TikTok and Museums
This essay was part of the June 6th Curator Notes Newsletter.
During the pandemic, museums and galleries explored new ways to connect with their audiences, to make sure they stayed relevant, weren’t forgotten in the noise and continued to receive donations from visitors when they couldn’t visit physically. I’ve discussed a few of these before in previous newsletters, including museums starting virtual exhibitions, holding discussion panels on Zoom or creating more content on Instagram. However, very few museums and galleries took up the opportunity to get involved in the fastest growing social media platform in the world: TikTok.
One of the most well known examples, featured in The New York Times, is the Uffizi Gallery. A respected, highly visited gallery in Florence, the Uffizi went viral last year on TikTok and now has 82,000 followers. It used its own collection to create funny, meme-like videos in Italian and English, and attracted a whole new audience who couldn’t even visit the museum to see the works in person. The Uffizi achieved this success after only having created a website in 2015 and a Facebook account at the beginning of Italy’s first lockdown. They made TikTok their main source of social media over any other platform. Ilde Forgione, an administrative assistant at the museum, is the woman behind the account. The director of the museum had discovered she liked memes and asked her to create the account. “Sometimes you have to give people a different point of view, something that says, ‘Art is not boring. Art is not something you just learn at school. It’s something you can discover for yourself,” Forgione told the New York Times. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History is another museum with a TikTok account, starting in January 2020 and now with over 317,000 followers. Their accounts success is largely attributed to their 66 year old mollusk curator Tim Pearce, who is soft-spoken, charming and often tells snail jokes. Both the Uffizi Gallery and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History show all it takes is one person and a museum has a whole new audience.
This year, on May 18th, in celebration of International Museums Day, TikTok launched its first #MuseumMoment, a livestream marathon and hashtag which explored 23 institutions across 12 countries throughout the day. It started with a tour at the National Gallery in Singapore and moved across the globe including the Tel Aviv Museum in Israel and the Rijksmuseum in The Netherlands. The Palace of Versailles was also involved, and joined with TikTok to create an AR effect that transforms viewers into Marie Antionette as she runs through the palace grounds. It’s now taken on a life of its own and is one of the currently popular memes circulating the platform.
The Palace of Versailles was also involved, and joined with TikTok to create an AR effect that transforms viewers into Marie Antionette as she runs through the palace grounds
As well as museums, emerging artists themselves are finding more opportunities on TikTok, preferring it over other platforms like Instagram and Facebook. This is because TikTok has a better algorithm, showing artists work to those who are more likely to appreciate and connect with it. It is also the easiest to share to other platforms, making it the first place for artists to create. Instagram has steadily been declining in reach and fair visibility due to its preference of paid advertisements. It has been a long time since Facebook was a good platform for creatives to share their work and Twitter compresses images down so artists can’t properly share their work. It is no wonder that TikTok has grown so quickly. In 2020, as part of the lawsuit the platform filed against the US government, the number of users was listed as 100 million. The year before there were “only” 26.7 million users. The hashtag “#art” has 171.5 billion views; “#artist” has 51.1 billion (accurate as of 6th June 2021).
However, running a TikTok account is not easy. It requires constant content creation with almost daily videos needing to be posted if you want the algorithm to support your work. Aside from the upkeep of videos, the content can’t always be the same either. Viewers won’t always want to see the same ideas repeated, and what works one day won’t be the same as what works the next. This is also true for the content of different museums. The Uffizi can add hip-hop music tracks to their memes while showing Renaissance paintings, but for the Carnegie Natural History Museum this wouldn’t work as well, and viewers would’ve seen it elsewhere. It’s important to choose fresh content that’s right for the museum.
It will be interesting to see the future of the platform. Will it become the new Instagram, where it’s vital for the survival of any museum or gallery to stay relevant or is it a gimmick that is having a moment in the spotlight? Should Curator Notes have its own TikTok account?
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/26/arts/design/boom-bust-tiktok-artists.html
https://jingculturecommerce.com/tiktok-museummoment/
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/national-gallery-strategic-plan-anniversary
https://theartgorgeous.com/why-tiktok-is-a-great-platform-for-the-artworld/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/arts/design/uffizi-museums-tiktok.html
https://www.museumnext.com/article/how-arts-organisations-can-use-tiktok/