first 'here' and then 'here'

Although I was just about to apply for a dozen different M.L.I.S. programs this winter (and even relearned a bunch of math to take the GRE towards that goal), I had a revelation of sorts recently and have since switched gears. I was up late on the internet one night, anxious about the number of things that had to be done by mid-December for the first wave of Fall 2010 deadlines. In light of my inability to muster the enthusiasm to start a personal statement on why I wanted to pursue library work, I realized that I was not as excited about the library sciences as I thought I was 6 months ago.

Given I'm looking to apply to graduate programs for a second master's degree, I really want to be sure that it's the right choice and that I'm selecting it for the right reasons. This isn't to say that I wish I hadn't gotten my M.F.A. in Visual Art/Painting (Univ. of Chicago, 2007)--I don't think I could be making the work I'm making now (or any work at all, really) without that time and what I learned there--but I also want to understand the context in which a wider range of cultural objects and resources are put out into the world and how we engage with those things differently than the way we deal with more basic activities like eating, sleeping, working, or traveling. I don't feel like I've learned enough yet about how museums and similar public and private institutions are structured and how they function relative to the other places we also spend our time and money. Places like school, work, home, restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, dog parks, the sidewalk, the post office, a bus in rush hour traffic...

How do cultural institutions exist as outlets for preserving, displaying, and challenging what exists both beyond and concurrent to our various lives? I'm not satisfied with what I know now about the history of the buildings that facilitate the transmission of these ideas and the display of these objects. How do we decide (and who decides) what to make accessible and what factors determine whether that material succeeds or fails to communicate information? I first started to consider these questions after getting some part-time museum admin jobs this year (first here, and then here) and spending more 'objective' time in museums (for example, being in a museum but not to see a particular artwork or exhibition can make certain other aspects of the entire organization more pronounced). Since then I have realized that the scope of these questions can be so much more dynamic when applied beyond the context of (oftentimes commercial) contemporary art spaces that I was focused on while managing a gallery in Chicago right after grad school.

Basically, I'm interested in seeing what I can come up with in the next year on these topics and in speculating on what else I can potentially learn about in the course of beginning certain programs in Museum Studies, Public Humanities, Arts Administration, or Museum Arts Education next, next fall (2011). Hopefully this blog will begin as a document of the different routes that I test to get to that point, as a place to casually explore any related subjects that I encounter for the first time or revisit with this different end in mind, and then transition into something larger later. In the long term, I hope that it can be a platform for building a better understanding of the many reasons we study cultural institutions and one example of how it might be done.