They are watching us.
The Toledo Museum of Art has a new logo. It’s like a boxy spyglass lens looking down on your every move, and it rotates right to left.
It’s funny that we are the ones who come to the museum to look at art, but here is the museum looking at us. They are selling our data. Wow. A visitor to the museum website is now expected to log in in order to visit the website. Your every move will be watched and recorded and matched with your name and shared with third parties.
As if the museum had ever had a log-in to enter the museum website. They sent out an email last week informing people that they should now register to log-in, and that their old log-in no longer works. That’s news to us, who have been using the website for the past twenty years without a log-in. The museum doesn’t explain what is behind the log-in door, either. But they explain in detail how the website data will be shared with numerous partners.
Sad, very sad, that the museum would sink so low as to trade on our privacy.
It is bound to offend a lot of people and cause many bad user experiences.
exploitation of basic human rights
Why would the museum suddenly have a sign-in, and for what? It’s a public institution. The founders would not have approved of the museum’s lack of transparency and the museum’s exploitation of human rights. The Libbeys funded the museum so that it would always be free and accessible to the public, and not in exchange for the public individual’s privacy.
The museum casts a long shadow
I can see why the museum would want to shrink the public’s use of their website though. During the past 10 years — mostly during the past four years, they have been busy becoming anything but a museum. Our democratic museum has become more like an elite private club.
The current stewards give themselves private parties in the Great Gallery. They take the Old Master Paintings off the walls to decorate the Great Gallery’s walls as they wish. (In spite of it being a near-surgical operation to be moving valuable old masterpieces, as it was put in The Blade last week in regard to the hanging of the museum’s former European art curator Larry Nichol’s show.)
Today’s stewards of the museum serve people in the two-mile radius to the detriment of the rest of the people in the city. Here’s one example: the $119,916 grant the museum got for art-making sessions for senior citizens. They limited their classes to a two-mile radius. They only gave 12 classes in total, at only two neighborhood senior centers – out of more than 10 senior centers throughout the city. Considering the museum received $119,916, that’s quite a lot of money at $9,993 per class.
We will never forget that in 2022 the current stewards sold Impressionist masterpieces for $61 million while telling the public they would buy diverse art with the proceeds. It’s been nearly two years and they still have nothing to show for it.
The Libbeys would not approve.
As the museum burrows into its dystopian future, a nasty smell permeates the air. Our privacy is not for sale. We are not slaves to corporate interests.