In a 2009 article for The Art Newspaper, titled “With Newspapers in Terminal Decline, What Future for Arts Journalism?” András Szántó argued that museums are creating alternative and innovative media infrastructure similar to news organizations, with the result that “arts groups are getting better at telling their own stories and directly engaging their constituents.”

As director of a museum, the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, I am particularly interested in the museum’s role as image-makers, whether in sharing a behind-the-scenes view of an exhibition’s installation or presenting a curatorial grand narrative in a guided walking tour. Many museum videos are now conceived for online platforms rather than for broadcast or a physical archive, so curatorial, pedagogical, and editorial concerns go hand in hand with the institutional tasks of communication, marketing, and audience development.

Community interests are the driving force behind Rufino.mx, an online project we at the Museo Tamayo commissioned to the local collective Salón. With an eye to contemporary thought and cultural practices, it focuses on the museum’s program and on its local community, featuring videos of exhibition walkthroughs, artists’ studio visits, and interviews with designers, curators, and critics. The programming is meant both as a complement to the museum-visitor experience and to stand alone as an entertaining educational tool.

Museo Tamayo is hardly alone in developing arts-related video content online. The Museum of Modern Art’s popular “Behind the Scenes” online video series focuses on the workers’ perspective, be it the artists, their assistants or performers. The UK’s Tate Channel, home of “Tate Shots,” presents videos about modern and contemporary art in general, including a selection of films by artists in their collection, documentation of public programs, and artist interviews. Smaller institutions are producing innovative video and Web sites as well; Art Tube features videos about art and design produced by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and the highly praised Art Babble, founded by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, shows a selection of art videos produced by various arts organizations and is becoming the most important public online database for free art-related video.

One open question that emerges from these developments concerns the weight of intentionality in the interpretation of the art object. Most videos produced by museums today prioritize the voice of the artist, the curator, or another specialist in the field. On the one hand, this presentation focuses a deserved and demystifying attention on artistic intentions and processes, frames of reference used in creating both artworks and exhibitions. On the other, this way of presenting art may result in an emphasis on judging art and one’s experience it by the way in which ideas are verbally articulated—when in our field, artists have chosen to think, make, and communicate primarily through visual language. Are there other ways to experience art through video that we have yet to explore, or are we fated to didactic, documentary forms?

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