If you work for a museum, then you almost certainly make less money than your corporate counterparts.  Even the few shameless robber baron-style museum CEOs out there only make, like, four or five hundred k.  That’s hardly a polite Christmas bonus to a proper Wall Street robber baron.

This, needless to say, attracts all sorts of folks for all sorts of reasons.  That’s why museumssuck.com has developed this handy shorthand metric to evaluate and categorize your museum colleagues.

If you’ll permit the oversimplification, in my experience there are essentially three broad genres of reasons that people decide to make less money at a museum.  And so nearly every museum professional can be tidily summarized as a combination of these three traits: noble, lazy, and incompetent.

Now that’s an unfairly hyperbolic shorthand, so I should elaborate on each.

Noble basically covers professionals who are either motivated by their institution’s mission (to, like, stimulate minds and such) or are highly enthusiastic about some museum-specific trade or discipline (such as curation or -I don’t know- taxidermy.)  The first are really aware of what their museum is trying to accomplish and they ponder their role in those terms.  Specifically how, they wonder whilst showering, can we achieve this mission better?  The latter are truly passionate about… taxidermy, say, and want to be really historically great at it and museums are where you do that.  So here they are.  They may or may not give a hoot about mission stuff.  I tally that under Noble for convenience either way.

Lazy?  Let’s face it.  Working in a museum just isn’t as stressful as heart surgery or commodities trading, is it?  More holidays, fewer dress codes.  And some people just aren’t wired to be evaluated in terms of dollars in and dollars out.  Museums are full of cozy refugees with not-especially-nostalgic battle stories about their days at a high-powered Manhattan ad agency.  Or who would frankly prefer to be at a high-powered Manhattan ad agency but will never exert themselves to get there.

Incompetent may be a bit harsh.  I mean it to cover a broad spectrum.  Which isn’t to say there aren’t enough cases in which it applies literally.  Incompetent generally covers people who either haven’t the chops to make it at what they do in the big money real world or they could, but not without taking a huge step down.  The museum COO who’d be lucky to be a middle manager.  The museum middle manager who’d be lucky to be a shift boss.  The museum Senior Executive Vice President of Information Strategies who’d be level three help desk if you left him without a note on AT&T’s doorstep.

Each museum pro is built of ten units which are divided amongst these three categories.  It makes a convenient shorthand for knowing who you are about to collaborate with.  I, for example, am a Noble 3, Lazy 5, Incompetent 2.  See how useful that is?  You can even shorthand it further to refer only to that trait which is relevant.  How was your meeting?  I’m really excited about this project.  That woman is an incompetent: 0. Mind you, that can sound wrong to someone unfamiliar with the scale.

Try it on your colleagues.  Try it on your boss.  Try it on yourself.  (It works, no?)

Museum 3.0?  Really?

I went ahead and booked Museum 4.0™ and Museum 5.0™, so I’m kind of hoping museumssuck.com will be the future of cultural institutions for at least the next two conference cycles.  I’m just going to tidy the CSS while I wait.  I wonder if I should get Google ads.

(It’s actually a really cool resource by a really cool museum.  I mean, let’s not judge people by their ill-conceived domain names, shall we?)

The videos for last week’s TED2009 Long Beach are beginning to go up on ted.com.  None of the really museum-y stuff is up yet, so I decided to celebrate the occasion on museumssuck.com by posting Johnny Lee’s Wiimote hacks from last year’s TED2008 down in Monterey.  But go check out them out as they go up.  See if you can sleep after finding out what a homo evolutis is.

I was just going to use Google Apps free version to handle the email for museumssuck.com, but I kept getting the following vague error message: Google Apps does not currently support this domain name. At first I thought maybe it was a DNS propagation lag or something, so I waited another day: Google Apps does not currently support this domain name. And that’s when it occurred to me.  Museumsareboring.com: Welcome to Google Apps! Museumsarefuckingboring.com: Google Apps does not currently support this domain name.

Now, any of you who know me professionally are liable to know two things.  The first is that I think advanced content filtration algorithms are absurdly silly. The second is that I am pretty darn good at advanced content filtration algorithms.  I once sold a (funny, I thought) article that would explain these two seemingly contradictory facts, but the magazine refused to run it or return the rights to me.  Which at the time seemed like a suitable-to-the-topic Hellerian outcome.  (In the magazine’s defense, I wanted to call the article “Can a Robot say Vagina to a Thirteen-Year-Old?”  In my defense, the article included a scene where adults with PhDs debated this very matter at earnest length.  I offered to change the title to “Is Fucck a Bad Word?”  Negotiations broke down after that.  If I recall, the article concluded with the following technical summary of writing content filtration algorithms: “Sckrroo this b-lschytt.”)

Anyway, my perverse ears pricked.  And I couldn’t wait to test my chops against mighty Google.  The nutshell verdict:  I’m waaay better at software-spotting naughtiness than Google Apps.  From a decade of broadcasting user input from middle school kids.  I should make my algorithm available as a catchily-named web service.  Maybe I’ll get Google-acquired.  Hmmm… mouthsoap.com?

Shit.com can’t run Google Apps.  Shits.com can.  (I assume the second-s rule is to give you the benefit of the doubt for the use of hits.  As in yoursiteshits.com.  Or greatestbeatleshits.com.  Etc.)

Ass is the one that always gave me fits in that regard.  I tried bass.com: Welcome to Google Apps! Ok.  Hmmm.  Ass.com?  Welcome to Google Apps! Asshole.com?  Welcome to Google Apps! I guess they decided not to get mired in ass algorithms altogether.  Good choice, Google.

Hmmm… museumsareassholes.com?  That’s not as catchy.  Guess I’ll have to load my own SMTP.

I’ll admit, I sort of just registered museumssuck.com because I wanted it to exist as a cosmic counterpoint to futureofmuseums.org. But now that we’re here, I’m game to live up to it.

Check it out, by the way, won’t you: futureofmuseums.org. The Center for the Future of Museums. “In order to thrive, grow and continue to provide vital services to society, museums need to be prepared to respond to massive changes that will take place in the 21st century.” Oh, good. We need more box lunch retreats about the struggle for museums’ relevance in a world gone Facebook. Hundred dollar discount if you become a member today!

Well, I don’t own a museum. I’m just another charlatan with box lunch retreats to peddle. So I don’t need to be on the de facto side of museums. If your city has three Starbucks then it also has a “hands-on science museum” and if it loses a war of relevance with Twitter: good riddance, I say.

Richard Dawkins tells an anecdote about how an erstwhile and highly succesful editor of New Scientist was once asked what the philosophy of New Scientist was under his direction and he replied, “Our philosophy at New Scientist is this: science is interesting, and if you don’t agree, you can fuck off.” And in that spirit, cheers to any museum not experiencing Drupal-induced existential angst. If you got the goods, right? There ain’t no Quickcam visitor feedback kiosk next to the Venus de Milo. (In fairness, louvre.fr does have a new My Personal Space™ section. I hope that sounds blingier en Français.)

To be clear, I’m agnostic on collections v. interactives and I’m very pro-technology. (I began and continue my career as an interactive exhibit engineer and developer.) My point is if your museum had the Venus de Milo, your museum wouldn’t suck. A priori. And you’d never have to stand up and tell the room your name, the museum you work for, and a little bit about your background before joining in a provocative group exchange session about how to stay relevant by leveraging Flickr.

But you don’t have the Venus de Milo. So… what do you have instead?

It’s a fair question. Nay, it’s the question. The Louvre has Venus. What do you have instead? If you can answer that question confidently and concisely without a lot of stimulating-the-following-target-audiences mission statement hooey–and your answer isn’t on SecondLife, then you may be one the few museums that doesn’t suck.

You’re a museum, right? You’re not an outreach summercamp. You’re not an Imax theatre lobby. You’re not a social networking iPhone app. Be a museum. And try harder not to suck at it.

You want a real lesson the museum industry can learn from successful web 2.0 initiatives? Be really good at what you’re interested in and other people who are also interested in that will get excited and involved. Be really good at what you’re interested in and other people who aren’t also interested in that… will do something else. Let them.

Um, desuckification. TM. That sounds industry meme-worthy. It’s all the rage here in San Francisco. Being good at what you do is the new leveraged synergy. Remembering why you exist in the first place. Getting rid of the bloat and atrophy that has evolved since then.

Let’s have an honest moment, just the two of us: your museum sucks. Right? I’ve been there. It was all well and good when there were donors who couldn’t be bothered to notice as long as there was enough flattery and free scotch at the white tie gala. Ah, it was fun while it lasted. But now you’re in trouble, aren’t you? Mandatory furloughs. Aggressive new pie chart goals for the membership team. Renegotiating percentages with the gift shop firm. Look at the agenda from your last crisis meeting. If that meeting wasn’t fundamentally about making your museum suck less, you needn’t have bothered.

At one point in the early-1990s, Blockbuster Video was opening one new retail location every seventeen hours. During that same period, three (3) hands-on science museums opened in the state of Ohio. Oh, and all those major label deals for grunge bands? Good luck. Museums suck.