The hotshop at the Museum of Glass has become a tourist destination. It can also be watched via their live streaming webcam (click on photo).
Editor’s Note: This is the second posting by guest blogger Lauren Fujii who asks whether using Studio Glass to build tourism is ultimately good for the artists or the work they produce. Part I can be read here.
Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery in Wanganui, New Zealand, and a prominent architecture and design writer, recently questioned his city’s desire to become known for glass in an article in the New Zealand Listener. He worried that Wanganui was promoting its glass festival primarily to attract tourists, and that this increase in visitors would result in a market flooded by glasswork without “long-term cultural significance.”
His argument leads to some interesting questions: What are the results of glass-oriented tourism on the market for glass? Who is concerned about protecting cultural heritage in cities with a history of glass manufacturing and preserving glassblowing jobs? In other words, how is glass tourism sustainable?
Seattle artist John Hogan doesn’t think the allure of glass will fade: “For most people, glassblowing is amazingly fascinating. As long as molten glass doesn’t stop moving and glowing as it does at 2000-plus degrees, I don‘t see any reason to fear people might lose interest.”
There’s no logical reason why, after thousands of years of loving it, people will suddenly find glassblowing unappealing. And there is general agreement in the glass community that watching glass being made is an educational experience that increases the number of customers who buy glass, and helps support studios where artists work.
“I think that the idea of drawing people in to observe an ancient art-form, all the while educating the public, is a win-win situation,” says Benjamin Cobb, lead gaffer and hot shop manager at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington.
But whether this attention is helping the art form to grow naturally, or pushing it into the popular mainstream where uniformity reigns, is what makes some observers of the trend to promote glassblowing wary.
What can be agreed upon is that the majority of people who visit a glass attraction like a museum or a production studio do so for the experience of seeing glass being blown. They may already be a consumer of the good, perhaps they own a Simon Pearce vase for example. But when they are in Vermont and visit his factory, the main reason is to watch the glassblowing; the purchase of glassware is secondary.
Most every production shop has an open studio with space for the public to watch the work being done. Typical of this, on any given day at Seattle’s Glasshouse Studio, tourists to the Pioneer Square shop are pressed up against the glass windows at the back of the gallery to watch the team at work. Likewise, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, boasts an extremely large studio floor plan and artists working at this world-class facility make their art in front of a live audience of up to 150 people.
Visitors purchase admission to the museum, a single pass that allows them a day pass to view the exhibits and watch the glassblowers and other artists. The experience of seeing glass being blown becomes the product. From this perspective, the product is similar to a dance or a play, and the glassblower is like a performer. Consumers pay to sit and watch a show that begins and ends in under three hours, for them to return another day, the show needs to change … frequently.
Not only does the art market demand new and interesting pieces, the tourist market demands a new and interesting show. Not only that, but with the proliferation of glass museums around the country, in order to draw out of town visitors, each city must retain the uniqueness and the regional flavor that initially made glass a cultural attraction there to begin with.
About the Museum of Glass, Cobb says, “In order to keep a sustained interest, we are constantly pushing boundaries, whether it is outdoor installations or fantastic international visiting artists, we want to make sure that each visit yields a new perspective on the medium.”
This year the Museum’s visiting artist program received 52 proposals up from 22 in 2009, and Cobb adds that the sophistication of the ideas was also at a higher level than in previous years.
Clearly the art form has taken on the dual pressures of both performance and product. Will glass live up to the challenge?
—Lauren Fujii
The author is based in Seattle where she maintains a blog called ABJ Seattle Glass Online.