To the Hermitage for a Stroll

– Over the two weeks of quarantine, we have accumulated around 15 million views in the social media and on the website. We have never had anything like that! What is going on with us?

Every day, when opening the Hermitage online, we announce a programme for the day. Each day has its own theme, for which we offer five videos. Those are films from our series The Hermitage Academy, Custodian in the Hermitage and My Hermitage.

And the viewers also have to choose between those and the premiere showings that also take place every day with us. In the few days before the start of quarantine – by dint of tremendous efforts – we managed to film a few dozen lectures, guided tours and topics that have now become our daily premieres. For examples, people can view videos about all our exhibitions, beginning with Tis Potemkin Himself and ending with the exhibitions of porcelain, the Order of Saint George, artistic leather,. Korean art (which opened, incidentally, when the quarantine had already begun), the Studio 44 architectural bureau and the commemoration of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. Anyone who did not manage to watch them at the time shouldn’t worry. The premieres will be repeated.

The philosophy of our life in quarantine is above all practical. We are actively mastering contact-free communications (which in general is very much in the spirit of the 21st century) and testing to what extent the virtual and the authentic are superior to each other.

Our general stance is long since familiar to everyone: virtual is attractive, but the authentic thing is 100 times better. In a time of quarantine, though, the links between the virtual and the authentic grow more complex. And right now, we are clarifying all that for ourselves.

But these are not games around the museum exhibits, not a feast in time of plague. No. We are trying to create for the viewer a semblance of real, direct contact with the Hermitage. Not a glamourized version, but as if they were genuinely in our museum.

To that end, we first of all speak about how it works. Quarantine has, of course, made a priority of the task of ensuring the safety of the collection. Safety in the most divers ways, from physical security to climate control. Over in Holland, thieves exploited the coronavirus to steal a Van Gogh. Our security service is guarding the museum using state-of-the-art methods and technologies, constantly surveilling the displays and exhibitions electronically. And the curators are keeping track of that remotely and compiling records of the checks, as happens in the museum in normal times.

But things do not end with security and checks. We cannot, of course, not present our collection. So, we decided that we would add commentaries from members of the Hermitage staff to the views of the empty halls that the security service films and turn them into sort of “remote lectures”. That almost ephemeral footage – after 34 hours the recording is erased and the live commentary with it – has unexpectedly become an enormous hit. Especially in Instagram, where direct contact is one of the chief distinctions.

As a matter of fact, the idea of slow-paced observation of the museum and its visitors is one that at some point we discussed with Alexander Sokurov. And we have realized it. We have three cameras giving round-the-clock feeds: one showing Palace Square, another the Hermitage courtyard, the third the Raphael Hall with the Conestabile Madonna, Holy Family and Boy on a Dolphin. That slow view is not simply a whim, but something very important. Seeing how everything looks in the morning, in the evening, at night, when people appear and disappear on the square…

Right on time, we and Apple shot a film that shows the Hermitage uninterrupted for 5 hours 25 minutes. That’s like “slow reading” as well.

In the museum now people can listen to and view general and thematic tours that go deeper than usual.

Bearing in mind that the Hermitage is a global museum and that it has many viewers that speak different languages, we decided to also produce tours in Italian, English and Chinese. They have been a very big success. The Italians thanked us – the Mayor of Venice almost with tears in his eyes, and the Italian Minister of Culture dry-eyed. Our British friends are also very grateful for this.

Admittedly, some commentaries from Russian viewers at first were quite aggressive: why should I, a Russian, watch a tour in Italian? (Although we are also offering those tours in Russian.) Gradually, though, even they got the feeling that there is something to those tours, even if you don’t know Italian. And now, pride is taking over from resentment: what a good thing it is that our Hermitage is addressing the whole world!

In the social media, interactivity for the tours, lectures and seminars is very high. On the website, though, the virtual strolls during which you can “walk” around practically all the halls in the Hermitage are in high demand, as are the videos telling about our repository and restoration workshops at Staraya Derevnya.

So something like Hermitage TV is forming around the museum with a whole schedule and a distinctive philosophy. And we have accumulated 15 million views in the social networks and on the website, which we never had before. We have only 5 million real-life visitors a year. Of course, not all those 15 million are actual visitors to the museum, but even so it’s a very big number.

We have also made some unexpected discoveries. It turns out that quarantine is also a time when dreams come true.

For example, the curator’s dream of an empty museum with no-one in it and you can go just where you want and do what you want. But a dream come true is always an additional problem. It suddenly emerged that when the museum stands empty for a very long time, without visitors, it (the museum) does not feel well.

Another dream come true is that during quarantine you can see everything in the museum free of charge. However, questions of copyright immediately arise when you reproduce things. For museums they are not so difficult to deal with, but theatres are doomed to suffer from the tyranny of copyright-protection agencies that is a big hindrance to providing access to culture. One more dream come true is a museum without queues. Feel free to view what you want. Suddenly, though, the way modern-day viewers have lost their depth of understanding reveals itself. That, too, can be seen from visitors’ comments. People are very used to “fast food” – brief general tours provided by guides from the tourist companies: one, two, three, four: tsars, pictures, Rembrandt, Rubens, Nicholas I, off we go – and that’s it. That’s not what we in the Hermitage are offering. We are serving up delicacies. And the encounters with our professional tour guides and curators (who handle priceless objects every day) is a completely different matter. Again, the genre of slow presentation becomes important and we need to think how to nurture a complex visitor.

Of course, we are analysing visitors during the quarantine. Every day I look through almost all the reviews and I can see that they have become more interesting. When the museum is open, people are constantly sending us complaints: the queue for the cloakroom, someone was rude to me. Now, though, people are responding to what they see – and, it must be said, people’s level of kindness, judging by the reviews, is immense.

We now also have the opportunity to analyse our public education work – different types and styles of lectures, guide tours, explications, demonstrations – short, long, big, little.

Our tour guides are getting used to what usually strikes them as incorrect – recordings and broadcasts at the expense of live interaction. That combination of live and electronic interaction is also very valuable experience for us.

We are not forgetting about the concerns of the Union of Museums of Russia and are seeking to tell people about other museums. In our social media we have been showing previously shot videos about the Petersburg Water Basin museum and the museum of models of railway bridges. At this moment it is very important to draw attention to small museums that do not have state funding and are having a particularly bad time of it. That makes it all the more important that people don’t forget about them by the time they reopen.

As President of the Union of Museums I made a special appeal to the heads of Russia’s constituent territories and government bodies arguing the need to support institutional and municipal museums. We ought to remember the importance of museums that are subordinated to the local authorities, who always have many other considerations, or that belong to government bodies.

We are attempting to get something changed with the funding of museums as well. We are considering along with the Ministry of Culture – I’ve written a number of letters about this – how to modify the state commission. Now, when there are no visitors, it is especially obvious that the number of them is not the chief criterion.

We are also trying to review our attitude towards questions of state funding. We want to understand exactly what the state should be funding unconditionally and independent of whether a museum has its own sources of income or not. I think the results of our reflections on this topic will be very important.

The times we are going through now remind me of the 1990s. There is no money, incomes are dropping, the situation is unclear, and everything changes almost every day. And you can’t take decisions with an eye solely to instructions from above (as we have already become used to doing). You have to make your own, and very quickly.

We are not at war, of course, but the experience of the siege and of evacuation in Sverdlovsk has in some parts again become relevant. Recently we recalled the daily timetable in Sverdlovsk and the way they checked the presence of things there every day. A high level of discipline, a combination of scholarly activities and storage, all of that is extremely to the point for a system of remote working too. And how can we complain that sitting at home is dampening our enthusiasm, when we know that people continued their studies even in the Hermitage bomb shelters.

Our huge Hermitage online bill of fare, for all its superficial dissimilarity, has its roots in what was laid down during the siege, when they organized guided tours around the halls where only the empty frames were hanging, or celebrated major anniversaries of Alisher Navoi and Nizami. We are understanding once again that it is important not merely to exist, but also to demonstrate to the world how museums are living in such difficult conditions.