The 3L Mantra to live by!

A few days ago, I delivered a keynote on ‘Automating culture: How Digital Platforms are Shaping the Art World’ for an international conference organized by Prof. Filip Vermeylen . For about a decade now, we both have been working on the democratization possibilities of the art world through the rise of social media and globalization through the  new cultural commons project . The talk was about how the art world has entered the platform economy. The art industry is being subjected to similar fears and possible opportunities of automation as other cultural industries such as the music, film and the publishing business. Hence, it asks some key questions: Can the traditional art intermediaries still compete in the platform economy as data mining companies enter the fray? Has the divide between the high and the popular culture collapsed as user behavior, platform design and engineering staff circulate between these worlds? Do customers no longer care about the aura of the a...

I am so proud of my recently graduated master students Jessica Verboom and Daria Gladysheva for successfully working together on this paper and getting it published in the Digital Culture and Education Journal. So far, in the last 5 years, I have co-published 4 articles with my students and I hope many more to come. Its good to see their work reaching the public as we are mainly targeting open access journals for wider readership. So this paper is about the phenomenon of museum communication through online video hostings, either by using YouTube or a customized platform. The videos uploaded by museums present a combination of educational and entertaining content depending on their objectives, attracting users to watch art content online. While the literature on uses and gratification is highly represented in media studies, few studies exist about the specific user motivations and gratifications of new media platforms in a museum context. Three types of users were identified ...

What a wonderful day to see 2 of my Masters students get their thesis published as papers in one of my favorite journals - First Monday . This journal is one of the first open access journals dedicated solely to the study of the Internet. It has published excellent and pioneering texts from several renowned scholars such as Howard Besser, danah boyd, John Seely Brown, Edward Castronova, Paul Duguid, Nathan Glazer, Eszter Hargittai, Lev Manovich, Helen Nissenbaum, Trevor Pinch, and Richard Wiggins. So proud of Jessica Verboom , and Kristina Sedeke , both wonderful young scholars and practitioners. So the first paper by Jessica Verboom , ' Museum 2.0: A study into the culture of expertise within the museum blogosphere' is on how museums are addressing the rise of social media and how this challenges the notion of expertise in the art world. The abstract below gives a glimpse of what its about: Abstract While studies on popular culture have a more vast understanding of...

What a wonderful idea isn't it? To make " high " culture a popular event is a challenge that the Netherlands seems to have met and even superseded expectations. Here's a glimpse of the program of the night: All 45 museums and galleries participating in the ninth edition of the Rotterdam Museum Night have announced their programmes, inspired by the theme XS/XL. The spectacular opening at 20.00 hours outside the Laurenskerk will kick off with a musical highlight of XS singing tones, XL music and 999 eyes that will be let off to wander through the night by the minister of Culture Ronald Plasterk. The programme of the Museum Night is varied and consists of pure highlights. The Witte de Withstraat and the Museumpark is the booming centre of the night. Let yourself be surprised by the eccentric circus at Alliance Française or relive your puberty in the National Museum of Education (Nationaal Onderwijsmuseum). Make your own inventions in the Kunsthal, create your own dream...