Conference paper, Friday, October 19th, 10:15 a.m.
The present contribution is the written version of the Keynote speech by Professor Peter Weibel in the context of the MAI conference 2007, museums and the internet on May 10th, 2007.
Peter Weibel: Web 2.0 and the Museum. The Noah’s Ark Principle
The museum embodies something that I would like to call the Noah’s Ark principle. The story of Noah’s Ark is a parable of survival, and of storage. As we recall, the story of the flood and Noah’s Ark is in the first book of Moses (Genesis) chapters 6–9 in the Bible. God chose the patriarch Noah for his sense of righteousness and warned him of the flood. He told him to build an Ark (lat. arca) that could float and to bring in this Ark, himself and his wife, his three sons and their wives, eight people and a great number of animals, two of every sort. According to the story in the Bible, this floating Ark was extraordinarily large for its day, ca. 150 meters long, 25 meters wide, and 15 meters high with three decks and a floor space of 9,000 square meters and a gross volume of nearly 14,000 cubic meters: almost as large as the Titanic. After it had rained for forty days and nights and the whole surface of the earth was covered, and the waters remained high for 150 days, all that was left on earth was what was in the Ark. Everything else that had stirred upon the dry ground, whether human or beast, had been eradicated.
In light of the general destruction, Noah’s Ark doesn’t really embody the principle of survival. The majority were extinguished, only a tiny minority was selected for survival. Is this a picture of Darwin’s natural selection, “the survival of the fittest?” Is this an aristocratic model or a democratic one? Noah’s Ark embodies the principle that states: only few are chosen, and only some will be saved. This is not a democratic principle. Noah’s Ark is a platform that has room for only a few. Museums are, likewise, such floating crates. They are meant to assure that artworks do not disappear, but instead, are preserved, that artworks survive and do not perish; they are meant to store artworks in their “bellies.” Until now, museums have worked along the lines of Noah’s Ark, selecting a small number of works and saving only a few: the masterpieces. Not very many artists or works have been able to enter this platform: these wood and stone crates, ships, Ark of the archives. Museums have mercilessly followed the Darwinian model of selection (Darwin 1986). Culture has become the embodiment of this selection. If we inquire into how many works have been preserved in the course of the century, estimates vary from one percent to a maximum seven percent. Imagining that a maximum of just seven percent of the Gothic altars or artworks in general have been preserved, then museums’ hitherto archiving activities do not appear to have been very successful: because museums work on the principle of selection, the same as Noah’s Ark, only a few can be saved, as it were, only a few allowed to enter this platform, this ship. Art is produced incessantly throughout the world. Through their collection activities, museums have the task of making sure that these works do not vanish. However, museums have only minimally fulfilled this responsibility. Most works have disappeared and only a small number are selected. Museums have done a poor job. They passed their judgments with the guillotine of history; separated out the majority of art, rejected it, and forgot it.
The Web 2.0 Principle
On the other hand, today we have Web 2.0—the opposite of Noah’s ark. Web 2.0 is a platform on which, in principle, everyone is searching and finding and can be saved. Web 2.0 is virtually an endlessly expandable Ark, an endlessly deep archive, a ship, a floating crate, wider than it is long, longer than it is high, higher than it is wide. All that we are experiencing today with YouTube (www.youtube.com), Flickr (www.flickr.com), or MySpace (www.myspace.com), etc., is precisely the opposite of selection. Just imagine, you are an unknown artist, more precisely, a photographer, who is at the beginning of your career, striving to be accepted as an artist and to depart from the ranks of amateur. You go from editors to museums and galleries, present your works, submit them, send them in, and request attention. Most galleries, museums, and magazines will reject you. You will be cast back on your status as amateur. Until now, through the Noah’s Ark principle, culture was a bottle neck through which only very few could pass. The Net platforms of the twenty-first century have expanded this bottle neck—almost everyone can get through. All amateurs can show all of their photos, although this does not remove them from the ranks of amateur. We now have a Noah’s Ark that has room for everyone, but it is no longer a platform for the chosen ones. This need to be creative, which a great many of society’s members have, has now finally found its Ark, although at the price that this Ark is not a culture Ark, but an amateur Ark: culture continues to take place in traditional institutions, such as publishing houses and museums. A gap has arisen between amateur culture and feudal culture. The nineteenth-century avant-garde’s demands that art should be made by all have been forgotten. Lautreamont formulated this avant-garde program in his famous maxim: “La poésie doit être faite par tous, non par un.” (Poetry must be made by all and not by one.) (Ducasse 1870, 207).Ever since the early nineteenth century, we have had what is known as recipient culture. This recipient culture was also formulated in a statement, Marcel Duchamp’s famous statement, which he articulated in his speech The Creative Act (Duchamp 1957), namely, that the spectator contributes to the creative act. Modern art of the twentieth century has a tendency to place the beholder or spectator at the center of the work. This recipient culture was further developed by various theorists (Warning, 1988), through to Michael Bakhtin (see Bakhtin 1979; Jauß 1975). In the practice of art, this recipient culture, that is, visitor participation, has taken hold since the 1950s. Ever since Op Art and Kinetics, artworks have been spectator-dependent. The visitor has to move to either evoke optical effects or set a work in motion. Happenings, Fluxus, and Events were dominated by instructions to the beholder for how to act: The beholder followed the written or spoken instructions of a game leader and thereby completed the artwork. Concept art, too, commonly addressed the beholder to carry out ideas. Already in 1966, Franz Erhard Walther published a series of works entitled “Objekte, benutzen” (objects, use). Since 1980, interactivity has played a central role in digital art, through to virtual, immersive environments. The word “user” has long been present in art. Art movements have consistently demanded the spectator’s participation. For example, the Gruppe GRAV – Groupe de recherche d’art visuelle, began making exhibitions in Paris in 1960 entitled: “Touching is permitted.” Normally in the museum one reads, “Touching is not permitted,” or “Please do not touch,” but here the opposite is called for. The possibilities offered by the computer further developed spectator-relativity, which had not been a physical thing up to this point, to a human-machine interaction. We created interfaces with which humans communicate with machines and are able to give them instructions for how to act. Spectator-relativity thereby heightened to become interactivity. But this interactivity consisted basically of the artist simply delivering an artwork and then this artwork having to be set in motion by the visitor, for example, through movements or by pressing a button, that is, through interface techniques. The content of the artwork comes from the artist; the beholder merely sets the artwork in motion.
