New in Outland: From Blogs to Bots (how museums have used digital media to take—or lose—control of the narrative)
Welcome to Soft Labor, the namesake publication of Soft Labor, a strategic consultancy for organizations, designers, and the culture industry led by Sarah Hromack-Chan. Soft Labor is a publication about creative labor—what it is, what it looks like, and how it has and will continue to change. Did someone forward you this publication? Subscribe, read our archives, or email us at info@softlabor.biz.
Our latest piece just published in Outland, the publication produced by Outland, a new, nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing and education in the field of art and technology. We've been invited to contribute a monthly column about encounters between institutions and new media, and the shifting meaning of digital work.
In our third column, "From Blogs to Bots," we trace 2010s digital media history to consider the ways museums gained—and perhaps have lost—control over their own institutional narratives. Thanks to Outland editor Brian Droitcour for encouraging us to republish the piece in its entirety below. Be sure to subscribe to Outland on Substack!
Who tells stories about art in 2026? Critics? Curators? ChatGPT? It feels increasingly difficult to tell who controls the narrative.
It’s worth looking back on a period in the 2010s when museums asserted their control by publishing blogs, which were then reaching their height as a journalistic form. Two publications—the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s now-defunct Open Space and Walker Reader, the publishing platform of the Walker Art Center—are fondly regarded by many writers as critical outposts whose incisiveness and tenacity exceeded those of the independent press.
Open Space was founded in 2008 as a blog, named in homage to the hyperlocal 1960s poetry magazine that served as a foghorn for a group of San Francisco poets centered around Jack Spicer, who congregated at bars in bohemian North Beach. The city is prodigious where independent publishing is concerned, yet in 2008 there was a dearth of outlets for arts journalism. (There still is.) Run by founding editor Suzanne Stein and, at the time of its shuttering in 2021, Claudia La Rocco, Open Space published the writings of hundreds of authors from the Bay Area and well beyond.
Open Space was remarkable for running apace with national media trends while maintaining a strong air of independence. Blogging peaked in the 2010s with voicey posts, written in the first person with a dishy, almost confessional tone. The Awl and The Hairpin are a few of the sorely missed sites that redefined publishing practices and media business models. Picking up on this sensibility, Open Space featured a series of columnists-in-residence who, remarkably, published without editorial or institutional oversight.
While situated within a museum, Open Space managed to maintain the feeling of independence that so many digital initiatives did at that time —and it held that position even as the museum expanded and redesigned its website. In 2021, SFMOMA announced its decision to discontinue Open Space along with several other programs, including its film program, which opened alongside the museum in 1937, and its Artists Gallery, which had been open since 1946. SFMOMA needed to bring in bigger audiences to fill the expanded building that opened in 2016, and the “supersizing” of its operation was seen as coming at the cost of provincializing the programming. The backlash was swift and furious. Museum staff, artists, and arts advocates openly spoke out against the cuts.
The final issue of Open Space addresses the challenges and possible futures that the then-waning pandemic presented for artists. If it feels as though Open Space was cut off right when the culture needed it the most, it’s because it was.
The Walker Reader functioned similarly. Launching in 2017 with Paul Schmelzer at the helm, the Walker Reader was—and still is—a container for organizational storytelling on a website whose content strategy at the time was already news-driven following a 2011 redesign. Now billed as an “experimental publishing platform,” the Reader publishes so-called special projects including interviews and artist editorials on subjects ranging from design to dance. Again, we see an institution attempting to keep apace with trends in media consumption, including short form-video.
While Open Space was left to drift in the digital wind, Walker Reader continues, though it currently feels more marketing-driven. Schmelzer’s program of artists’ editorials on social and political issues has given way to content that is tied more explicitly to the Walker’s collection and programs. But in their heyday, these publications showed what could happen when museums treated these platforms as journalistic frontrunners rather than passion projects, educational resources, or marketing initiatives. Even well-funded and professionally executed publications such as MoMA Magazine, which produces video and a full-scale podcast as well as text articles, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Perspectives series, feel removed from the ecosystems of local and national journalism that ostensibly drive the conversation around art and culture.
Who—or what?—fills the distance between the institution and its audiences? Once it was the institution itself, along with an inner sanctum of journalists and publications. Now, we can’t be so sure.
Enter AI.
Whether institutions like it or not, people are presumably using ChatGPT and other conversation agents to plan visits to cultural destinations as much, if not more, than they are institutional websites, where editorial content that might inspire a visit is often buried in poor UX design. (I had to proactively search for MoMA’s magazine.) Additionally, startups like Contxt and Artlas are developing apps that use generative AI to guide users’ experiences with artworks, in the gallery and beyond. These startups seek to partner directly with institutions, a business relationship that could grant museums stronger participation in designing a chatbot and broader control over the kind of information visitors are accessing.
New applications of emerging technologies are slowly eroding institutional and journalistic authority—a development both concerning and exciting in its chaotic implications. Whether or not curators should be the primary source of truth when it comes to contextualizing a collection has been a lively debate even within museums, where various departments vie for the opportunity to hone the institution’s voice.
If anything, AI-generated interpretation invites us to imagine a world where institutional voice is trained on tweets, reviews, press releases, and countless other sources of language both internal and external to the organization. This raises a multitude of problems, chief among them the realization that institutions simply don’t have the same handle on narrative authority that they once did.
AI interpretation, as I’ll call it here, also raises the question of what happens, exactly, to the multitude of texts that are produced around a given exhibition or initiative—from those written internally to the multitude of texts produced by critics and the public at large, from social media captions to long form critical reviews. Researchers such as Ruha Benjaman and Kate Crawford have documented the biases in the data that LLMs are trained on. Compounded with the bias that artists and art historians have called out in museum practices, this risks even more suspicion. But, if handled carefully and judiciously, AI-driven interpretation could help museums open themselves up to new forms of language production, one that invites a wider range of voices to the table by virtue of their inclusion in AI training models. There are ways to do this creatively, but also ethically and responsibly. Using AI needn’t be an intellectual zero-sum game. It needn’t ignite hysteria.
Whether or not museums want to engage with AI or not, the future is here. They don’t have much of a choice, just as the media industry can’t shrug off the implications of AI, either. If in the 2010s museums were at least somewhat keeping up with the media zeitgeist, then 2026 is a moment where they have the opportunity to seize that energy once again.