Nick Gray founder of Museum Hack. Photo via Museum Hack.
What started as a quirky hobby is now changing how New Yorkers are viewing and connecting with art in museums.
‘We are trying to attract an audience that doesn’t even want to be at the museum in the first place,’ said Museum Hack founder Nick Gray at the Creative State Summit in June. During his keynote, Gray addressed the crowd on ‘how cultural institutions can turf tradition to create fresh new perspectives and experiences for audiences.’
He spoke about how he began Museum Hack, a company that focuses on delivering unique museum tours, almost by accident. At the time, Gray was working in the technology sector, but an impromptu visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art while on a date, led to what he said became an obsession.
‘This tour unlocked within me a sense of curiosity about art, and history that I never knew I had,’ he said.
Gray visited the museum regularly in his spare time. ‘I went into the museum, and I started looking things up on YouTube and Wikipedia. I joined the docent tours – I love the place.’
He started to give his own tours, enticing his friends and family to come along to the Metropolitan Museum. ‘Now I’d never done a museum tour, I’ve never taken an art history class. I learnt how to give tours by watching other people, and doing my own research. And you know what these tours didn’t have a narrative arc leading them. The tours were basically “Ten cool things I found” and “Three things that I want to steal.”’
Word quickly spread about Gray’s bespoke tours, and when the blog Daily Candy described them as ‘the best thing to do in all of New York City’, Gray suddenly received over 1,300 emails from people trying to book a place.
Museum Hack has now grown to include tours in other cities of the United States with the business expanding into museum consultation.
Much like himself, Gray realised that ‘people wanted a new way to look at these boring institutions, they wanted to have fun in the space,’ he said. Eventually Gray quit his job and started his company Museum Hack ‘with the goal to re-imagine the museum experience. And I’ve been spending every day since then trying to figure out how to engage new audiences to come into these museums,’ he said.
Guides, Games and Gossip
Gray emphasised the need to challenge how institutions and organisations attract new audiences.
‘How do you go after the people whose filters are already up? People who say, “You know what, I’m not a museum person,” someone who just doesn’t like museums? I’m going to tell you the three things make Museum Hack does differently from most museum tours, and those three things are: guides, games and gossip.’
Tour Guides
‘The tour guides are the heart and soul of our business. They are the reason we have become successful, and they are the reason that we have grown. Our tour guides are the reason why our customers love us.
‘We don’t usually hire people from the museum world because they tend to come with a lot of bad habits, and a lot of bad training – I say that with an open heart to all museums today – but when you bring in an outsider to a space they tend to look at things with a fresh set of eyes. They have never been told that you can’t do that inside the space.
‘We hire people that can make a connection with our visitors, and really get them tuned in. We hire actors, we hire comedians, we hire musicians, we hire renegade museum staff that have left and now come over to the dark side – they tell us all their juicy gossip.’
Games
‘Most Museum Hack tours are really fast-paced so the guides have to incorporate some games to keep the group connected and moving fast. They’ll do games just to start off the tour. They’ll have everybody put their hands in the middle (I think they do this in sports), and the guide will say, “We are going to do a little cheer so we stick together as a team. Let’s say the word museum; down on MU and up on SEUM.” So the group will go “MU-SEUM!” And then everybody runs, or walks quickly into the museum space.
‘We came up with thinks that are called fatigue fighting exercises to keep our guests tuned in. Millennials look at their cell phones over 160 times a day – literally Google did a study. That’s mind boggling, so we have to keep people tuned in. We will do yoga in the Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery; we will make people do squats in the stairwells; we’ll pass out candy in the elevators, and we’ll do shots of orange juice or wine – whatever we need to do to raise somebodies blood sugar and get them re-engaged in the space. That’s what we are looking to do so people have fun.’
Gossip
‘We do things on our tours that involves gossip. My favourite one is the juicy back story about the art. These are things that we have read in books about the museums. There was a Director at the Metropolitan whose name was Thomas Hoving. He wrote this awesome book, Master Pieces: The Curator’s Game, that tell these great stories. We use gossip to engage visitors and we get a lot of demographics coming along to the tours – from Millennials to Boomers.
‘At Museum Hack it’s our goal to flip the switch, for somebody to go “You know I don’t like museums and galleries, they’re not for me,” to then say, “Wow, that was fun – I’ll come back.”
‘We are not afraid to be a little controversial. The slogan I built my business on is: Museums are fucking awesome. We do these controversial things and we use language like this to let people know this is totally different. This is not like a regular museum tour,’ Gray concluded.
Nick Gray’s keynote speech was made at the 2018 Creative State Summit.
