Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating discussion at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival looking at the future of museums. Chaired by Charlotte Higgins, chief culture writer at The Guardian, the event brought together Gus Casely-Hayford, founding Director of V&A East which is currently under construction in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries (2010–2016). They discussed competing claims on who owns cultural heritage and who it is speaking to against the background of the pandemic and the economic problems this has caused for museums. They talked about the lessons of the pandemic including relying less on tourism and looking more to the domestic audience and the growth in digital content. The latter led to a lively discussion about the relative merits of going to see real objects and looking at them online. As an avid museum and gallery visitor this discussion gave me lots to think about in my visits since.

Eclectic and fun day from the BBC highlighting the work of museums and galleries through live streams and an interactive website. Dan Vo and Sacha Coward, freelance curators, lead the day via a series of live streams where they talk to museum staff and cultural commentators about what galleries and museums are doing during lock down from checking items in store to creating online material and running archive projects to collect stories and objects from this time. They define galleries, libraries, archives and museums as the GLAM sector and, as a librarian, I am happy to be part of that! The written live feed includes links to some fascinating videos on exhibitions which were on when lockdown made by the BBC started including “London Calling: The Clash” at the Museum of London and “Art Deco by the Sea” from Norwich. Also, great pointers to short pieces on museum websites about their exhibitions and fun content they are putting out. I am spending some time during the day fol...

Fun day at Charleston Farmhouse exploring hidden aspects of LGBT+ history as part of the Outing the Past an international celebration of the subject. I went to three of the talks starting with Jane Traies, telling the story of a possible Lesbian love triangle in Sussex, and not part of the Bloomsbury Group. She was a super speaker leading us to conclusions and them subverting what she’d told us. It was an interesting study in how we often can’t always know people’s stories from the past and whether we should of draw conclusions with modern sensibilities. Next was Andrew Lumsden talking about how the Labouchere family both enable Forster to wrote and held him back. I found this a bit tenuous but still fascinating to learn more about Forster, a regular visitor at Charleston. Finally I went to hear Dan Vo talk about queer curating in museums and galleries. Vo leads queer tours of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the National Museum of Wales. He t...

Seminar on new technologies to enhance the experience of musuems and how they deliver information organised by the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK) and held at the Christopher Ingold Chemistry Lecture Theatre, University College London. I am cheating a bit here as this was an event I attended for work but as it was about museums etc I thought I'd count it for the blog! I found it fascinating and although some bits made me ask why, Anthony Hudson-Smith's web project to tag objects and record memories associated with them, Tales of Things , others made me want to sign up to help such as the Transcribe Bentham porject at UCL which is asking the publci to help them transcribe the papers of Jeremy Bentham. Anyway here is a list of all the talks : Shaping Up : 3D documentation and knowledge in cultural heritage by David Arnold – Department of Computer Science, University of Brighton Tales of things : archiving and viewing the cultural heritage of everythi...