Letter to the Examiner: Musingplace Funding

Rosita Gallasch’s report on Saul Eslake’s address to museum people on Monday is right on the money. He’s no ordinary economic commentator and he does know how to join dots.

When he says that cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries are going to find public funding “tight” it’s true. He’s talking about the tip of that ominous iceberg called ‘fiscal accountability’.

Otherworldly ‘Ivory Towers’ that once held out in splendid isolation to muse upon the world are beginning to crumble. Almost noiselessly, the winds of change are disturbing the dust and tumble weed in troublesome ways for elitist musers. 

Saul Eslake’s “personal” intuitions might well be much more informed than he dare give himself credit for. Musingplaces actually do offer real dividends and are not in competition with “schools, hospitals and the police”. Not by necessity anyway!

Catchwords like ‘interfacing technologies’, ‘social networking’, ‘efficiency and productivity dividends’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘crowdfunding’, ‘citizen curator’ etc. are increasingly coming together to deliver much more for much less in musingplaces.

All this is going on well below the tip of that fiscal iceberg Saul Eslake is reporting on. Nonetheless, he does seem to be suggesting, musingplaces need to get busy joining some dots … and smartish!

Ray Norman

Why are musingplaces changing

Most households will have someone living in it, or someone near to them, who will remember their museum, the one near where they lived, as a kind of chamber of curiosity. Typically a visit to the musingplace meant that 'the visitor' was passively receiving whatever it was the people running the place thought they should know about in order to 'live better in the world' – whatever that really meant. 

While we might nostalgically reminisce, the world has changed, sorry ... it is continually changing, and what once was, mostly, no longer cuts the mustard. 

Children once could be encouraged to spend a wet Sunday in a musingplace and lose the day wetting and slaking their curiosities. But no more and quite clearly so. Why go out on a wet day to muse when with a SMARTphone, ipad, laptop, whatever, in some cosy spot somewhere, the universe can be explored and from there? AND it doesn't even need to be Sunday! AND Wikipedia is free, authoritative and it is never shut when you have homework to do –  and mostly its pretty reliable. Quite a democratic and interesting place really!

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The 'owners' of 16th C Wunderkammers/Kunstkammers used their musingplaces to demonstrate their authority and power – assert it even. Later Napoleon, the British, and other empire builders put musingplaces together to display their spoils of empire and to allow their subjects to muse upon their great power in deference to it. In a way, public musingplaces, in kind of a way, still employ this technique. 

Also, MONA's, owner, plausibly, uses his musingplace in Tasmania to demonstrate his prowess and draw a line in the sand. Indeed, his stoush with the tax office would seem to bear this out. It's not too long a bow to draw to say that often(?) musingplaces are political tools.

Nonetheless, increasingly 'the public', 'the great unwashed', tax payers et al, are increasingly encroaching and banging upon the door of the 'Ivory Tower' and demanding accommodation inside. No longer can those running musingplaces claim to be 'the authority'. Napoleon was not an authority on much except military matters and clearly he took advice from scholars et al in order to win. The world is full of experts outside musingplaces.

Then again, by all accounts it was unwise to disagree with Napoleon. Possibly it still is unwise to argue with musingplace gatekeepers if you think about political empire builders in musingplaces. But Napoleon met his Waterloo and ended his days in exile on Saint Helena. But he did give us access to The Louvre in not such a round about way.

So, its possible that musingplaces, public musingplaces, are not really changing all that much. Yet the technologies they employ, need to employ, are changing as are the expectations of their audiences who in turn are increasingly expecting more. That's the kind of change Ole Worm did not have to worry too much about.

Even if it was not Karl Marx who said "religion is the opium of the people" musingplaces are sometimes imagined as as secular temples of a kind. However, it seems that their priests are being defrocked and locks on the gates are becoming much easier to pick it seems.

Marketing the muse

Recently the Ecopreneurist – a klnd of greenish musingplace cum ideas marketplace online – was promoting an app and website that invites people to map oases of calm – musingplaces (?). People value  and feel a sense of ownership for musingplaces for vast variety of reasons. 

A person might want to find some information on a particular topic or place, or simply to be entertained. They may want a "third place" , somewhere other than home or their workplace to engage socially, somewhere they can relax and somewhere to socialise with friends – a place to meet and muse ... their Community of Ownership & Interest. 

Sometimes some people may just want a place to be quiet, a refuge from the noise and hustle of the urban environment or anywhere that precludes quiet contemplation. 

Stereopublic's website says, "Welcome to a quieter world. People from many cities across the earth have been adding spaces of solace and retreat for you to find. Use the map to find your own space." The app includes original music compositions, musingplaces tagged by the crowd, some include an image other simply GPS coordinates.

In the end 'the app' is a MARKETINGtool for the musingplace concept in a 21st C kind of way. The question hanging in the air is when will musingplaces proactively adopt this app as a MARKETINGtool? The answer probably is only when it cannot be ignored anymore but by then the musers will have worked out where they are welcome and where they are not.

Musing right along: how many people have their own secret third place in a musingplace somewhere, where do they go to find some peace, some solace, some stimulation, whatever? It is going to be interesting to see how many musingplaces, courtyards,  gardens, country houses or historic sites or other third places show up on this MARKETINGtool dedicated to alerting us to their presence. 

All this will be one more way to measure marketing outcomes in a digital KPI kind of way. Crowdsourcing is the way of the world and only lazy or out of work marketers can ignore this newish social phenomena.

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What Value a Musingplace

The value of museums in a 21st Century context is questioned from various perspectives. From a purely economic rationalist point of view, commentators typically forward propositions that the funding allocated to musingplaces would be better spent more pragmatically. 

Conversely cultural elitists assume some kind of moral cum cultural high ground and talk about “the public good”. The commentary is simplistic but the polarisation it engenders far from simple. If it were there would be some standout vantage point from which to mount a more informed critical discourse but that is not the case. 

Assessing the value musingplaces – museums, art galleries and libraries – add to a community’s wellbeing is complex and multi-dimensional issue. Nonetheless, in current cultural realities musingplaces play somewhat different roles than they did for the greater part of the late 20th C. No longer are their audiences passive receivers of pre-masticated ideas that fit some cultural norm or other – sometimes blanded and blended ideas. 

Rather, new technologies are delivering participatory and engaging ways for musers to acquire new knowledge and develop better understandings of their world. Increasingly, ‘the world’ they are exploring is far off as they venture to places far from home and examine ‘home’ with more intensity.

As organisations, musingplaces have the ability to improve their efficiency and better target expenditure than is currently apparent given their outcomes. Critics advancing such arguments, may suggest that here is an opportunity to “underpin programming with the advances in technology, societal changes and an expectation of achieving efficiencies and value for money". Furthermore“increasingly eliminate the traditional arguments for public musingplaces".

But the critics don’t then go where this argument is seemingly headed. They seem unlikely to recommend a noble retreat from public funding of musingplaces.

That age old observation that when the whole village is starving it’s rather pointless to be hunting down a few mice. The point of the message here is one economic rationalists often cannot see.

Instead, they might well ask why the benefits deliverable via new technologies and increased competition have not translated into increased productivity or reduced the demand on the public purse.

They charge instead that public musingplaces have overlooked these benefits, new found as they are. Rather than embracing them for the benefit of their public all too often musingplaces' masters can be found resting on rather wilted laurels and wondering why the crowd isn't cheering them on. 

Interestingly, the economic rationalists continually choose to discount the values, and the dividends musingplaces offer to their Communities of Ownership & Interest – and can deliver on in fulsome ways. For instance, musingplaces are adjunct 'school rooms' where children have the opportunity to have the kind of haptic educative experience school rooms do not offer – not to mention the opportunity to think independently. 

In a different way dementia patients, Alzheimer sufferers, and their carers are being provided for in musingplaces in the USA – MoMA & The SPARK Project – with considerable dividends being delivered.

In the language of the efficiency dividend an annual reduction in funding for the overall running costs of an operation can be delivered as a consequence new technologies. Or alternatively musingplaces

might well deliver expanded dividends in new ways. Musingplaces might well be put on notice by proposing a benchmarking exercise that would attempt to estimate the size of this captured resource,  how it might be best employed and the dividends it has the potential to deliver. All this may well allow musingplaces to enter into future funding equations that impact on programs, the ways they are delivered and the ways they are measured. The notion that public musingplaces might continually, and automatically, becomes more productive is as yet a groundless assumption.

There may well be room for cutting public sector inputs in concert with the potential rate of increase in productivity without changing the level of output. Yet the urge to cut corners and apply a theory without testing it is something to be mindful of.

Nevertheless, it seems that musingplaces will need to undergo fundamental change and transform themselves from their 'cost centre' models into not-for-profit enterprises if they wish to fulfil their promise. Possibly even in some instances they will need to operate as quasi for-profit enterprises in line with the cultural and social paradigm shifts currently in play. 

The changes, and the increased audience reach, that new technologies offer might well allow the derived efficiency gains to benefit musingplace programs allowing them to deliver: •

1. Enhanced cultural dividends and new cultural opportunities for an expanded Community of Ownership and Interest; 
2. Value-adding in regard to employment, educational and professional development opportunities for the benefit of a diverse range of people internally and beyond the institution. 
3. Improved income opportunities for related enterprises such as tourism related enterprises –accommodation, restaurants, guided tours etc.

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