Second Time's the Charm?

Today started out with a tour around the galleries, all by myself of course, retracing my steps to find the objects that I was supposed to be working on. The image started to come into focus as these pieces fit together, a much more coherent group than what I had been working on, which were random and had left me more than a little confused as to the relationships they held. Well, at least now I know I wasn't crazy, just wrong. I managed to get almost all of them before heading back down to my desk, missing the one piece in the Glass Pavilion, then I attended the Visitor Engagement meeting, which Adam runs. We had a pretty somber opening, but as they began to discuss all of the changes happening in the museum and the new tools they were using to track interest, everything perked up a little bit. I'm beginning to recognize more faces and connect their names and what they do, which in turn helps me to form a larger picture of the workings of the museum. Evidently there has been a lot of rearrangement in the management, but my favorite part of the meeting was seeing a software program they had just begun using. It tracked the members of their email list and members of the museum to see what emails they open, what they delete, what purchases they make, and so on and so forth. Furthermore, with the museum's app they can even track movement of people through galleries to see how they experience it, where they linger, and how many times they come. Although a museum's facade seems rather unchanging and placid, it's astounding to see how much thought and work is put into where things are positioned, and the amount of energy put into targeting specific people for donations and attendance. Definitely a little bit Big Brother, but I can't really begrudge a museum that has no admission fee its advantages, although that is always how it starts in the books, isn't it?

After that meeting, I finished up looking at the objects and typed up my notes about them, only to be rather startled by an alert for another meeting I had practically forgotten. This one was about the Tuileries exhibit they're getting ready to open in February, in a collaboration with the Louvre. They had a floor plan of the layout and discussed the objects, how they would be moved, the little sticking points they were finding with the Louvre on this and that, and other things like graphics and educational materials. To hear everything that goes into an exhibit is rather overwhelming, though I can't say entirely surprising. I think the most interesting part was when they discussed the aesthetics of the exhibit and the experience they wanted to create for the viewer, which was very specifically geared towards a mimicry of the gardens themselves almost, yet I'm sure that when visitors come the experience will be so seamless that they never realized that was such an integral part of their visit, yet without it their experience would have been missing an important piece.

I finished up my day with thinking up pairs that would do well together in the trade timeline, so that their juxtaposition would create a point and add to the argument that globalization is by no means a new process. So far, I have some tentative plans, but so many of the pieces would do well in so many different pairing that it will likely prove difficult to decide. I hope I'm up to the challenge!

Well, my first week at the museum is almost up, only one more day left. My but the time does fly.