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Museums: Coming soon to a theater near you

Date: April 11, 2013
Author: admin_pastcast
Categories: Art Museums

Technology is rapidly changing the museum experience. By Experience, a company that brought the New York Metropolitan Opera to a wide audience via their live video programs, has now entered the museum for its latest venture. This week, their program, Manet: Portraying Life, played on an estimated 1,000 screens in twenty-eight countries. Unlike the live opera broadcasts, the art presentations are really just one-time-only documentaries.

What is gained with this new format? For one, I will not be able to visit the exhibit, stunning in its quality. I can sit in a comfortable chair (with a bag of popcorn) and receive what the project director calls “a super-size VIP virtual tour.” I’d learn something, and that’s good.

What is lost? I am not in control over what I see and how long I look at it. In a real museum, you set your own pace, decide what’s worth twenty seconds or ten minutes. I also lose depth, so the painter’s brush strokes flatten.

The biggest loss, though, I might call the experience of the holy — entering into the presence of the real thing. I have gone online and read letters of Thomas Jefferson. But there was an ineffable moment when I was in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia and held the actual paper in my (gloved!) hands.

Still, these two approaches are not contradictory. The Met says that opera attendance is up because a new audience has been attracted by the theater experience.

Roger Ebert and the Princess Theater

Date: April 5, 2013
Author: admin_pastcast
Categories: Pastcasts

Yesterday brought the news of Roger Ebert’s passing. It also brought to a close more than forty years of turning to his reviews on the movies of the day. It began with train commutes to summer jobs in Chicago. The Sun-Times was the right size to hold while sitting next to other passengers,  and slightly more liberal than the Chicago Tribune.

Two years ago I completed a walking tour pastcast for Urbana, Illinois, entitled, “In Lincoln’s Shadow.” The challenge was to connect the city with the presence of our greatest president, who practiced law here while on the circuit. However, no buildings — except possibly one house — remained from the 1840s and 1850s. Instead, the scripts reflect themes about Lincoln’s association with Urbana — he, for example, signed legislation establishing land grant colleges, leading to the founding of the University of Illinois.

One theme brings us back to Roger Ebert. Lincoln had friends in town, and in the evenings when the court had adjourned, enjoyed lively local entertainments. In much the same way, Roger Ebert, an Urbana boy, fondly recalled his visits to the historic Princess Theatre where he gained an early love of movies.

City of Gold

Date: March 24, 2013
Author: admin_pastcast
Categories: Pastcasts

In this 1957 classic film, Pierre Berton talks about his hometown of Dawson City. A recollection of the Klondike gold rush at its height, City of Gold used still photographs to compare Dawson City of the gold rush era with the town in the 1950s. It is, in essence, the “Ken Burns” technique years before that filmmaker’s breakthrough documentary, Brooklyn Bridge.

The documentary began when Colin Low visited the Public Archives in Whitehorse, Canada, and found 200 photographs taken by A. E. Hegg during the Gold Rush in 1898-99. These 8 × 10 glass plate negatives had been found in wooden boxes in a sod-roofed log house, but were fortunately saved and restored. The plates provided incredibly sharp images; photographer Hegg brought an eye for faces and context to his work. This is a real gem, lasting around twenty-one minutes.