Letter From The Director
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, is the author of this tri-annual letter.
In addition, he is featured weekly on WYPR radio's Postcards From The Walters podcast.
He also writes a blog, called Culture Comment, published by the Baltimore Sun.
In the fall of 2008, Wall Street slid into its deepest slump since the Great Depression. The Walters, like all cultural institutions across America, initiated a broad range of painful austerity measures to weather the ever-worsening financial storm. At that time, we made the seemingly counter-intuitive decision to raise our investment in technology significantly.
This meant that we would continue with two critical new hires, even as we were forced to eliminate other staff positions, and that we would remain fully committed to digitizing all the works of art on view in our galleries. It also meant that we would proceed with a highly innovative plan to make cover-to-cover digital surrogates of the Islamic manuscripts in our collection (more than 53,000 pages), with grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Further, we decided that we would make these tens of thousands of new digital images available worldwide in very high resolution with minimal use restrictions. We would also let the world know about our rapidly growing content base and open access policy through social media: Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. We did all this for the same reasons that we removed our general admission fee in 2006: these wonderful works of art belong to the public and it is our duty to lower or remove all barriers to their access. We felt that through technology we could further fulfill our mission to “bring art and people together”—now, without geographic or financial limit.
Despite the financial climate, raising the Walters to a fundamentally different place in our relationship with the world through investment in content for our website felt like an enormous but essential task. Guided by what one of our curators calls the “Mona Lisa Phenomenon”—the idea that familiarity with images of a work of art, like the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, makes people more and not less included to see the original in person—we continue to advocate for broad exposure to images from the permanent collection. Having these works available for everyone around the world to reference fulfills our mission of bringing art and people together.
Happily, our results have been impressive and our strategy vindicated. Since 2008, the number of images of works of art we offer on line has doubled, from fewer than 5,000 to nearly 10,000, and during that same period, the number of our unique web visitors has increased almost four-fold, to a rate nearing 1,000,000 per year. From 2009 to 2010 alone, visits to the online collection have increased by more than 50 percent. At the same time, we have seen dramatic growth in the number of our social network friends, with now more than 4,600 Walters Facebook fans and more than 8,800 Walters Twitter followers. Perhaps it is no accident that attendance at our last five major exhibitions has, in each case, significantly exceeded our projections. If you are not already receiving e-mail from the Walters, you can sign up at thewalters.org.
Henry Walters would probably be astounded—but I’m certain he would be pleased.
Cordially,
Gary Vikan
Director