Centre Pompidou in YouTube

YouTube and Dailymotion have greatly helped to democratize the use of cameras and cell phones in museums but also to broadcast art throughout Internet. The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Indianapolis Museum of Art conducted interesting initiatives in this realm. The former has created MoMAvideos, a channel on YouTube intend at fostering "the public's engagement with modern and contemporary art [...] selected exhibitions programs, performances and behind-the-scenes looks at conversation and art installation at the Museum can be easily watched and shared by YouTube viewers" (MoMAvideos, 2007). The latter has produced It's My Art, a YouTube channel where the Indianapolis Museum of Art shows videos produced and edited in-house. To follow this trend, the Centre Pompidou in Paris has started to experiment the diffusion of videos through YouTube and Dailymotion. The scope of this project is to inform potential visitors and/or web users to be informed of Centre Pompidou's program. The firsts videos (in YouTube and Dailymotion) have produced on purpose to be diffused on collaborative platforms: they are short, with relevant information for visitors and with any "institutionalized" character. The Centre Pompidou has plenty of videos in their archives: artists' interviews, conferences, dialogues, and so on. It seems clear that it is just a matter of time before the Centre Pompidou makes available its great collection or archives to YouTube's six million daily users. 

In fact, these initiatives answers to visitors' trend to record their visit with their own cameras or cell phones and broadcast it with Dailymotion, YouTube or any other broadcasting platform. By broadcasting their own content, museums can control what they want to make available to their audience.