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Reposted from AAM
Almost all Chinese museums closed immediately on January 24, only one day after the city of Wuhan locked down, to reduce the risk of infection in crowded places. Beginning in early February, China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched online public culture and tourism services, which aimed to enrich the cultural life of the public while they were locked in their homes. Viewers could browse thirty virtual exhibition halls of the National Museum of China, search for information about historical relics at the Palace Museum, and attend open courses from the National Library of China. Many of the country’s provincial museums—including those in Zhejiang, Hebei, Jiangxi, and Jilin—developed a platform to gather their resources (virtual exhibitions, online storage, online shopping, etc.) together on one website. According to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, museums across China have moved more than two thousand exhibitions online, attracting over five billion visits during the Spring Festival (January 25-January 31).
Chinese museums also collaborated with some influential online platforms for livestream events. On April 5, China’s Palace Museum, also known as the Forbidden City, went live online for a two-day streaming extravaganza. Through popular apps including People’s Daily (the largest newspaper group in China), Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), and Tencent News, museum staff took viewers on tours of the ancient imperial mansions, cultural relics, and springtime flora and fauna in the compound. This event attracted over one hundred million views, an astronomical number even for a country with one-fifth of the world’s population.
Some online live programs focused not on Chinese museums, but on other museums around the world. On February 15, the British Museum went live online for the first time on the Kuaishou app (another TikTok-like platform). A Chinese docent at the British Museum led a guided tour of Egyptian culture, Renaissance art, and the East Asian collection at the museum. Unlike on traditional television programs, the docent could interact with the audience, and got immediate and direct responses via “bullet-screen comments.” This ninety-minute event attracted two million views and five hundred thousand likes.
On March 17, more than 180 museums in China reopened after month-long closures, according to a release published on that day by the National Cultural Heritage Administration. Only museums, memorials, and cultural heritage sites in low-risk outbreak regions were allowed to gradually resume operations, with the prior permission of local authorities. In medium-risk regions, open areas of cultural heritage sites and ruins-based museums could resume opening to the public in an orderly manner, while their indoor areas had to remain closed. Museums in the high-risk outbreak regions could not open at all. In the middle of April, several museums in Beijing, Guangzhou, Dalian, and Xiamen that had reopened were required to close again due to the rising number of COVID-19 confirmed cases in these areas.
Continuing precautions to control the pandemic, museums asked visitors to make online appointments and pledged to limit the total number of visitors, stagger visiting periods, and offer digital tour services to avoid public gatherings. The Shanghai Museum, for instance, releases two thousand online appointments every day, only 30 percent of its capacity. Although the appointments on its first reopening day were booked quickly, only 996 of the two thousand registered visitors went to the museum.
The new arrangements mean that visiting a museum is not an easy thing. Visitors must remember to bring their ID and show their green health QR code, to prove that they haven’t been to high-risk regions or had close contact with sick individuals. They are required to wear face masks and the museum should check that their body temperature is below 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit. They must stagger their visiting periods and keep six feet from others. All the cafes and restaurants are closed, and only vending machines provide beverage and snacks.
Reopening museums during the pandemic also means new strategies for exhibitions and programs. Because of travel restrictions, many temporary exhibitions and other academic and educational programs had to be postponed or even canceled. Many museums had to extend the temporary exhibitions opened before closure, and curated special exhibitions with their own collections. Some museums also tried to find cooperative opportunities with museums in other East Asian countries, both because of geographical convenience and better control of the pandemic in these counties compared to others around the world. All group visitors and onsite educational programs are still postponed, leaving a gap in engagement for students.
The financial implications of COVID-19 also concern Chinese museum practitioners. A February 2020 survey of 514 practitioners in visual art organizations (including museums, galleries, auction houses, art media, and art funding) showed pessimism for the near future of this field. 42.4 percent of respondents thought COVID-19 would have a strong negative effect on the art industry, a quarter estimated that they and their organizations’ income would decrease by more than 50 percent, and only 5.6 percent thought their income would remain the same in the first half of 2020.
Although many public museums in China are free and rely on national and provincial special funds, the cancellation of activities that charge a fee still affects their income. For private museums, the situation is worse. They lost their income from tickets and events during the month-long closure, and some of them had to change their plans for temporary exhibitions this year and even next year. In the survey, respondents wanted the government to provide tax concessions (70 percent) and rent and utility subsidy (67.6 percent). During this hard time, some provincial governments offered financial help to museums. For example, on March 27, the Henan province in central China announced a plan to offer loans of no less than one billion yuan ($141 million) to help revive the cultural and tourism sectors that have been hammered by the novel coronavirus outbreak. Museums which “have a relatively mature market and the potential for cultural product innovations” would be supported by this fund.
During this time, it is important for museums to think not only about how to survive, but how best to serve the public.
Almost all middle-scale and large-scale Chinese museums have continued to put virtual exhibitions online, since many people are still restricted from traveling outside or are afraid of going to public spaces like museums. However, these exhibitions have been criticized for their homogeneity and lack of creativity, including by Jian Liu, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Museum Data Center. Museums should think about the unique characteristics of the digital space and treat the online exhibition as an independent project instead of an appendage of onsite exhibitions. Even with the same objects and themes, the ways of curation and storytelling are different. The COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to think about the meaning of digitization and what makes a lively online experience, with content that goes beyond pictures and videos of objects.
There are also shortfalls to livestreaming. Although the live online viewing of the British Museum on June 30 gained great attention and had many visitors, many watched it for just a few minutes and then left the page; the average viewing time was only 2.3 minutes, as estimated by Udazrenz (see this translated screenshot for a data breakdown). On the Zhihu app (a Quora-like platform in China), viewers commented that they were attracted by the big name of the Palace Museum, and the unique opportunity to enjoy the palaces with nobody there, but left disappointed by its poor recording effect, slow pace, and lack of interaction. On the other hand, sometimes too much interaction with the audience is not a good thing either. The docent of the British Museum, for instance, had to deal with live comments like, “How much are these artifacts, can we buy them?” and “the British Museum should return these Chinese national treasures to China.” Museums must consider not only technical issues but, just as important, how to interact with the audience in a new way in the virtual world.
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Reposted from Artnet News
As museums shut their doors in March, cultural institutions across the US were forced to lay off staff as revenue streams abruptly dried up. Now, museums are slowly starting to reopen—but a significant portion of the staff that kept them running will not be there to greet visitors. A second round of layoffs has seen at least 17 institutions make substantial reductions to staff in the past month, affecting a total of more than 1,350 workers, according to analysis by Artnet News.
Throughout June, major art institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis announced plans to reduce staff, citing revenue loss and looming deficits caused by the extended closure.
“Most museums—not necessarily all of them—have fought to hold onto staff as long as possible,” Adrian Ellis, the founder of AEA Consulting, told Artnet News. “If you’re in a prolonged period of closure, it’s a extremely difficult position to be in… but at some point you’re going to have to make tough decisions—that’s why you’re paid to run the institution.”
Some say that museums could have done more to save people’s jobs, and that the latest wave of layoffs reveals fundamental flaws in the United States nonprofit model. The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, avoided layoffs by matching employees with new tasks that were often put off. But most museums do not have enough financial cushion to retain their full workforce without additional philanthropic support or ongoing ticket sales and other revenue.
According to a 2016 survey from SMU DataArts, the median art museum has just 1.5 months’ worth of working capital (or cash in hand), underscoring the catastrophic impact of closures that have dragged on for three months or more.
Last month’s layoffs frequently coincided with the end of federal aid from the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers forgivable loans to businesses with under 500 employees. Under the initial PPP guidelines, three-quarters of the loan—which lasted eight weeks—had to be spent on payroll. The cuts also came at the end of the fiscal year, a time when museums reset their budgets.
SFMOMA had nearly 500 employees before lockdown. In March, it announced that it would lay off 135 on-call workers while furloughing or reducing hours for an additional 188, some 60 percent of its staff. A $6.2 million PPP loan meant that the cuts were limited only to the on-call workers. But the museum still faces an $18 million deficit going into the new fiscal year, and at the beginning of June announced the layoff or reduced schedules of 55 staffers, effective at the end of that month.
When the PPP money came in, SFMOMA staff started a Change.org petition warning that “while this is a temporary reprieve for SFMOMA workers, we know that this simply kicks the can down the road.” A second petition asked the museum to reconsider layoffs, saying that “staff at all levels have offered to decrease their hours or pay, to share what workload exists in order to preserve all of our jobs.”
Signatories criticized the “unreasonably large salaries” of executive staff, noting that “even after taking a 50 percent pay cut, [museum director] Neal Benezra earns more in one month than a full-time frontline staff member earns in an entire year.”
But even pay cuts can only go so far, and some advocates have called on wealthy museum board members step in to cover ballooning deficits and payroll expenses.
“Some board members are stepping up, but most are not,” said Art and Museum Transparency, an art workers’ collective looking to improve museum working conditions. “This is particularly egregious given the discrepancy between the healthy financial markets and plummeting employment rates. It is important to recognize that board members can afford to support staff through this, but are choosing not to.”
The squeeze comes as museums have increasingly relied on a small number of donors giving large amounts of money to fund ambitious capital projects. Just four people—Leon Black, David Geffen, Ken Griffin, and Steve Cohen—gave more than 50 percent of the Museum of Modern Art’s $400 million capital campaign to fund its recent expansion. “Asking them to protect workers is a much more modest request, but it doesn’t come with an auditorium or gallery named after them,” Art and Museum Transparency said.
Without emergency support, and with many closures still continuing, as many as one in eight such institutions worldwide may shutter for good, according to reports from UNESCO and the International Council of Museums.
“This moment is a bit like a tornado. As a tornado goes through an area, you can have a house that’s standing and next to it one that’s disappeared, just because of the path of the tornado,” said Ellis. “There’s quite a high likelihood of quite a lot of change.”
Much of the criticism of museum layoffs has centered around who exactly is losing their jobs. In many instances, institutions are cutting visitor-facing roles in anticipation of reduced hours and attendance. These same roles tend to have a higher proportion of staff of color than executive-level positions, according to museum staffing surveys.
And although plenty of senior staff have taken pay cuts, those jobs also seem to be the most secure, in part because of their specialized knowledge.
When the Brooklyn Museum laid off 29 employees on June 29, “the decision-making process was conducted with a commitment to equity, and therefore strove to have cuts fairly distributed across departments,” the museum said in a statement, noting that the percentage of BIPOC workers had actually increased from 49.8 percent to 50 percent of staff with the cuts.
But the bigger picture is more ambiguous. “Layoffs did not impact senior staff at all. So, they are not equitable at all, especially as management and senior staff is largely white,” one Brooklyn Museum employee told Artnet News.
Art and Museum Transparency has been advocating for institutions to disclose not only the size of salary cuts for top staff, but also the duration of those cuts, as well as to implement “longer-term redistribution of their payrolls to address inequities across their institutions.”
“We believe museums should honor their professed commitments to equity by supporting those staff who need it the most—the lowest paid and most precariously employed—and by cutting pay or reducing hours for those who need it the least—the highest paid and most securely employed,” the organization said.
Some museum staff members have taken these measures into their own hands. In a striking display of both staff unity and the challenge of addressing inequality swiftly on an institutional level, the Brooklyn Museum’s staff banded together to set up the the Brooklyn Museum Mutual Aid Fund. A GoFundMe pledging to support “fellow and former colleagues facing financial hardship, food insecurity, and housing insecurity” with relief payments of up to $500 each has raised over $57,000 in just three days.
Top contributors included the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, who gave $1,500; former Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, who gave $1,000; senior contemporary art curator Eugenie Tsai, who gave $1,000, and David Berliner, the museum’s president and COO, who gave $1,000.
Unfortunately for museum employees, institutions probably aren’t out of the woods just yet. “I expect another series of layoffs announced late August,” when the second round of PPP expires, said Ellis.
Museum workers are well aware of the uncertainty they face.
“There’s a general psychological weight for art and museum workers now—those that have not yet been laid off or furloughed know that more layoffs are imminent, but lack a seat at the table in decisions directly affecting them, so are working in a state of limbo for weeks at a time,” said Art and Museum Transparency.
And as the outbreak intensifies in many states, it remains uncertain whether museums will be able to safely operate in the coming months, potentially extending (or reinstating) closures and the associated revenue loss.
“Institutions are probably making a set of decisions premised on a longer time horizon of mayhem than they might have been three or four months ago,” said Ellis. “This is probably the most difficult period in most museum management’s professional lives… This is completely uncharted territory.”
June 2
Chicago’s Children’s Museum laid off 74 of 100 employees, furloughing an additional six workers. (Chicago Tribune)
June 8
SFMOMA laid off or reduced schedules of 55 employees, after having let go 135 on-call workers in March. It is projecting an $18 million deficit for the fiscal year of 2021 following a $7 million deficit in 2020. (KQED)
June 12
The Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, laid off 231 of the 336 employees at its 11 historic homes and mansions, or 69 percent of its staff. (NewportRI.com)
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History laid off 26 employees, or 10 percent of the staff, reducing the $15 million annual budget by $1.2 million and helping make up for the $1.5 million lost during the shutdown. (Cleveland.com)
June 15
The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, laid off 45 employees, or 44 percent of staff, after a $1 million PPP loan ran out. (Santa Fe Reporter)
June 16
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor) laid off 14 staff members and furloughed an additional 33 employees in light of a projected $20 million revenue loss. The institution had received a $4.1 million PPP loan. Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell is taking a 10 percent salary cut, and executive leadership is taking cuts of up to five percent. Eliminated positions will get up to six months severance and 90 days health insurance. (KQED)
The Seattle Art Museum furloughed or reduced hours for 76 employees. The job cuts come after the museum exhausted a $2.8 million PPP loan and additional support from board members. (Seattle Times)
June 17
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts laid off 38 workers, 15 percent of the 260-person staff, in anticipation of a $6 million drop in its $36 million budget, once its PPP loan (between $2 million and $5 million) ran out. Employees making over $110,000 are taking 10 to 25 percent pay cuts. (Boston.com)
June 18
Minnesota Historical Society laid off 176 employees and furloughed 139 workers. The organization had nearly 600 employees across its 26 sites before lockdown. (Star Tribune)
June 21
The National September 11 Memorial & Museum, New York, laid off 148 workers and furloughed 51 employees, out of a staff of 337, following a $4.6 million PPP loan. Pay cuts have been instituted across the board, with five percent for lower paid employees and up to 15 percent for the director, who made $530,000 as of 2018. Facing a deficit of up to $45 million, the museum has cut its annual operating expenses, formerly $80 million, by about 50 percent. (New York Times)
June 22
The Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York, cut 32 jobs, or more than 40 percent of the staff. The job losses, which come after the end of a PPP loan of $350,000 to $1 million, were in visitor services and tours. After initially stating that there would be no reductions to executive-level salaries, CEO Jack Kliger announced that he was taking a 15 percent pay cut and that there would be salary reductions for other management. (New York Times, Forward)
The Minneapolis Institute of Art cut 39 jobs from its staff of 250, slicing its projected operating budget from $34 million to $30 million as its PPP loan ran out. Leaders at the museum had already taken a 15 percent pay cut. The job losses come despite a Change.org petition calling on the museum to retain all staff through board contributions and increased salary cuts. (Star Tribune)
June 24
The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, laid off 33 people effective July 1, all visitor-facing staff. Executive director Mary Ceruti is taking a 20 percent pay cut, with 10 percent pay decreases for other senior leadership. The museum is projecting a $5.7 million drop in revenue, equivalent to 26 percent of last year’s operating budget. (Minnesota Post)
The Science History Institute, Philadelphia, laid off 14 full-time employees and two part-time employees of a staff of 85 after its $1 million-to-$2 million PPP loan expired. (Email)
The Philadelphia Museum of Art announced plans to eliminate more than 100 of its 481 jobs, or more than 20 percent of its staff, through a combination of furloughs, severance packages, and layoffs. The museum, which had received a PPP loan of between $5 million and $10 million, was predicting a $6.5 million shortfall in its $49 million budget for the 2021 fiscal year starting July 1, already down from $60 million in 2020. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
June 29
The Brooklyn Museum laid off 26 full-time and three part-time employees, or seven percent of the 412-person staff. The museum had received a $4.5 million PPP loan. Its director and president took 25 percent pay reductions when the museum closed, and full time staff making over $75,000 are being partially furloughed (one day a week) until reopening. (Email)
June 30
The New Museum, New York, laid off 18 workers who had been among 41 staff members put on furlough in April, or 27 percent of full-time staff, on top of earlier reductions. After earlier reductions, only 56 of 137 staff members remain on payroll, including just seven union members from a unit of 84. The museum has cut the director’s salary by 30 percent, with 10 to 20 percent pay cuts for other executives. The museum received a PPP loan of between $1 million and $2 million in April. Health care for furloughed or laid off employees is being extended through August.
Reposted from KSMU
Meyer Library’s Special Collection contains one-of-a-kind materials, like letters from early Ozarks history, the newspapers from MSU’s founding, and the Rare Books Collection.
When campus closed down due to the coronavirus, Anne Baker, head of Special Collections at the library, said staff continued to check on the books “once in a while,” with campus being regularly patrolled by campus security. The archives remain locked anytime they’re not being used, and the library requires an MSU ID to enter.
Baker says the archives have adjusted their policies to keep staff and researchers safe.
“We’re looking at what we can do to minimize problems. We’re also looking at what other people in the profession are doing,” she told KSMU.
Also because of the pandemic, visitors can view the archives by appointment only. And anytime someone uses material, it’s quarantined for three days.
KSMU reached out to the Springfield Art Museum to ask about how it’s keeping its art safe. In an email, spokesman Joshua Best responded by saying: “The Museum doesn’t comment on our security policies and procedures in the media.”
Reposted from World Resources Institute
Flooding has already caused more than $1 trillion in losses globally since 1980, and the situation is poised to worsen: New analysis from WRI’s Aqueduct Floods finds that the number of people affected by floods will double worldwide by 2030.
According to data from the tool, which analyzes flood risks and solutions around the world, the number of people affected by riverine floods will rise from 65 million in 2010 to 132 million in 2030, and the number impacted by coastal flooding will increase from 7 million to 15 million. This is not only a threat to human lives, but to economies: The amount of urban property damaged by riverine floods will increase threefold — from $157 billion to $535 billion annually. Urban property damaged by coastal storm surge and sea level rise will increased tenfold — from $17 billion to $177 billion annually.
Flood risk is increasing dramatically due to heavier rains and storms fueled by climate change, socioeconomic factors such as population growth and increased development near coasts and rivers, and land subsidence driven by overdrawing groundwater. In places experiencing the worst flood risk, all three of these threats are converging, though the relative share of each varies by country.
India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, for example, have some of the largest populations affected by riverine and coastal floods each year. By 2030, these three countries will account for 44% of the world’s population annually affected by riverine floods, and 58% of population affected by coastal floods.
Even places you might not expect will see increased flood risk:
Climate change will intensify rainfall and coastal storm surge in some parts of the world, putting more people in harm's way. In Puerto Rico, for instance, climate change will be the number one driver of increased flood risk. By 2030, the expected annual population affected by riverine floods will double, while the expected annual damage to urban properties will increase $340 million. Heavier rains inland will drive around 51% of this increase.
The change to coastal communities will be even more pronounced. Currently, storm surge causes relatively little damage in Puerto Rico, thanks in part to strong flood-protection measures like dikes and levees. Existing coastal flood protection guards against 285-year floods (major floods with only a 0.35% probability of occurring). But with climate change causing more intense and frequent flooding, coastal flood protection could drop to only protect against 2-year floods (floods with up to a 50% probability of occurring). In other words, if left in its current state, Puerto Rico’s coastal flood protection will become effectively obsolete by 2030.
Growing populations and booming urban development in flood plains will increase both riverine and coastal flood risk in many countries. Even extremely water-stressed nations like Saudi Arabia will suffer. By 2030, 614,000 people in the country are expected to be affected by riverine floods annually — a tenfold increase from today’s risk — thanks largely to new development near rivers. Damage to urban property will increase by $1.6 billion annually.
Along the coast, 15,500 more people and $1.1 billion more in urban assets are expected to be affected annually by coastal floods by 2030. Urbanization accounts for 87% of this increased flood risk.
Additionally, subsidence — sinking in coastal cities, largely caused by the overexploitation of groundwater — will put an additional 2 million people at risk of coastal flooding in 2030. The United States is projected to see an additional $16 billion in flood damages to urban property annually by 2030, with $4 billion caused by subsidence. This is more subsidence-driven flood risk than any other country. Subsidence’s role in future flooding is the most pronounced in the country’s west coast, where groundwater pumping is common to supplement scarce surface water supplies.
Investing in protective measures like levees and dikes is not only important for safeguarding millions of people and their homes and businesses, but also to help grow economies. Aqueduct Floods allows decision-makers to assess the costs and benefits of adapting to riverine flood risk with flood protection infrastructure.
We found that, in many cases, flood protection measures offer a strong return on investment. For example, the three countries with the highest number of people affected by riverine flooding — India, Bangladesh and Indonesia — are all suitable candidates for riverine dikes. Every $1 spent on dike infrastructure in Bangladesh may result in $123 in avoided damages to urban property, when moving from the existing 3-year flood protection system to a 10-year flood protection system by 2050. This investment would reduce the likelihood of floods from 33% to 10%. In India, the investment is even more promising: Every $1 spent in India may result in $248 in avoided damages, when moving from the existing 11-year flood protection system to a 25-year flood protection system by 2050. In Indonesia, every $1 spent may result in $33 in avoided damages to urban property, when moving from the existing 10-year flood protection system to a 25-year flood protection system by 2050.
There are also job creation benefits. The costs for building flood defenses are not just a one-off capital investment; they require maintenance, which creates long-term jobs that stay in the local community. As governments look to rebuild their economies in the wake of COVID-19, investments in flood protection could be an important component of stimulus packages.
And built infrastructure like levees and dikes aren’t the only investments worth considering. Green infrastructure like mangroves, reefs and sand dunes act as natural buffers to coastal storms. Intact forests prevent erosion and can reduce landslides. Protecting and restoring this natural infrastructure offers flood protection and other benefits like water filtration and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Governments can pair natural ecosystems with more traditional gray infrastructure like embarkments and levees, called gray-green infrastructure. In the face of multiplying threats from climate change, gray-green infrastructure is a resilient, high-performing solution that also creates jobs.
Increasing investment in flood protection infrastructure and combining these methods will be necessary as climate change, socioeconomic growth and subsidence increase flood risk worldwide.
Reposted from Nature News
Researchers in Brazil are sifting through the ashes of a fire that destroyed part of a museum in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais on 15 June. The blaze follows repeated warnings about fire risks at museums, and comes less than two years after a massive inferno gutted the prized National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.
The latest fire has reopened wounds in the research community and intensified a national conversation about the need to protect Brazil’s cultural and scientific heritage.
Mariana Lacerda, a geographer at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, received a disturbing Monday-morning call: a building at the university’s Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden, which she’d directed for almost a year, was in flames. When she arrived on the scene, smoke was still coming out of a single-storey building that housed thousands of artefacts, skeletal remains and taxidermied animals, many collected several decades ago.
Two storage rooms full of fossils and large archaeological objects were covered in soot and smoke. Flames had partly consumed a third room, which housed folk art, Indigenous artefacts and biological specimens. Two further rooms, housing important collections of insects, shells, birds, mammals, human bones and ancient plant remains were almost completely lost.
For these, “little hope remains of material that can be recovered”, Lacerda says. “Something that is so slow to build was destroyed so quickly, in just over an hour.”
Archaeologist André Prous, who started working at the museum in 1975, was devastated. He and his colleagues had amassed a collection of human remains from a range of periods, including some from the earliest known inhabitants of Brazil, as well as samples of cultivated and wild plant species. Prous had also seen part of his life’s work disappear during the 2018 fire at the National Museum, when ancient skulls that he helped to collect in the 1970s were destroyed.
“The sadness is matched only by the fear that other, similar disasters will continue to destroy [Brazil’s] scientific heritage,” he says. Some stone artefacts, ceramics and documentation of the sites he has excavated survived the blaze.
Brazilian museums have faced a series of fires, often resulting in irreparable losses, says Carolina Vilas Boas, director of museum processes at the Brazilian Institute of Museums in Brasilia. At least 12 buildings of cultural or scientific significance have burnt in the country, many of them in the past 10 years (see ‘History in flames’). But the full extent of the damage is hard to know, says Vilas Boas, because reporting is probably incomplete.
Brazil is not unique in losing heritage institutions to fire, she says, but the country does have a poor record in taking care of its museums. Often, fire-prevention systems are installed, but budgets are too thin to maintain them properly. “There are many actions being taken to mitigate this risk,” she says, but recurring economic crises have hindered long-term planning.
“That lack of resources had no relation to the fire in the collection’s storage rooms,” says Ricardo Hallal Fakury, a structural-engineer at the UFMG. He did not speculate as to the cause of the fire, because investigations are still under way. But he says that the building that burnt was equipped with smoke detectors, and was mostly built of non-flammable materials.
The tragedy in Belo Horizonte has amplified a decades-long discussion among Brazilian scientists pushing for national and state-level policies to help protect research collections, says Luciane Marinoni, an entomologist at the Federal University of Paraná and president of the Brazilian Society of Zoology, both in Curitiba. “The community is upset because we have been trying to solve this problem with the federal government but without success.”
Back in Belo Horizonte, scientists are cleaning up after the fire. This time, however, they have some guidance on how to move forward.
National Museum researchers have teamed up with Lacerda to advise on the recovery of items that might still be salvageable. They are sharing protocols they developed after the 2018 blaze with UFMG professors and students who have volunteered to help. “Unfortunately, we are now experts in this matter,” says palaeontologist Alexander Kellner, director of the National Museum. “We went through it. We know the mistakes to avoid, we have a way to act, we have a methodology.”
Reposted from CGTN
The world's largest glass blown castle, housed at Shanghai Museum of Glass, has been broken into pieces after two children knocked the showcase down, the museum announced over the weekend.
The Fantasy Castle was made by Spanish glassblower Miguel Arribas, based on the iconic Cinderella Castle at Disney World Resort. It was presented as a gift to the museum in 2016 to mark its fifth anniversary.
The 60-kilogram artwork is worth around 450,000 yuan (64,000 U.S. dollars) and features spires made with 24-karat gold.
It took the artist 500 hours to complete the castle, using 500,000 glass loops, according to Manuel Arribas, co-founder of the Arribas Brothers, a chain of glass and crystal shops at Disney Parks around the world.
The museum said they have contacted the artists as they sought to repair the artwork, but because of travel restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic, they are unable to travel to China at the moment.
Shanghai Museum of Glass apologized to visitors for not being able to present the collection in its entirety and urged them to follow the guidelines and refrain from running and crossing the protective railings.
The parents of the two children have apologized for the incident and promised to take responsibility for the repairs.
Reposted from The American Alliance of Museums
Everyone is eager for a return to normal, which includes access to museums and other cultural venues. While countless people likely have been inspired and sustained by virtual museum tours these past few months, there is something very powerful about visiting galleries and venues and being in the presence of physical exhibits that many crave. Artist Maira Kalman says “a visit to a museum is a search for beauty, truth, and meaning in our lives,” and she advises us to “go to museums as often as you can.” What will museum visits be like as venues reopen in the context of the novel coronavirus and new public health safety guidelines? The answer might be found on your smartphone.
Anyone who has been to a museum, zoo, aquarium, or other cultural venue in the last decade probably noticed the same thing: almost every visitor had a smartphone. According to the Pew Research Center, 93 percent of Millennials own a smartphone and other generations aren’t far behind. 90 percent of Gen Xers and 68 percent of Baby Boomers own one.
This is good news for museums as they reopen and look for ways to keep visitors safe and engaged during the pandemic. Smartphones will enable visitors to maintain physical distance from others, avoid shared touchpoints, and increase accessibility.
Maintaining physical distance from others and wearing masks help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But it can be difficult to hear others when they are far away and speaking behind a mask, especially if speakers are also competing with HVAC units and other background noises. Shouting can strain the speaker’s voice and is believed to increase risk of spreading the virus if speakers are infected.
Audio-over-Wi-Fi systems enable museum visitors with smartphones and smart devices to practice safe physical distancing and hear clearly. Visitors simply download a free app and stream museum audio—it could be pre-recorded or live—from any venue audio source to their smart devices. Visitors experience clear sound directly to their ears via their Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids or personal earbuds and headphones. They can adjust volume to suit their needs and hear while staying safely away from others. No more crowding close together in groups to better hear a docent or video display, and no struggling to read lips or understand speech muffled behind a mask.
In an effort to inform and engage visitors pre-pandemic, many museums offered interactive touchscreens, flipbooks, and pushbutton or other tactile displays. Some may have even reused programs and information guides designed to help visitors navigate the venue and optimize their visits. Unfortunately, each of these is a conduit for spreading germs and could increase exposure to the coronavirus. Smartphones and other personal smart devices that guests already have on hand can enable museums to eliminate shared touchpoints and deliver information to guests safely.
One way museums can do this is with QR codes displayed throughout a venue. When visitors take a picture of the code with their smartphone, they are directed to a specific site that could feature information about the exhibits and artists. Similarly, museum-specific apps can provide visitor maps and programs as well as information about current and future exhibits and events. They also can link to visitor surveys that provide museums valuable insight about guest experiences. Apps featuring augmented reality (AR)—think Pokémon Go—are another way to engage visitors and add layers of detail and content to exhibits.
Some innovative museums had already begun leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones and cloud technology to connect with visitors and eliminate shared touchpoints before they were forced to close in response to the pandemic.
Expect more of these apps and creative uses for smart devices as museums reopen and look to engage with visitors while keeping them safe. These alternatives to touchscreens and tactile interactives foster engagement (visitors can easily access more information about displays on demand rather than waiting in queue for their turn at a crowded display) and reduce exposure to germs on shared surfaces.
In addition to protecting guests by enabling them to practice physical distancing and reducing their exposure to shared interactives, smartphone technology eliminates the traditional barriers to accessibility. The inability to hear or see an exhibit or art display are no longer barriers to enjoying an experience. For people with disabilities, life-changing smartphone features include voice-control features to navigate the phone, apps that transcribe conversation, and apps that tell visually impaired users what the text in a photo says.
When museums invest in Wi-Fi-connected audio systems, they enable visitors with smart devices to experience the exhibits, regardless of their ability to see or hear. They also eliminate language barriers.
Museums that have tour guides and translators available can use Wi-Fi-connected audio and smartphone apps to deliver real-time translation to smartphones. Guests simply choose the channel for their preferred language and listen via headphones or earbuds. Another option is to select a system that translates recorded content and delivers it to guests’ smartphones. Some of these systems can provide translated content for more than thirty languages.
Visitors with mobility challenges can benefit from GPS-triggered smartphone technology that lets them move about at their own pace and focus on what interests them most. Content is automatically delivered (no need to press a button or touch any shared surfaces) as visitors pass exhibits or reach a trigger point. When combined with powerful storytelling, this technology enables guests to engage more fully in their visit and get caught up in the cinematic story associated with what they are experiencing.
The prevalence of smartphones may once have been considered immaterial or even a distraction in museums, zoos, aquariums, and other venues, but the benefits of smartphones in this new environment are clear. When museums reopen, smartphones will help keep guests safe and deliver an even better, more inclusive, and engaging experience. Imagine that—feeling closer and more connected than ever, while staying safely apart.
Reposted from The New York Times
In 2005, Lonnie G. Bunch III became the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. There was just one problem. The museum did not yet exist. There was no collection, no funding, no site and just one employee. Just over a decade later, the museum opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to rave reviews and huge crowds.
Last year, Mr. Bunch became the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, overseeing the museum he founded, along with a few dozen other museums and libraries, and even the National Zoo.
The coronavirus pandemic has shuttered those institutions for the time being, but Mr. Bunch has stayed busy. The Smithsonian is launching new digital tools intended to facilitate a dialogue about race, and Mr. Bunch is engaged in the debate about the removal of controversial statues and monuments.
This conversation, which was condensed and edited for clarity, was part of a series of live Corner Office calls to discuss the pandemic and the protests. Visit timesevents.nytimes.com to join upcoming digital events.
Where does the Smithsonian stand when it comes to reopening?
The reality is that this is not business as usual. One of the great strengths of museums is they bring people together who don’t know each other to look at an artifact or explore an exhibition. Well, all that gets called into question this year. We will have to do something like timed passes to control the number of people. Because the one thing we don’t want is crowds of people standing outside, waiting to get in. That’s a recipe for disaster. But we’re also going to think carefully about how we social distance within the museum. We are going to have cleaning protocols. We’re going to expect everybody to wear a mask.
Should museums wait until events are squarely in the past to confront them? Or is there a need for institutions like your own to engage with these issues in something closer to real time?
Cultural institutions, regardless of the subject matter, have to be as much about today and tomorrow as they are about yesterday. And that really means that one of the jobs of cultural institutions is to collect today for tomorrow. We have people out collecting during the different protests. We have people around the country sending us the videos that they shoot on their cameras. But collecting isn’t enough. So we’ve created a major initiative that looks at race, community and our shared future. It’s an opportunity for the Smithsonian to say, “How do we help stimulate local conversations around race?”
Many people say that this moment feels different, that it feels like there’s the potential for real change. As a Black man yourself, who is not only a student of history, but a steward of history, does it feel different to you?
I am hopeful, but not always optimistic. I’m hopeful because I see how often African-Americans believed in an America that didn’t believe in them, how often they dreamed a world that wasn’t there yet, and then worked strategically with allies to make that happen. Who would have believed in 1820 that there would be no slavery? Who would’ve believed in 1920 that there would be no legal segregation? And so in a way, the opportunity to believe that change is possible is part of what is embedded in African-American history. But on the other hand, we also recognize the limits of that change.
On the surface, this is a different moment. I am taken by the diversity of people that are in the streets. I’m taken by the number of people throughout Europe saying Black Lives Matter. I’m taken by the fact that some police chiefs and some police officers are recognizing that their institution has to change, because it has reflected a kind of systematic racism where the police are considered not the friends of a community, but an enemy of the community. So all of that suggests that this just may be a time of transformation.
What I worry about is that after the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, we also saw a law-and-order backlash. We saw people turning their attention away from finding fairness and dealing with racial justice to trying to bring law and order to control what they thought was an out-of-control community. And that led to mass incarceration. That led to people turning their attention away from what was the major point of the day. So I do worry a little bit that this could turn into that as well.
In your memoir, you recalled when President Trump visited the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. And you shared this detail that the president didn’t want to see anything “difficult.” I feel like that story is emblematic of this broader tendency in American culture where many people, again, simply don’t want to confront the reality of some of the things that have happened in this country. How do we get people to engage with these difficult chapters in our history, especially when the legacy of some of these incidents is still very much with us today?
Americans in some ways want to romanticize history. They want selective history. As the great John Hope Franklin used to say, you need to use African-American history as a corrective, to help people understand the fullness, the complexity, the nuance of their history. I know that’s hard. I remember receiving a letter once that said, “Don’t you understand that America’s greatest strength is its ability to forget?” And there’s something powerful about that. But people are now thirsty to understand history. I hear people all the time saying, “I didn’t know about Juneteenth. Help me understand about the Tulsa riots.”
History often teaches us to embrace ambiguity, to understand there aren’t simple answers to complex questions, and Americans tend to like simple answers to complex questions. So the challenge is to use history to help the public feel comfortable with nuance and complexity.
The notion of simply pulling down statues means that you’re not really bringing historical insight. What you really want to do is use the statues as teachable moments. Some of these need to go. But others need to be taken into a park, into a museum, into a warehouse, and interpreted for people, because they’re part of our history. What is crucially important about this is that removing statues is not about erasing history. Removing statues in many ways is about finding a more accurate history, a history that is more keeping with the best scholarship that we have out there. So for me, it is about making sure we don’t forget what those statues symbolize. It’s about pruning them, removing some, contextualizing others and recognizing that there is nothing wrong with a country recognizing that its identity is evolving over time. And as this identity evolves, so does what it remembers. So it does what it celebrates.
So much of our history isn’t memorialized in that way. How many statues around this country deal with women? How many statues deal with African-American women who have changed this country?
For years there was a view that museums were sort of temples, places where artifacts could be collected and preserved and perhaps interpreted in a scholarly way, and that was about it. That has changed over the years, and many now argue that museums are really places for public gathering, for dialogue and that it is appropriate for museums to really engage in the issues of the day and perhaps even take a point of view. Where do you fall on that?
I believe very strongly that museums have a social justice role to play, that museums have an opportunity to not become community centers, but to be at the center of their community, to help the community grapple with the challenges they face, to use history, to use science, to use education, to give the public tools to grapple with this. Museums always take a point of view by what they choose to exhibit and what they decide not to exhibit.
I’m not expecting museums to engage in partisan politics. What I’m expecting museums to be is driven by scholarship and the community. I want museums to be a place that gives the public not just what it wants, but what it needs. And if that means that museums have to take a little more risk, if museums have to recognize that they’ve got to do a better job of explaining to government officials, funders, why they do the work they do, then so be it. I would rather the museum be a place that takes a little risk to make the country better than a place where history and science go to die.
Who becomes the arbiter of what is appropriate to display in a museum? How are they making those decisions about how to present history?
It’s crucially important to recognize that in museums, you need to have people who care about a variety of subjects in positions of influence, like curatorial positions. That means that it’s crucially important to have a diversity, not just of race or ethnicity, but of ideas, to be able to sort of make sure that cultural institution is grappling with interesting questions that help the public. But I want to be candid. Twenty years ago, I wrote an article about the lack of diversity at museums. Today there is more diversity than ever before, but it’s still lagging behind corporate America, for example, which I never thought I’d say. So the challenge is for museums to live up to what they say they are, which are places that should model and reflect the best of what they expect from other Americans.
It was 10:00 a.m., and the director and staff of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Étienne were both excited and nervous as they unlocked the institution’s front doors for the first time in months. At two minutes past the hour, three women who had travelled there from the neighboring city of Lyon came bursting in.
“We were so pleased,” said Aurélie Voltz, who personally greeted the visitors. “People had really waited for this moment.” Voltz said the museum received 100 visitors that day, a significant departure from the usual 1,000 during peak season.
Across the country, French museums are finally reopening en masse. The Louvre reopens on July 6 after 16 weeks; the Centre Pompidou opened on Wednesday, July 1, with a highly anticipated show dedicated to Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Others, like the Musée Picasso, have opted to open later in the month.
The joy of reopening, however, is clouded by the serious losses suffered during lockdown and the ongoing need for crowd control. The Saint Étienne institution, which is showing a historic survey of early works by American sculptor Robbert Morris, lost €100,000 ($112,300) in income (out of a $5 million budget) and an estimated 28,000 visitors during its closure. And while it hopes the Morris show, which boasts loans from the Guggenheim and Tate, will draw visitors, it must cap attendance at 470 at any given time for the foreseeable future.
Larger museums have seen even bigger shortfalls. In Paris, the Centre Pompidou incurred a loss of €1.2 million ($1.35 million) per month in ticket sales, not to mention lost revenue from gift shop and book sales.
“The reopening yesterday was a very intense and moving moment,” a Pompidou spokesperson told Artnet News. “The first visitors were warmly welcomed by a round of applause.” The opening also included a memorial service to the late artist Christo, who died in May, before he could see what would have been his final exhibition open to the public.
“The total attendance yesterday was about 3,000 visitors—not bad,” added the Pompidou’s spokesperson—around 2,000 less than a usual day. The museum estimates it can accommodate around 30 percent of normal visitor levels for the rest of the year, racking up losses of up to €20 million ($22.4 million) by December.
“The crisis has hit the cultural world very hard,” Laurence des Cars, the head of the Musée d’Orsay, told the Jakarta Post upon its opening at the end of June. The museum usually attracts 15,000 people, but it will be capping attendance at 5,000 per day. “The financial loss is still hard to encompass,” a spokesperson told Artnet News. They expect the losses to be into the dozens millions of euros.
Exhibition of Christo’s show at Centre Pompidou. Photo: Audrey Laurans.The most hotly anticipated reopening comes on Monday, July 6, when the Louvre opens its doors. The museum’s president Jean-Luc Martinez recently told the New York Times that it had incurred losses of €40 million ($45 million) during the shutdown. Only 70 percent of the galleries will be accessible upon reopening.
The calculus will continue to evolve as travel restrictions are lifted. “If Europe’s borders with the rest of the world are not opened this summer, we will see an 80 percent drop in visitors,” Martinez told the newspaper two weeks ago. Since then, Europe has lifted bans on Australia, Canada, Japan, Algeria, Georgia, and other countries. American tourists will not be allowed in and Chinese travelers, only provisionally. Martinez estimates it could take three years to get back to normal visitor levels.
The experience of walking through museums has certainly changed in France as it heads into what is usually its peak tourist season, but so has the political climate. Museums with colonial-era collections are under the microscope now more than ever. A few weeks ago in Paris, five activists were arrested for seizing a historic African funerary object from the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, saying it had been looted.
Museums can count on some financial support from the government as they work to adapt and cover financial shortfalls. Several museums would not disclose the exact number they received in support but, since March, the federal government has provided €5 billion ($5.6 billion) in relief to the cultural sector (which includes the media industry as well as the arts).
Last week, the French government, which has been leading the way beside Germany with relief aid for the creative fields, announced that it would make available another €20 million ($22.5 million) to help the cultural sector reboot with what the French ministry is calling a “Summer of Culture.”
Aurélie Voltz from Saint-Étienne said that while this year has already been turbulent, 2021 may prove even more difficult. “This year, I think we can make it. We had to change the program around at least 10 times but we managed not to cancel any projects,” she said. Looking ahead, however, she is concerned about a major drop in funding. “When it comes to next year, I am really not sure,” she said. “I am not very positive.”
Reposted from Forbes
There is nothing ordinary about the amount of disruption that will impact our lives moving forward as countries and states reopen following the coronavirus pandemic. In the context of the cloud, disruptions caused by COVID-19 have opened the door to another type of virus: cybersecurity threats. Today we are witnessing a rapid rise of opportunistic cybercriminal activity taking advantage of the chaos created by COVID-19.
Focal concerns about economic recovery and a potential second wave of human infection are abounding. Still, the concern for many companies should also include heightened cybersecurity threats that can easily break companies before they have a chance to relaunch. For the many companies that are already fighting to remain afloat due to challenges faced during COVID-19, a cybersecurity breach could quickly mean the end. As businesses navigate this “new normal,” they must address weaknesses in their IT strategies exposed by COVID-19 and consider implementing a better preparedness plan to avoid long-term damage.
Remote work has hastily spread everywhere, making IT departments justifiably cautious, even scared, as their users work in new environments with new tools including:
Incorrect use or misconfigurations create new cyberthreat opportunities to lurking bad actors. A missed certificate, a wrong setting, insufficient management, or unmanaged user training are all open windows for cybercriminals to sneak through.
The pace of major security incidents will continue to increase in the near future. While not uncommon, an increased frequency of ransomware, breaches, and exploits could be a harbinger of things to come. The month of May, for example, saw a staggering number of security breach reports:
Uncertainty, particularly in the early days of the pandemic, has resulted in a media blitz and information overload. Unfortunately, with too much information out there, misinformation, distrust and additional openings are ripe realities for cybercriminals to explore and leverage digital scams, such as:
The managed chaos of cyber-threats is an everyday reality, but in times of challenge, chaos escalates exponentially. Scammers scale up attacks such as phishing, hoping to trick employees into releasing or transferring funds, improperly changing bank routing information, and installing malicious software. They try to get employees to give up credentials, click on ransomware in emails and more. Hackers know that users are prone to using the same password across multiple logins, which could also lead to breaches across other platforms.
This novel climate is a perfect storm for cybercrime activity. Post-COVID-19, businesses cannot afford to be compromised in this fragile world where any resource can serve as an attack source. If there was ever a time for hackers to open their cybercrime toolbox, the time is now. Please stay safe by exercising proper online security hygiene. If you are not sure, or if this is not your company’s competence, this is the time to ask for help from experts.
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