NPR Series: Museums in the 21st Century
- By Jenny Parker
- December 16, 2008
With over 800 million visitors each year, museums are big business – and face big challenges related to increasing visitation, maintaining the integrity of its collections, and keeping up with a tech-savvy audience. These issues are a few of the topics to be explored in NPR’s new series on museums in the 21st Century. Here’s a cheat sheet if you’ve missed any of the stories:
- November 24: NPR’s arts critic Bob Mondello uses the 2006 box office hit “Night at the Museum” to help report on the continuing challenge for museums to shed their “boring” personas and reach new audiences – while also maintaining their educational missions. Mondello highlights the need for museums to keep up with technology: “Museums now have to have really killer Web sites because, as it turns out, the virtual museum actually drives people to the physical museum.”
- December 1: NPR senior correspondent Noah Adams profiles Alex Nyerges, Director of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Among the tasks filling Nyerges 16 hour workday? The blogosphere. “With 80 million bloggers out there, my goal would be to have about 8 million of them blog about the Virginia museum every day,” he says.
- December 8: NPR correspondent Laura Sydell reports on the tensions between form and function in museum architecture. She profiles two dramatically different Daniel Libeskind projects – The Denver Art Museum and San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum – and their very different public reactions.
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