How can technology reinvent and deepen the museum experience? New York’s 92Y recently convened a panel of forward-thinking museum pros to tackle the question, and we sent writer Nancy Lazarus to report back on what the future of museums may look–and sound and feel–like.

A visitor gets in touch with the Cleveland Museum of Art’s “Collection Wall,” a 40-foot, interactive, microtile wall featuring over 3,500 works of art from the permanent collection.

King Tut may finally have met his match: interactive technology. “Digital technology is as much a game-changer now for museums as blockbuster shows” were in the late 1970s, said Cara McCarty, curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The Metropolitan Museum’s 1976 Tutankhamen exhibit was a pioneer of the blockbuster, and now many of the Met’s ancient treasures are also viewable on interactive touchscreens.

McCarty moderated a recent 92Y panel about technology trends and the future of museums. When she said, “Technology is hitting us all like a tidal wave,” she wasn’t lamenting, but referring to the overwhelming options. The panelists agreed, including Mark Robbins, director of the International Center of Photography. “Nineteenth-century museums were comprised of a privileged set of objects,” he said. “Now museums offer more immersive experiences without walls.”

“Technology is a tool shaping museums’ future,” added Seb Chan, Cooper-Hewitt’s director of digital and emerging media. Interactive options enrich visitors’ experience, especially for storytelling. Chan described the mobile app at Australia’s Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. It senses where gallery visitors are and delivers custom content, thereby eliminating wall labels. London’s Tate Museum has a similar app, the Magic Tate Ball, which promises, “It’s like having the Tate in your pocket.”

Another proponent of technology’s narrative power is Jake Barton, founder of Local Projects, a firm that designs media installations for museums. One client is New York’s 9/11 Memorial Museum, slated to open next year. He previewed an exhibit where visitors will use interactive maps to pinpoint their locations when they learned of the 9/11 news. Then they record messages about that moment, and their voices will play in the background as visitors view the exhibit.
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(Photo: Erik Smits)

“Ten years of slow days / ten years of wakeful nights / till what was to come would be disclosed,” wrote Remco Campert in a poem commissioned as part of today’s reopening of the Rijksmuseum, the national art museum of the Netherlands. The long-awaited occasion was celebrated with a spectacular opening ceremony during which the soon-to-abdicate Queen Beatrix, wearing a large black chapeau that made her resemble a Playmobil figurine or one of Rembrandt‘s beloved gang of Staalmeesters, followed her private preview of the renovated museum with a trip down the orange carpet to turn a giant golden key before an audience of thousands. Fireworks and free admission (’til midnight) followed.

Designed by Renaissance revivalist Pierre Cuypers and completed in 1885, the Rijksmuseum has been closed since 2003. “It’s a kind of Harry Potter castle. It’s a crazy building, a sort of neo-gothic Arts and Crafts building covered in images. It’s a comic strip,” said director Wim Pijbes in a recent interview with Apollo magazine. “It’s the last hooray for neo-gothic–just a year later, the Eiffel Tower was built, welcoming a new age.” The decade-long overhaul, which cost nearly $500 million, half of which was supplied by the Dutch government, includes the integrative building renovation of Cruz y Ortiz, who burrowed underground to link the museum’s two separate halves and add an atrium, a fresh installation (of some 8,000 objects) masterminded by Jean-Michel Wilmotte, and Copijn’s redesign of the surrounding garden. “What is the new Rijksmuseum about in one word? It is time, time embodied in taste or fashion, however you like,” said Pijbes. “We are a time machine.”

These days, fashion designers rarely agree on seasonal trends such as hemlines and skirt shapes, but runway watchers remain abuzz over statement shoes, even if they are all but invisible to those without front-row seats. Celine’s minimaluxe ready-to-wear and steady stream of hit handbags was recently outshined by the house’s furry stilettos and sandals, including a Meret Oppenheim-gone-grandpa style that is flying off store shelves. The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology has seized the moment to present an exhibition that highlights the extreme, lavish, and imaginative styles that have made shoes central to fashion. We asked writer Nancy Lazarus to put on her reporting shoes and size up the show, on view through Saturday.

Roger Vivier’s Eyelash Heel pump, designed by Bruno Frisoni for the fall 2012 “Rendez-Vous” limited edition collection. (Photo: Stephane Garrigues, courtesy Roger Vivier)

“Everything here is wearable, it’s just not walkable,” said Colleen Hill, co-curator of the Museum at FIT’s “Shoe Obsession” exhibit. Leading a tour of the show during its final week on display, she explained that the focus was extreme, extravagant 21st-century shoes and boots. Hill and co-curator Valerie Steele included not only fan favorites like Blahnik and Louboutin, but also the latest experimental prototypes.

The exhibit’s selections represent a commentary on an era rather than a reflection on wearability, Hill noted. “The inspiration for these shoes is sculpture and architecture. Some are shoe objects, one-of-a-kind or limited editions,” Hill said. Three styles are on display: single-sole stilettos, platforms, and more avant-garde heel-less shoes favored by the likes of Daphne Guinness and Lady Gaga.

Recent shoe designs tend to rely more on manmade materials. A few prototypes utilized 3-D printing processes. One experimental design was made of resin, while a pair of slippers was glass. A pair of Pierre Hardy heels sported neoprene, more often associated with athletic wear.
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“My own theory about why Picasso agreed to do it [create a sculpture for Chicago's Richard J. Daley Plaza in 1965] after many stops and starts, and despite being a totally unreliable and temperamental character, as all interesting artists are, is–and it’s buried in the Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill correspondence–is that somebody told him that Miró was doing something even bigger in a related space in Chicago. And Picasso really was the Michael Jordan of modern art, not just In the sense of being incredibly accomplished but in the sense of being utterly driven by competitive fire and an unrealized sense of grievance at every turn, that somebody else would outdo him or do better than him. And I suspect that played a significant role in getting him to do it.”

-Writer Adam Gopnik on the Chicago Picasso (pictured), in a recent talk at the Art Institute of Chicago, where “Picasso and Chicago“–the first large-scale Picasso exhibition organized by the museum in almost 30 years–is on view through May 12.
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Robert Longo, “Capitol” (2013)

Want a good look at our nation’s Capitol? Take a detour from D.C. and head to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum has unveiled Robert Longo‘s monumental charcoal drawing of the United States Capitol building. “The building appears to be moving forward toward the center of the room,” writes curator Kelly Texter in a publication that accompanies the exhibition, on view through August 25. “Varying opacities of black create clouded sky and landscape, which blanket and surround the building executed in tonal grays and chalky whites. A differently shaped moulding adorns the top of each window, with snippets of tapestry unique each opening barely visible through glinting glass.” The 41-foot-long work, which spans seven panels and gets an entire wall of the museum’s South Gallery to itself, is shown with 81 of Longo’s ink and charcoal studies, with subjects ranging from the furniture of Sigmund Freud and Franz Kline‘s 1956 AbEx classic “Mahoning” to the Hollywood Sign and Steve Jobs.

Detail from Gary Baseman’s “The Celebration of Toby” (2005)

The countdown is on to Gary Baseman‘s first major museum exhibition, which will turn L.A.’s Skirball Cultural Center into a fun house full of paintings, photographs, toys, sketchbooks, and videos. More than 300 artworks and objects will be installed in thematic “rooms” of a gallery designed to evoke Baseman’s childhood home, complete with family photos, Super 8 home movies, and furnishings. The creative exuberance of “Gary Baseman: The Door Is Always Open” will be revealed on April 25 with an opening house party at which Baseman will create a “spontaneous artwork” amidst pinata smashing, mask making, a performance by Nightmare and the Cat, and a DJ set by Shepard Fairey. Prepare yourself by taking a virtual trip into Baseman’s world (and studio), thanks to filmmaker Eric Minh Swenson:

Since 1971, Mondays at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have been reserved for journalists (attending life-enhancing press previews) and crestfallen tourists. The latter bunch, recognizable by their non-black garments, lack of writing utensils, and general giddiness, mounts the famed staircase in twos and threes only to discover that the museum is…CLOSED. A rapid progression through the five stages of grief follows, and by the time anger (“I told you we should have checked the website!”) turns to acceptance, the out-of-towners are proceeding north to the Guggenheim. That scenario will come to an end on July 1, when the Met’s new schedule takes effect: the museum, both the main building and the Cloisters, will open to the public seven days a week. “Art is a seven-day-a-week passion, and we want the Met to be accessible whenever visitors have the urge to experience this great museum,” said director Thomas Campbell in a statement issued this week.
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The FBI announced earlier this week that it has identified who was behind the 1990 art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but–spoiler alert–the Feds aren’t naming names, and the statute of limitations has run out on the crime, so the creeps that swiped masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas can’t be prosecuted. This may or not explain why Rick Abbath, one of the night watchmen on duty the evening of the crime 23 years ago, has decided to get chatty. In a segment (below) that aired this week on Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN’s Randi Kaye spoke with Abbath about what happened inside the museum that fateful night. Kaye takes a closer look at the famous caper in 81 Minutes: Inside the Greatest Art Heist in History, a documentary that airs on CNN tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern.

The amazing Letman (a.k.a. Job Wouters) will be on hand tonight at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to discuss and demonstrate his eye-popping approach to the alphabet–think illustration meets grafitti meets graphic design. The Amsterdam-based designer’s talk and hand-lettering demo, which will be webcast live at 7 p.m. EST, is part of the Walker’s “Insights” series of design lectures that earlier this month welcomed Geoff McFetridge and Eike König, and next week features Wouters’ fellow Mokummer, Luna Maurer. Each of the designers has been commissioned to create a project for the Walker, and Wouters is at work on mural. While you await tonight’s webcast, enjoy his 2003 video, “”abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” (below), in which Wouters and his then four-year-old nephew, Gradus, practice their penmanship.

Exactly 23 years after the stunning heist of masterworks from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, FBI officials announced today that they have identified the thieves (“members of a criminal organization with a base in the mid-Atlantic states and New England” is all they’ll say, dashing our hopes that Thomas Crown, Steve McQueen, and/or Pierce Brosnan was involved) and determined where the 13 artworks had traveled in the years after the robbery (Connecticut! Philadelphia!), but the hunt is still on for the pilfered Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a portrait by Edouard Manet, and sketches by Renoir, among others. Check out the FBI’s newly released video (above). There may be a $5 million reward in it for you.