ArtTube

In October 2009 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen became the first museum in the Netherlands to launch its own video channel on the internet. Arttube.boijmans.nl is a Dutch/English website with videos about art and design produced by the museum.

The ArtTube online video channel attracts about 17,000 visitors a month, from art professionals to school pupils, and on average they spend over six minutes per visit viewing the 100 or so videos. Besides videos about artists, exhibitions (and their realisation) and the museum collection, arttube.boijmans.nl presents recordings of lectures and reports about art events in the Netherlands and abroad, as well as interviews with the museum’s VIP guests. Arttube.boijmans.nl also serves as the museum’s memory: footage from Polygoon newsreels brings the museum of the 20th century back to life. For example, you can watch an adaptation of a unique silent film from the 1930s, in which the construction of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen can be followed brick by brick. Rapper, composer and filmmaker Redman edited the original documentary, which lasts almost an hour, into an exciting five-minute film and composed the accompanying soundtrack.

All the videos have accompanying texts, presenting them in an attractive manner and providing them with plenty of contextual information. Each video is linked to collectie.boijmans.nl, a platform with information about and images of hundreds of works from the museum collection, and will soon also be linked to alma.boijmans.nl. These websites complement each other, providing the public with comprehensive information about the collection and exhibitions.

ArtTube is an initiative of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and was developed with the support of the VSBfonds, the museum’s partner in education. Videos from arttube.boijmans.nl are also posted on Art-Babble, the American equivalent of ArtTube, which became a collaborative partner in the project in 2010.