Clicking Through the Gift Shop: The Rise of the Virtual Museum

The opening of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence earlier this year indirectly highlights one of the more quietly powerful riffs of museum development in the digital age. Named after and based on Pamuk’s 2008 novel of the same name, the actual Istanbul museum contains artifacts that cover the neighborhoods and eras covered in Pamuk’s novel about a rich businessman’s obsession with a working-class woman. As Pamuk recently explained in Newsweek about why he opened it, the museums he grew up with had state-sanctioned missions that “held authoritarian displays of various objects whose purpose we could not quite fathom, belonging to kings, sultans, generals, and religious leaders whose lives and histories were far removed from ours.” He was going to be able to tell a different story in his museum. Museums in the United States typically don’t have such draconian state-sanctioned protocols, but they are the social institutions that establish and maintain the dominant narratives, be they cultural, aesthetic, historical, or otherwise. The rise of new media over the 1990s caused museums to adapt in two primary ways. One is supplemental: Since the early 2000s museums have embraced and explored the ways in which new media can support and enhance their traditional missions, turning to interactive media displays, creating original content targeting portable digital devices, and using social media for communications such as Twitter tours. The other is curatorial, finding ways to exhibit artists who explore digital media as an end product. But as Rhizome recognized in 1996, the virtual gallery/museum is a powerful and effective way to disseminate ideas and art works and for artists and curators to explore narratives that don’t easily fit into the dominant trends or stories maintained by conventional large institutions. Freed from the need of significant start-up capital and sometimes contentious funding situations, the purely virtual museum can be as idiosyncratic, able to explore underrepresented points of view, document global movements that geography otherwise hinders, to collect stories before they disappear, or to try out new education platforms. A few have already impressively staked out their online corners even as the artists and the art world itself is still figuring out how they are responding to the digital upheavals of mundane life over the past two decades. The Tucson Gay Museum

Launched in 2011 by the Tucson Gay Historical Society that dates to the late 1960s, this virtual museum tells the story of gay life from the 1700s to the present in this small pocket of marriage equality tolerance in an otherwise conservative state. The site’s simple design is overloaded with links to historical documents, photographs, and videos that place Tucson in the ongoing story of gay rights in the United States—and even includes a gift shop.

Virtual Museum of Canada

Traditional brick and mortar museums provide the content for this online portal to Canadian heritage and culture but it’s scope turns the site into impressive entity unto itself. The Virtual Museum of Canada compiles exhibitions from more than 1,300 Canadian institutions, governmental agencies, educational institutions, and private enterprises to create an encyclopedic single hub for information on First Nations peoples, the Newfoundland paintings of Campbell Tinning, Canadian rail history, and fascinating examples of Quebec editorial cartoons. The Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art

Late afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, novelist Buchi Emecheta, the emergence of Nollywood as a global force in film production and distribution — Nigeria’s artists and culture industry have a global reach, yet it visual arts community remains a bit lesser known, despite a legacy that dates to Aina Onabolu in the early 20th century. Last year Spanish architect Jess Castellote partnered with the Pan-African University in Lagos to create the Virtual Museum of Modern Nigerian Art, an effort to create a searchable database of Nigerian artists. It’s still in the developing stage as far as hosting curated online exhibitions, but as a one-stop portal to see works by Nigerian artists working today.

The Global Museum on Communism

A 1993 act of Congress established the educational nonprofit Victims of Communism to " “the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims in an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust,” such as the mass killings under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong in the People’s Republic of China, and Pol Pot and the Khmer Rogue in Cambodia. Since June 19, 2009 the Global Museum on Communism has become an online effort in crowdsourcing the histories of people and events that regimes typically try to white out of the “official” stories. The Memoria y Verdad sobre el Stronismo

A profoundly effective effort in online historical curatorial work, MEVES documents what happened in Paraguay from 1954-1989 following the military coup led by Alfredo Stroessner, whose anti-communism stance endeared him to the United States even though Stroessner’s Ministry of the Interior surveilled, arrested, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands of Paraguayans. The site is in Spanish, but a great many of its features — a photo of a rusty bathtub draped in chains, a skeleton in an anonymous grave — need no translation.