What About Museums?

Spend time in almost any art museum and you’ll see a lot of traditional picture frames. But despite the assault that digital imaging, photography, and frames are mounting on the traditional frame, I doubt you’re likely to see too many digital picture frames – wireless or otherwise – in art museums anytime soon.

Some museums have multimedia and digital art collections displayed on LCD panels, and there are many exciting options for using digital frames to aid museums’ missions (more on this later), but museums will be a bastion of traditional framing for a long time to come.

The reason? People want to see original art, not a scan or photo of that art. They want to be able to get close enough to see the texture and brush strokes and globs of paints which are the closest connection that most get to the painter’s hands and process. Plus there’s just something about digital that seems to run against the grain for many museums, their curators, and staff.

But this resistance to replacing art with digital frames doesn’t mean that we won’t see some museum collections exhibited on digital frames.

Photography seems like the obvious first place where digital frames could be adopted in museums, showing both traditional photos (though some photographers will continue want the look and tone that printing on different kinds of paper gives) and specific installations created for the frames.

Digital frames could also be used to extend the life of, or more frequently display, fragile, rare, or unstable pieces. Rather than exposing an ancient painting to light that could fade and damage it, why not create high-quality scans and show them on a digital frame? After all, that’s a better option than only periodically displaying the piece or displaying it in a way that could cause damage.

So, the in-gallery outlook for digital picture frames at museums is mixed in the near term. Where it shouldn’t be mixed, though, is as a fundraising tool. Digital picture frames could be a powerful tool for museums to use in both promotion and revenue generation.

For promotions, museums could offer branded frames or create a general RSS feeds for their collections and specific ones to highlight upcoming exhibits. These free RSS feeds would include not only exhibit highlights, but also dates for the show, hours of operation, phone numbers, website address, and maybe even a special discount code. What a great way to whet appetites and drive foot traffic!

Museums interested in generating new revenue (and which ones aren’t?) could do so by creating channels that art lovers can subscribe to for a small monthly fee. Lovers of individual artists or certain types of art would likely be willing to pay a small monthly or annual fee for a set of photos that they could download to their frames and show whenever they want.

With a little branding from the museum supplying the content, these feeds could both drive revenue and foot traffic.

So, while museums aren’t likely to turn into high-tech wonderlands with digital frames on every wall any time soon, forward-looking museums should be able to make use of digital picture frames to shoe up bottom lines and share their collections with more people.