In Terms Of

Tag: Technology

  • Landscape Surveyors

    The Changing Landscape of Museums Today
    Thursday, January 29, 2015
    Asia Society, Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium, New York

    Melissa Chiu, ed., Making a Museum in the 21st Century (2015)

    A panel on “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today” coincided with the release of the Asia Society Museum’s anthology of essays, Making a Museum in the 21st Century. Responding to a question asked by Josette Sheeran, president and chief executive officer of the Asia Society—“What does a successful museum look like in the twenty-first century?”—the museum directors Richard Armstrong and Melissa Chiu talked about collections, buildings, and exhibitions, while the bureaucrat Tom Finkelpearl zeroed in on diversity and audience.

    The event’s moderator, Peggy Loar, interim vice president for global arts and culture and museum director at the Asia Society, described the mission of the Institute of Museum Service (now the Institute of Museums and Library Services), where she worked from 1977 to 1980. In its early days this federal agency provided grant for general operating expenses. At the time, Loar said, museums were failing because of business mismanagement, low community engagement, and the lack of a clearly defined vision. Those that thrived, she continued, did so because of passion, collecting, education, community, and economic strength. Innovative institutions are built, renamed, reformed, and reinvented, but she wants to know if they are now overreaching. China boasts four thousand museums, Loar told us, with one hundred new ones opening each year. Among the issues in the East and throughout the world are migration, urbanization, demographics, and technology. In other words, the same issues museums have faced for decades.

    Building and Expansion

    Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and its foundation since 2008, surveyed the history of his institution—a presentation he’s probably given many times. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, the first in today’s global chain, was founded in 1939 in a former car showroom in midtown Manhattan and moved into the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed building twenty years later. Armstrong described how the museum’s namesake founder, Solomon R. Guggenheim, and its first director, Hilla Rebay, believed that “abstract art and its deep contemplation … was the best way to change human behavior,” a socially edifying position with a reformist instinct that Armstrong called “a highly Teutonic idea.” He also noted the foundation’s prescient vision for a networked institution—geographically, that is—with the addition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection in Venice, which opened in 1949.

    Richard Armstrong oversees the Guggenheim Museum franchise (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The Guggenheim franchises around the world—operating at various times in New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, and Las Vegas, among other locations—are known not only for their collections and exhibitions but also for their architecture. According to Armstrong, the Bilbao branch designed by Frank Gehry is “the most significant museum building in the second half of the twentieth century,” a claim with which few would argue. He also said the Guggenheim’s buildings have inspired artists to readjust their exhibition practice, as was the case with Richard Serra in Bilbao and Maurizio Cattelan in New York.

    Like Armstrong, Melissa Chiu, who left the directorship of the Asia Society last year to lead the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, offered the background for her institution, which she called “the other round building.” The museum’s founder, Joseph Hirshhorn, was a New Yorker who made his fortune in uranium mining. He also collected art in depth, Chiu said, and wasn’t afraid to ask dealers for a discount. The museum bearing his name began with a donation of six thousand works from the Hirshhorn collection; ground broke for the building on the Mall in 1969 and opened five years later. Like the Guggenheim, Chiu said, living artists such as Ai Weiwei and Doug Aitken have responded to the museum’s curved walls; curators have also creatively installed historical works by Yves Klein and Andy Warhol. The museum’s crescent shape even changed the way the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto presented his own work in other exhibitions, Chiu noted.

    Melissa Chiu explains how artists have used the Hirshhorn Museum building in creative ways (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)
    Diversity and Inclusivity

    Tom Finkelpearl, who last year was appointed commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, launched into a discussion of diversity, reminding the audience that while New York has a “majority minority” population—65 percent people of color, he said, depending on how you count Latino—over 90 percent of museum visitors and workers are white. When Finkelpearl began his twelve-year stint as director of the Queens Museum in 2002, he realized that nobody on the “upstairs staff” or in its circle spoke Spanish or Mandarin as a first language. Since Corona and Flushing, the museum’s adjacent neighborhoods, are overwhelmingly Latino and Asian, this was a problem. “What did it mean,” he asked, “to have a staff that couldn’t even literally communicate” with its immediate constituency? As a consequence, Finkelpearl reorganized his major departments, making public events and community engagement as important as educational and curatorial programming. And instead of hiring museum experts for the new roles, he solicited professional organizers trained in “interactive, participatory community building.”

    Tom Finkelpearl laments the lack of racial and ethnic diversity on museums staffs in New York (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Stating the lack of black leadership in American museums, Finkelpearl advocated a closer look at the pipeline of PhD students that are future institutional leaders. People tend to hire those that mirror themselves, he said during the audience Q&A, but the Queens Museum made a “concerted effort from the top” to generate a diverse group of finalists for jobs (over 50 percent were people of color). While Finkelpearl praised the advances women have made into the top positions at many museums, he indicated that we still have a long way to go.

    From the Ground Up

    Opening the discussion among the panelists, Loar said that Guggenheim expansion projects have been controversial. (In fact, the architect and critic Michael Sorkin has called the practice “Starbucks museology.” How does the board make decisions for expansion, she asked. Armstrong said he meets franchise seekers about once a month, but the proposals are not always feasible. And Helsinki is the only proposal he has been involved in since its inception, he explained, noting that the Finnish capital had four advantages: a proximity to Russia, technological capacity, leadership, and economic need. About 1,700 architects entered the open call for a Helsinki building, Armstrong said, and six finalists were chosen to advance. An exhibition will present their work to the public and then politicians cast their vote—“That’s the mechanics of how the decision gets made.” Armstrong didn’t have much to say about criticism for the Abu Dhabi branch, a work in progress that the group Gulf Labor has been monitoring and protesting.1

    Loar asked the three panelists about private museums with limited public agendas, an issue recently explored in a New York Times article on art collectors who establish their nonprofits and foundations, often on property adjacent to their home or office, and receive tax exemptions for the housing, maintenance, and conservation of their private art collections. “I think the problem goes back to about the twelfth century,” Armstrong joked. Not all new museums will survive, he continued, and personally wished the Guggenheim were less expensive for visitors. (He later disclosed that one-time visitors keep the museum solvent, but local audiences—about 40 percent of the total—are a “more sensitive type of plant” that must be engaged differently.) Though Armstrong acknowledged that we live in a gilded age, he felt—quite inexplicably to me—that “it’s not good for people like us who like art to be criticizing collectors.” Chiu claimed that single collectors who founded institutions, like Hirshhorn, were interested in the public good. “It’s an evolutionary process” for the private to become public. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t watch these vanity projects like hawks.

    Peggy Loar interviews the panelists (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    Museum growth is predicted for regions outside Europe and North America, with new buildings being erected, Chiu reported, in the Middle East, India, and Singapore. “China is another matter, is it not?” Loar asked. Chiu noted that the culture of American museums—with private philanthropy supporting an entire museum’s infrastructure—is an anomaly in the world. None of the panelists, through, established if the building boom in China is public or private. In places like Shanghai, she continued, it is hard to ignore new museum development because of its large scale and fast pace. China boasts entire cities that did not exist twenty-five years ago, Finkelpearl said, and Westerners are baffled by the cultural planning developed concurrently with other municipal infrastructure. What took 1,500 years to grow in Europe, he said, now happens in 1,500 days.

    Locations and Audience

    While Finkelpearl noted how art neighborhoods develop organically in New York, Armstrong claimed that a homegrown arts community isn’t necessary for the success of museums, giving Oklahoma City and Kansas City as examples. Loar added that a sense of local community pride could eventually develop for a new institution. Moreover, museums may follow different models or invent their own. Finkelpearl flipped an audience member’s question about a Vietnamese art museum’s limited resources, arguing that we’re presupposing the West has better museological knowledge and knows the right way to implement it. Instead, he wondered, what can we learn from them?

    Armstrong said the Guggenheim is no longer “obsessed with Europe and America” and reiterated his institution’s commitment to Asian art, mentioning a few recent exhibitions, such as shows of the work of the Indian artist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde and the Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Guggenheim, he noted, is also actively buying the work of artists from across the United Arab Emirates for the Abu Dhabi branch. In her own backyard, Chiu said that two of the Hirshhorn’s five curators are Asian: Melissa Ho and Mika Yoshitake (who organized the excellent survey on the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha for the Los Angeles–based commercial gallery Blum and Poe in 2012). At her museum Chiu wants to place Asian art in a broader story of modern art, beyond New York and Paris, since art movements in the 1960s and 1970s were “truly global.”

    Education and Experience

    Learning, access, and social justice are important museum issues for the next decade, according to one audience member. Finkelpearl agreed, saying that Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has budgeted $23 million to improve a lagging arts education in New York, which includes an infusion of art, dance, music, and theater teachers. Tourism is also important to the city, he acknowledged, but then quipped, “How many people got into the arts because it was going to be good for the economy?” The audience laughed, of course. Seriously, though, Finkelpearl meant to emphasize how government has an inherent interest in community, and the mayor has even commissioned a major study to measure the impact of the arts.

    Tom Finkelpearl explains Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to fill New York City schools with art teachers (photograph © Elsa Ruiz)

    The idea of a shift in art museums—and in culture at large—from object to experience was folded into a conversation about museum education. Finkelpearl said that a focus on experience doesn’t abandon collections, scholarship, and connoisseurship but rather indicates a fuller recognition of the people who visit museums. “That’s [traditionally] been the purview of the education department,” he said and boldly proposed that “the avant-garde in museums is shifting to the education departments,” where warm, inviting teachers are eclipsing the authority of gatekeeper curators. That sounded nice, but I would argue something different: artists and curators have been cannibalizing education departments, making the pedagogical turn their own “unique” contribution to art and museums.2

    For Armstrong, the future of museum education involves “a more wholesale incorporation of technology,” citing his museum’s app, and responses to changing demographics. Curators also need empathy, he said. Chiu reported that discussions at a recent Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) meeting in Mexico City revolved around visitor experiences using social media and mobile technology.

    Concluding Thoughts

    While the blockbuster exhibition—from Treasures of Tutankhamun (1976–79) to The Art of the Motorcycle (1998–2003) to Star Wars: The Magic of Myth (1997–2003)—occupied the minds of many museum professionals at the close of the twentieth century, the subject surprisingly did not come up during tonight’s event. None of the panelists spoke about digitizing their collections and putting high-resolution images online for free academic use, nor did they discuss the ethics of improper deaccessioning, when museums sell works from their collections to fund operating expenses—a practice prohibited by both AAMD and the American Alliance of Museums.

    Armstrong, Chiu, and Finkelpearl are all figureheads who, as current and former museum directors, are experts at abstraction and delegation. Both granular details of running a museum and specifics about current projects aren’t easily conveyed in forums the one tonight, so the audience received sweeping overviews of the twenty-first-century museum landscape. Nevertheless, it was valuable to know what issues these figureheads felt were important enough to discuss.

    In Terms Of count: 11.

    1 See Colin Moyniham, “Protests Resume at Guggenheim over Abu Dhabi Museum,” New York Times, November 5, 2014; and ongoing coverage by various authors for Hyperallergic.

    2 See Michelle Jubin, “Museum Education and the Pedagogic Turn,” Artwrit (Summer 2011); Kristina Lee Podesva, “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Fillip 6 (Summer 2007); and Helen Reed, “A Bad Education: Helen Reed Interviews Pablo Helguera,” Pedagogical Impulse (publication date unknown).

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    The Asia Society has posted the video of “The Changing Landscape of Museums Today.”

  • Back to the Future

    Ross Parry: The Postdigital Museum
    Wednesday, January 28, 2015
    Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, New York

    Press release from the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its “Conference on Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums”

    In April 1968, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York brought together museum professionals, academics, and computer technologists from IBM for a “Conference on Computers and Their Potential Applications in Museums.”1 A postconference report,” said Ross Parry, senior lecturer and college academic director in the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, indicated that participants and attendees imagined their technological future in the year 1980. They envisioned a computerized image-search database that would allow a person to pull up any artwork that depicted, for example, “sailing vessels,” or to get information on objects in storage or from other museums. “This was reverie,” said Parry, of these predictions for a digital institution. In 2015 museums have websites, mobile apps, collections databases, email newsletters, games, and myriad forms of communication that facilitate scholarly and professional exchange. “This moment,” Parry stated the obvious, “has arrived.”

    Parry’s current research investigates the tipping point for digital technology in museums, when it evolved from being considered new, different, and even fearsome, to the present, when “it becomes a natural characteristic of the institution.” Whereas curators once conceived the digital aspects of an exhibition much later in their working process, these features are now created concurrently. “The digital creatives are in the room at the beginning,” Parry said. “They’re part of the ideation moment.” From the advanced skill sets of museum staffers and higher expectations from audiences to profound changes in fundamental approaches to design and education, the museum has entered a postdigital phase.

    At the outset of his talk Parry sought to legitimize the term “postdigital,” which he intends to be an economical and precise description of our current moment—just after the digital revolution—and not just a toe-curling neologism. I can accept his designation without resistance, but his explanation about the differences between digital and postdigital being as clear cut as the distinctions between structuralism and poststructuralism, or between modernity and postmodernity, was perplexing, since folks are still debating these divisions. And apparently he’s unfamiliar with the postinternet art debates.

    Technology in museums has become normative, a concept Parry borrowed from political theory and from business and management studies.2 In this context, he explained, normativity refers to shared work ethics and company values—it is considered a positive trait. With frameworks borrowed from disciplines outside museum studies, he can explicate the structures of domination (mission and values, policy and protocols, organizational shape), structures of legitimization (validated behavior and language, allocation of resources, valued skill sets), and structures of signification (strategy, brand) as the prism for analyzing an institution.

    Leaders of digital departments in UK museums consider their future and their possible obsolescence (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While this theoretical background was formally dry, the implications are consequential, especially regarding organizational structuring and people’s jobs. For example, Parry traced digital development in museums: the IT departments that once maintained infrastructure evolved into new-media departments, which grew into teams to build websites and gallery-based features, working alongside the marketing and education departments, among others. Postdigital museums, Parry predicted, will eventually phase out new-media departments because digital activities will be embedded across the museum, in every department. The need for a standalone branch of an institution, a silo to defend, will eventually fade.

    Parry has evidenced the postdigital notion not only through conversations with senior staffers in UK museums but also by scanning job titles in job classifieds. A museum at the digital level might seek to fill a web-designer position, but postdigital museums are searching for digital participation officers, online shop managers, digital marketing officers, and digital learning managers. Moreover, Parry suggested that a postdigital museum won’t need a director to lead a digital strategy; it will instead plan for its traditional roles of engagement, collecting, and exhibiting, which may or may not use digital technology. He also floated the notion that museum staff will work “permanently in beta,” meaning a project is launched, monitored, and constantly tweaked to the extent that, six or twelve months down the line, it will have mutated significantly from the initial public iteration. Goals are regularly redefined and may never actually be reached—something museum workers might find exciting, frightful, or both.

    The distinction between online and offline experiences for audiences has collapsed, Parry argued. A geographically based mobile app for New York architecture isn’t a singularly digital experience, he said, because the user is on the streets, with the sights, sounds, and smells of the city surrounding the person. A museum visitor might use his or her smartphone in tandem with looking at an object, and people walking through a park might receive historical sound clips on their phones relayed from iBeacons. Such hypothetical examples provide “an incredibly visceral, sensual, embodied experience” for the postdigital viewer. Because of resources, cultural context, and professional skill sets, Parry said, not every museum needs to be postdigital. Indeed, I wondered how institutions that are still resistant to digital, that have a poorly developed digital presence, or that—worst of all—lack a sufficient understanding of the importance of digital technology can survive in a postdigital world. Because technology advances rapidly, negligent, clueless, or impoverished organizations may fall too far behind and flirt with irrelevance.

    Ross Parry noted the shift in PhD research toward postdigital topics (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A man in the audience asked if digital technology augments human experience, or if it’s incorporated into a person’s full sense of being. “Which impulse is stronger?” he wanted to know. Digital, Parry responded, “has a profound ontological effect” on the way we perceive the world, shaping our community and our expression. He is fond of Lev Manovich’s observation, from 1999, that the database is the symbolic form for our time, just like linear perspective was a way of conceiving knowledge in the Renaissance, as the art historian Erwin Panofsky argued in 1927.3

    One audience member asked about remediation for media, and another questioned the politics of access and disenfranchisement. Parry flipped the question, wanting to consider the consequences of people using digital devices more and more but noticing this behavior less and less. One attendee raised the old “challenge to curatorial authority” chestnut, seemingly incapable of accepting that a populist interpretative experience can coexist with the sovereignty of the anointed expert. Then I realized how few people understand that artists are often the ones who challenge curators and institutions—and even challenge the idea of what art is—with the greatest amount of success.

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1For a review of the published conference proceedings, see Edward F. Fry, “The Computer in the Museum,” Computers and the Humanities 4, no. 5 (May 1970): 358–61.

    2One example he gave was James Barham, “Normativity, Agency, and Life,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 43, no. 1 (March 2012): 92–103.

    3See Lev Manovich, “Database as Symbolic Form,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 5, no. 2 (June 1999): 80–99; and Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991).

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  • The Meet Market

    Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age
    Tuesday, November 19, 2014
    The Art of Sex and Seduction
    French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall, New York

    Gerard ter Borch the Younger, The Suitor’s Visit, ca. 1658, oil on canvas, 31½ x 29½ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    The internet was once the “meat market for the undatable,” said the journalist Erica Lumière. Now, meeting people online for dating and sex has nearly become completely normalized in American culture. Which is good news, especially for couples who no longer must make excuses for how they met—“at a party,” “through mutual friends,” or something of the sort—and just say “on OKCupid” without feeling ashamed. In fact, men and women older than fifty is the largest growing segment of online dating (and the market cornered by a company called Our Time).

    The three speakers on the panel “Love, Sex, and Dating in the Digital Age,” hosted by the French Institute Alliance Française and moderated by Lumière, offered their experiences as writers, researchers, and professors—and as advocates—and the ensuing discussion culminated in agreement over a moderate, thoughtful approach to modern romance that originates on the web.1

    Swipe Right

    Lumière began the conversation with a few statistics: one out of ten people have used a dating site or app; 66 percent of those users go on a date; and 23 percent of them have met a spouse or started a long-term relationship via the internet. Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, praised the unprecedented opportunities we have to meet potential romantic partners, with large cities offering hundreds to thousands of people. But, he warned, a dating website is “only a good tool if you know how to use it.” Backed with statistics from Match.com’s annual Singles in America survey report, the biological anthropologist Helen Fisher said that cognitive overload is the biggest problem and that users can become overwhelmed with choices, overweighing trivial aspects of a person’s looks, dress, interests, and personality, gleaned from a person’s profile, at the expense of finding common ground.2 Don’t use a check-off strategy, Reis and Fisher both recommended. My question is, does anyone consider those endless lists of favorite movies, bands, and books that people put in their profiles to be helpful criteria?

    The experience Daniel Jones brought to the panel wasn’t scientific but literary—he is a writer and the editor of the New York Times column Modern Love, for which ordinary people contribute personal essays about their relationships. Dating sites put you in the driver’s seat, “looking for the ideal person,” he said, but you’re thrown into the sea with an “illusion of control.” Sometimes opposites—whether that’s differences in income, religion, politics, or smoking preferences—really do attract. In short, he advised, don’t be too strict with your imagined ideal.

    The sexperts, from left: Daniel Jones, Hellen Fisher, and Harry Reis, with the moderator Erica Lumière at right

    Fisher agreed: the algorithms work of dating websites work, but having a common background—which can be social values, good looks, or the same reproductive goals—is also important. “I don’t think they’re dating services.” Fisher continued. “I think they’re introducing services.” These websites are “changing courtship,” she said, “but [they’re] not changing love.”3 Connections happen in real life, Reis emphasized again. A prospective car buyer can read Consumer Reports cover to cover, his analogy went, but he or she must take a test drive before making a decision. Fisher nodded, stating that 35 percent of people fall in love “down the road,” not instantly, so patience is a virtue for anyone behind the wheel. There’s a joke about rocks songs about cars and girls in here somewhere.

    “Hi” Tech

    Many have declared that technology has killed romance. Jones recounted a story of a woman in Washington, DC, who Googled her date before meeting him. Because she “was able to excavate his entire personal life, and family life, all in advance of the date,” their conversation suffered from stunted communications and even led to an embarrassing mistake: she mentioned his sister before he said he had one. Yet 29 percent of internet users, Lumière stated, have looked up the person they are dating, or are going to date, online. Fisher had different statistics—38 percent of men and 53 percent of women have researched a date on Google and Facebook—and with safety and curiosity in mind and with different statistics said, “I don’t know why 100 percent don’t.” Besides, she explained, from hunter-gatherer era to the small towns of yore, many people already knew the family of the people with whom they might partner. This idea spurred Jones to assert that we’ve experienced a sea change of people dating strangers, especially in larger cities like New York and Chicago. Dating strangers inherently creates suspicion, the panelists concurred, so it’s sensible that a person conduct research in advance. And no, it’s not stalking.

    Technology doesn’t protect people from getting hurt, Jones said. Considering hookup culture (i.e., sex without commitment) in 2008, he observed that things go tragically wrong when the emotional involvement becomes imbalanced. There’s an understanding between partners when hooking up, he said, but “the rules aren’t posted in the dorm walls.” When hooking up, kids feel vulnerable but cannot act vulnerable. On the positive side, the panelists agreed noted that people’s sexual needs are being met this way, despite the anxiety hooking up might cause. Fisher even revealed that 35 percent of one night stands and 47 percent of friends with benefits turn into long-term relationships. The rules are developing now, she said, just like they were developing in other ways a hundred years ago. Later, during the Q&A, an audience member felt that hooking up takes time away from working on a core relationship, but Reis has observed that emotion flows plentifully in hookups, that “it’s following some different norms, to be sure,” and not necessarily a linear courtship progression. Jones, however, has witnessed people struggling with such arrangements but offered the idea that they’re practicing pieces of relationships. Sometimes dealing with a whole relationship while too young, he suggested, can damage a younger person.

    Daniel Jones (left) offered his experience as a writer and editor

    The panelists discussed long-distance relationships that develop online between people who have never met face to face. “It’s completely liberating,” Jones said, and “The flirtation is intense.” The risk for vulnerability is low, he continued, but foibles may develop, such as when one couple worked up to Skyping naked but still preferred typing to speaking. Another couple would fall asleep together online, Jones recalled, but the relationship failed after she drove from Missouri to New York. In real life they were bored by each other and could only get their emotional fix through their electronic devices. Lumière asked if these online relationships can work. “I would say ultimately not,” responded Reis, who again endorsed the primacy of flesh-and-blood connections.

    Deception is built into technology, Jones said. Since people regularly fudge their income, height, weight, and age in their online profiles, he wondered, how should an honest person act when everyone else is enhancing their image? Others might think a person who genuinely lists himself as 45 year old is actually 50, or a 180-pound person actually weighs 200. “Lying and cheating are hardly new inventions,” responded Reis, and the opportunities to both cheat and detect cheating are relatively equal. “It’s a bit of an arms race,” he observed. Jones believes that Facebook helps reignite old flames, but often you’re seeing someone’s curated life, not their actual life, and therefore illusions can develop. What’s more, he said, you must work harder to block people from your life online. Fisher asserted the notion that if you’re not predisposed to cheat, you probably won’t cheat. Dating sites, she concluded, don’t change brain chemistry and personality. After a few weeks, Reis added, you generally know who a person is—unless he or she is a pathological liar.

    It’s All Good?

    One study, Lumière noted, found that internet marriages are three to four times more likely to end in divorce, but Reiss asserted the opposite: “The right science has not been done to answer that question.” People don’t sacrifice their career for a relationship anymore, he continued, which is a positive development, and women need not follow their partners around the country or be told where to attend graduate school. Further, people may now split up romantically and separate geographically but stay together emotionally, which Reis said could develop into a new kind of relationship. Ever ready with her statistics, Fisher stated that 81 percent of lifelong partners would marry the same person again, and 76 percent are still in love with him or her. Now we choose for ourselves, often later in life, and leave bad relationships more readily.

    Harry Reis (center) encourages online daters to meet in person

    Regarding genders, Reis claimed that the similarities between men and women overwhelm the differences. Thus, the perception that single men only want sex, that married men pretend to be single want sex, and that women seek long-term relationships isn’t accurate. Based on her figures, Fisher even proposed that men are more romantic, fall in love easier, suggest moving in together sooner, and want to introduce family members earlier. Men are also more likely to commit suicide, she added, after a romantic snub. Reis stated, again, that there’s no information you can put online that’s better than what you’ll learn from meeting in person. The better dating sites, he said, tell you who is in your geographic area.

    The evening’s conversation completely avoided racial preferences, which were brought up in a 2013 report on interracial communications on a single Facebook-based dating site, Are You Interested. A few findings: black women are the least likely to be contacted, Asian women were the most pursued, and most women wrote to white men. OkCupid found similar results in 2009, including the fact that approximately two out of three whites prefer to date someone with the same skin color and racial background. And I don’t recollect a single mention by the panelists of issues affecting gays and lesbians. It’s inexplicable how the speakers—who were all white and straight—failed to widened their scope for a more inclusive discussion.

    Anna Gensler’s collage of Keith comprising drawing and smart phone screen shot, from November 24, 2014 (artwork © Anna Gensler)

    The panelists barely acknowledged accusations of emotional manipulation on social-media sites, which Facebook and OkCupid both faced earlier this year. And while the speakers discussed online communications between potential mates, they forgot to talk about the severe harassment of women by men—from sexually explicit written invitations to unwanted dick pics—which has become so widespread in the dating community that the aberrant behavior has become expected, in a way. Just ask the artist Anna Gensler, who draws caricatures of the men who contact her on Tinder with sexually explicit messages and publishes them, sometimes with collaged digital images but always showing the man with a hilariously small penis, on Tumblr and Instagram (as well as Granniepants.)

    In Terms Of count: 5.

    1 Tonight’s event was the third and final panel in the Art de Vivre: Talks series produced by the French Institute Alliance Française in conjunction with its gallery exhibition of fashion photographs by Jean-Daniel Lorieux, titled Seducing the Lens, and a film series.

    2 Fisher is not only a research professor at the Center for Human Evolution Studies in Rutgers University’s Department of Anthropology, she is also chief scientific advisor for Chemistry.com, a division of Match.com, which colored her comments.

    3 One trend Reis has noticed is that people prefer finding a good provider to finding love. The opposite was true during the 1970s and 1980s, he said, but because divorce is so prevalent, singles are suspicious of intense passion.

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