each episode at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:26:23
Speaker
This episode, to use an Ira Glass-ism, has two acts.
00:26:27
Speaker
You've just heard the first, and coming up is the second.
00:26:30
Speaker
I sat down with Brian Kennedy, who just recently took the reins as director of the Peabody Essex Museum.
00:26:36
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.
The Role of Museums in Society
00:26:46
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.
00:26:54
Speaker
I was thrilled to hear that perspective, particularly on the eve of the opening of the museum's vaunted new wing.
00:27:00
Speaker
So, without further ado, here is Brian Kennedy.
00:27:04
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.
00:27:26
Speaker
And it's something that I've never done in a museum before or anywhere else for that matter.
00:27:33
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.
00:27:53
Speaker
But then we had a little chat at the end and I said, you know,
00:27:56
Speaker
I think that in a sense, I'm always self-conscious when I'm walking through a museum.
00:28:01
Speaker
And I am a professional person in the arts world.
00:28:06
Speaker
I'm no stranger to visiting art museums.
00:28:10
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
00:28:27
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.
00:28:34
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.
00:28:46
Speaker
What are the big challenges that you're facing?
00:28:48
Speaker
What are some of the approaches that you think are important for a museum like yours to be considering?
00:28:57
Speaker
I think the most important thing is that we facilitate the freedom of our visitors to act whatever way they want.
00:29:04
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.
00:29:17
Speaker
So in the latter, generally speaking, though there are exceptions, you sit down and you stay there.
00:29:24
Speaker
You might get a break halfway through, but basically that's it.
00:29:29
Speaker
You experience in a static way.
00:29:32
Speaker
You receive it.
00:29:32
Speaker
But you're there alive to it.
00:29:35
Speaker
The art museum is completely different.
00:29:36
Speaker
I mean, you can come in and you can stay as long as you like.
00:29:40
Speaker
You can go wherever you like.
00:29:42
Speaker
You can stop for as long as you like in front of anything that you like.
00:29:46
Speaker
And generally speaking, about 90-something percent of our visitors come with somebody else.
00:29:52
Speaker
So you have a communication going on.
00:29:55
Speaker
So that's on the one hand, that's what we want to preserve.
00:29:58
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,
00:30:09
Speaker
And you can test it because you've really studied it.
00:30:11
Speaker
So it's less flexible.
00:30:13
Speaker
It tends to be a journey.
00:30:16
Speaker
I mean, you go in at the beginning of the show and you come out at the end.
00:30:18
Speaker
Right.
00:30:19
Speaker
So you can study reactions.
00:30:22
Speaker
And it's a little bit of a trap.
00:30:24
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.
00:30:44
Speaker
So while you learn a whole lot differently,
00:30:48
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.
00:30:58
Speaker
So that's a very interesting and palpable result that we're already dealing with.
00:31:03
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.
00:31:10
Speaker
But then applying that to permanent collections is quite a different thing.
00:31:13
Speaker
It's interesting, I was talking yesterday with my co-host Michael Diaz-Griffith.
00:31:20
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.
00:31:39
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.
00:31:55
Speaker
And for Coca-Cola, the mission is really simple, right?
00:31:58
Speaker
They want to sell as much as they can.
00:32:00
Speaker
They want the most appealing and addictive possible product, right?
00:32:05
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.
00:32:15
Speaker
But that's not your only mission.
00:32:18
Speaker
And so you may have competing interests.
00:32:20
Speaker
It is interesting to me to reflect on the work that Dr. Asher is doing.
00:32:27
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?
00:32:43
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
00:33:03
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.
00:33:11
Speaker
All that sort of thing then layers on what is essentially quantitative data about a qualitative experience.
00:33:19
Speaker
And I think that that goes more broadly to the function of a museum.
00:33:23
Speaker
So if you take Coca-Cola,
00:33:25
Speaker
Coca-Cola is a commercial company, it's a for-profit company.
00:33:29
Speaker
So they're trying to do all the things that you said.
00:33:31
Speaker
They're trying to build a brand that people will recognize, so more and more that product is consumed, of course.
00:33:36
Speaker
We want people to consume our product, but we have a different end.
00:33:40
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,
00:33:54
Speaker
when it has the most impact on the most people, right?
00:33:58
Speaker
But on the visitor, what we're actually intending is something different.
00:34:02
Speaker
We're actually looking to confer social benefits on the community, and that's a member of the community.
00:34:08
Speaker
So the social benefits are more likely to be long tail in marketing terms.
00:34:13
Speaker
They're going to be long term.
00:34:16
Speaker
And so in measuring as we are using our neuroscience initiative, we're of course measuring essentially momentary activity.
00:34:22
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.
00:34:34
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.
00:34:42
Speaker
Just to give you a quick example, when I was engaging the board here, among the questions we started with,
00:34:50
Speaker
where what are your favorite memories of this museum?
00:34:56
Speaker
What do you love most about it?
00:35:00
Speaker
What should we start doing, continue doing, stop doing?
00:35:02
Speaker
Those sorts of things that go to people giving answers like, oh, my brother's wedding.
00:35:07
Speaker
You know, actual experiences.
00:35:10
Speaker
So really to put a point on it, museums are about the activities of people operating in time and space.
00:35:17
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.
00:35:31
Speaker
It's interesting, isn't it?
00:35:32
Speaker
I mean, I think...
00:35:36
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.
00:35:47
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.
00:36:01
Speaker
what you take away from a visit to a museum is often something completely different.
00:36:07
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.
00:36:28
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.
00:36:49
Speaker
So it seems to me like a very difficult responsibility to try to fulfill those.
00:37:01
Speaker
I'm sort of restating my earlier question here.
00:37:04
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:37:05
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.
00:37:14
Speaker
The outcome is individual to the person, but it's a cultural experience.
00:37:19
Speaker
It's something that happened to them.
00:37:21
Speaker
It was what they felt.
00:37:23
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,
00:37:28
Speaker
You're doing the basic human function of moving in time and space.
00:37:35
Speaker
That is what your memory is, among other things.
00:37:38
Speaker
It's an accumulation of all the ways that you moved in time and space.
00:37:43
Speaker
So it's rare that we remember just one thing without actually remembering the sensory circumstance in which we experienced it.
00:37:52
Speaker
And that's, you know, not to be highfalutin about it, but that's the desire of me, certainly, as a museum director.
00:38:00
Speaker
But the responsibility goes, I mean, to many, many, many aspects.
00:38:05
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.
00:38:13
Speaker
And for each person that's a different thing.
00:38:15
Speaker
So we have to provide the opportunities for people to feel.
00:38:19
Speaker
And that's the essence of a work of art.
00:38:22
Speaker
I mean, a work of art starts as something that has an effect on the emotions.
00:38:27
Speaker
You've served at museums around the world and are just starting here over the last few months.
00:38:35
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?
00:38:43
Speaker
The reason it attracts me, this museum, is twofold.
00:38:47
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.
00:38:54
Speaker
I think it's a very special kind of practice.
00:38:55
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.
00:39:07
Speaker
but more particularly perhaps the engagement with the history of the museum.
00:39:11
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
00:39:21
Speaker
the early sea captains who gained membership of this exclusive East Indian Marine Society that saw and begat the museum in 1799.
Historical Context of Peabody Essex Museum
00:39:34
Speaker
Can I just back you up there for listeners who aren't familiar with that history?
00:39:39
Speaker
Can you tell a little more about the formation of the museum?
00:39:41
Speaker
Sure.
00:39:41
Speaker
So just after the mid-18th century in Salem, Massachusetts, the Marine Society...
00:39:49
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.
00:40:03
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
00:40:15
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.
00:40:33
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.
00:40:42
Speaker
How did they feel going to China or Japan or Korea or Zanzibar?
00:40:48
Speaker
And who did they meet there?
00:40:50
Speaker
And what did they hear there?
00:40:51
Speaker
And what did they find there?
00:40:53
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.
00:41:01
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...
00:41:13
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?
00:41:42
Speaker
Well, that's a bit.
00:41:44
Speaker
Sorry, that was a paragraph.
00:41:46
Speaker
No, my point is just that's quite a high aspiration.
00:41:51
Speaker
I mean, that's a lot for a museum to live into.
00:41:55
Speaker
Well, right now...
00:41:57
Speaker
You know, the world is just crying out for it.
00:41:59
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,
00:42:14
Speaker
to going to Australia and experiencing indigenous culture as a non-textual culture, and if we think of text as writing.
00:42:22
Speaker
But I think text and image are essentially the same thing.
00:42:26
Speaker
Text is an image and an image is a text, right?
00:42:29
Speaker
They're different as well, but they're very similar in what they actually do.
00:42:33
Speaker
And so in a non-textual culture like indigenous Australia, I learned a huge amount about people who are highly sensorily aware.
00:42:42
Speaker
And then we had the experience in our family of encountering severe difficulty with textual learning.
00:42:51
Speaker
And so learning how to negotiate that
00:42:55
Speaker
while understanding the hypersensory possibilities of somebody who often has difficulty with abstract learning, which is essentially digits and letters.
00:43:05
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
00:43:18
Speaker
essentially the practice of being sensorially aware.
Museums Enhancing Sensory Awareness
00:43:21
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.
00:43:31
Speaker
We can access it.
00:43:32
Speaker
So we're even more required as we move towards a world with artificial intelligence and robotics.
00:43:39
Speaker
to need to exaggerate our own human possibility.
00:43:43
Speaker
So a museum is utterly centered there.
00:43:45
Speaker
That's who we are.
00:43:46
Speaker
That's what we can do.
00:43:47
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.
00:44:00
Speaker
What do you think are some other museums that are doing good work along those lines?
00:44:04
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?
00:44:14
Speaker
It can do, but it doesn't have to.
00:44:17
Speaker
And I think that's the nature of the not-for-profit.
00:44:18
Speaker
The not-for-profit should not be aspiring to measure primarily by the number of people who consume it.
00:44:25
Speaker
The qualitative aspect is very, very important.
00:44:28
Speaker
And that's not to say that we don't care about who comes or how many comes.
00:44:32
Speaker
Of course we do.
00:44:33
Speaker
But I think that museums, of course, are concerned about the numbers of visitors that they have.
00:44:38
Speaker
But I think they primarily should be concerned about the experiences those visitors have.
00:44:42
Speaker
And around the world, there are so many examples of museums doing fascinating work.
00:44:46
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.
00:45:00
Speaker
And this has been particularly through my own involvement with the International Visual Literacy Association, which was founded in 1969.
00:45:06
Speaker
And it's interesting, visual literacy only entered the dictionary in 1972.
00:45:09
Speaker
It's kind of extraordinary, really.
00:45:12
Speaker
But since that time, there's been an annual conference
00:45:15
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.
00:45:21
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,
00:45:35
Speaker
transformed itself a number of years ago into a museum that you would enter and experience visual language.
00:45:41
Speaker
And actually there you can do eye-tracking exercises.
00:45:45
Speaker
Every visitor can when you go there.
00:45:47
Speaker
Really?
00:45:47
Speaker
Yeah, using machines, not the glasses.
00:45:49
Speaker
So you can use glasses as well.
00:45:51
Speaker
So that's not to say this is just one particular kind of practice, but I think that...
00:45:55
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.
00:46:06
Speaker
I mean why do people love zoos so much?
00:46:08
Speaker
They love zoos because actually you can go for a picnic.
00:46:10
Speaker
You can go inside and outside.
00:46:12
Speaker
You can do things together.
00:46:12
Speaker
You bring people of all ages.
00:46:14
Speaker
and you can have lots of different interests and it's a large expanse.
00:46:18
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.
00:46:27
Speaker
Animals are too, but each individual work is regarded as irreplaceable.
00:46:33
Speaker
like one of a species, it's kind of one of its own kind.
00:46:36
Speaker
And so there's all sorts of mechanics in the art museum.
00:46:38
Speaker
And there's a sense of elevation as well and... Well, we've created that.
00:46:42
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.
00:46:54
Speaker
It seems like a strange place to go as a family and have a light afternoon.
00:46:59
Speaker
Well certainly if that's the way it's characterized I think it should be.
00:47:02
Speaker
But there are places in museums that should aspire to being that because that's what they want to be.
Cultural Practices and Museum Goals
00:47:07
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.
00:47:16
Speaker
So, the way I just put a point on that is, I like to say to people, you know, what's culture?
00:47:22
Speaker
Well, the best definition for me is culture is what we do around here.
00:47:25
Speaker
Which means, who's we?
00:47:28
Speaker
What are we doing?
00:47:30
Speaker
And where is it?
00:47:31
Speaker
Here.
00:47:31
Speaker
And in our own lives, our culture changes all the time.
00:47:34
Speaker
It's a version of who we are and how we were formed.
00:47:37
Speaker
But there's lots of different aspects to culture.
00:47:38
Speaker
So, in an art museum, we're aiming to respond to many, many different practices by many people from many different cultures.
00:47:47
Speaker
Brian Kennedy, thanks so much.
00:47:48
Speaker
It's been a pleasure.
00:47:48
Speaker
A great pleasure.
00:47:49
Speaker
Thanks for the opportunity.
00:47:52
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.
00:47:58
Speaker
And even more than that, if I can use the word philosophy of what they're trying to do.
00:48:04
Speaker
The idea of visual literacy as a core principle of curating and managing a museum is a very interesting thing.
00:48:09
Speaker
is maybe more surprising and novel than it really should be.
00:48:12
Speaker
It seems to me like a very apt way of encapsulating what a museum is uniquely capable of doing in our culture.
00:48:18
Speaker
And maybe studying neurological responses to artwork is a way of expanding the museum's toolbox to do those things.
00:48:25
Speaker
In any case, there's plenty of food for thought, and I really hope you enjoyed the conversations as much as I did.
00:48:30
Speaker
That's our show.
00:48:31
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:48:32
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:48:35
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:48:36
Speaker
My co-host is Michael Diaz-Greffitt, and I'm Ben Miller.