CHArt TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE
|
|
Digital Archive Fever
|
Eva Moraga Guerrero, Madrid, Spain
New media and Web 2.0 challenges for cultural organizations. A new organizational model: the “cultural learning organization"
The debate surrounding new media, Web 2.0 and cultural organisations usually focuses on four key areas: the collection and conservation of works of art; education and public access; curatorship and exhibition organisation; and legal issues relating to ownership. Surprisingly however, the discussion does not cover the adaptations and innovations that must now be made from organisational and management standpoints, in order to confront not only the challenges posed by new artistic/cultural proposals but also the evolution of society and technological collaborative tools over the next few decades.
In the evolution of the concept of the artistic object over the past century, most museums and other organisations (and the market) have been able to assimilate such objects, barely altering their organisational structures. While the artistic object could be reified, packed and stored, the ways of formulating and carrying out the various traditional functions of cultural organisations hardly varied over the past decades. But now the situation is far more complex. Museums, libraries, archives, theme parks and websites seem to homogenise in the new enhanced technological social sphere.
I would like to introduce a new topic to help cultural organisations respond to the constant transformation entailed by new media and Web 2.0 in the characteristics and functions of works, audiences and other agents intervening in the artistic process. In a polymorphic environment where new media, and artworks in general, are changing so rapidly, organisations need to be flexible and introspective enough to welcome mechanisms of reflection on the evolution of their activities and performance that will allow them to present innovative responses to the continuing transformations of the medium. Such organisations need new models that favour the emergence of a new vision of cultural institutions. New media and Web 2.0 requires cultural organizations of the twenty-first century to become “cultural learning organizations” that keep up their traditional functions alongside the new functions, thanks to continuous reflection (internal and external), effective participation at all levels (internal and external), continuous learning and shared distribution of knowledge, all based on the conception of a new kind of cultural organization leadership.