Hammer Web Site Raises the Bar for Museum Offerings

Gary Garrels, a Hammer Museum curator, talks with six artists in one of the new Web site’s multimedia offerings.

For an art gallery, the Armand Hammer Museum of Art has always been both interactive and inventive. The museum — which is part of the University of California at Los Angeles — not only offers patrons a wide variety of talks, readings, screenings, and field trips, but it also goes outside the box when it organizes exhibitions.

On Monday, though, the museum surpassed itself — and every other museum I can think of, either on a campus or off — by unveiling a new Web site that all but vibrates with podcasts, videorecordings of presentations, blog posts, slide shows, and more. Many museums offer images of works in their collections or in special exhibitions, along with calendar listings, directions, and hours, but usually that’s about it. At the Hammer site, so much is available online that even those of us several time zones away have plenty to enjoy and learn from. And people who live in Los Angeles couldn’t possibly attend all of the museum’s events in person, so archiving presentations online benefits Angelenos as well.

Among the site’s current offerings — check the “Watch + Listen” tab — are a video of a screening of several delightful Brent Green short films (with live musical accompaniment), podcasts of a lecture by the artist William Christenberry and a reading by the writer Michael Ondaatje (author of The English Patient and much more), and a recording of a conversation between Leon Botstein, the conductor and Bard College president, and Frank Gehry, the architect. And this is, presumably, just the start. If the museum keeps adding to what’s online now, within a few years the site will be a treasure trove.

Making so much smart content available free online is a tremendous service to art and culture — a service other university museums would do well to study. —Lawrence Biemiller