If we want to discuss the merits of these new attempts to open museum practices to the public, these video forms of the glass-windowed lab, we must first look at their content. One of the most notable features of these videos is the conservators’ depth of explanation and their acknowledgment of their audiences. For example, in both the videos, “Conserving a Eurovision Dress”⁷ by the V&A and “The Restoration of Ave Maria”⁸ by Baumgartner, the conservators explain subjects such as why they are using bare hands rather than using gloves, a topic often commented on by viewers. Notably, these YouTube videos provide this opportunity for conservators to explain themselves, which contrasts with some of the struggles faced by Suzanne Thomassen-Krauss of the American National History Museum’s Star-Spangled Banner project in which conservators could only be observed by the public and not explain themselves in turn.⁹ She describes having to instruct conservators to wear scrubs during conservation as visitors would be watching through the glass walls of the lab and held a particular idea of what conservation should look like. Here, the medium of YouTube videos, in which a conservator can narrate their process to the viewer, and cuts can be made to show specific techniques, makes sharing with the public more candid and straightforward. In an address to the viewer in the V&A Eurovision Dress video, the conservator carefully breaks down the materials she uses, including insect pins and why they are used to secure beadwork. Similarly, in another V&A video, “Conserving a PJ Harvey Costume,” the conservator explains the proper use of soft arms in the sleeves of historical garments.¹⁰ In Baumgartner’s “Ave Maria” video, the creator explains his use of an isolation layer to protect the original painting from his interventions and render them reversible. In all these examples, the conservator not only lets the viewer see the process of conservation but also explains its intricacies and provides insider knowledge. In this aspect, we can locate these videos’ real potential for renegotiating the relationship between digital museum visitors and the institution. To assume that just because viewers can comment, like, or share—because they can “participate”—that they are included in the museum’s work would be problematic; in agreement with what has been said by Barney, Kidd, and others, we cannot assume that digital media’s interactivity equals inclusion or being heard. Instead, I suggest that we must locate the more potentially radical potential of this kind of video in how they give viewers agency through providing the transparency their audience is owed by explaining the techniques of the museum’s inner sanctums: the conservation lab and its collections.

As I have established, much has been said about the flaws of picturing a participatory, open digital sphere that will open the doors of the museum to never-before-seen kinds of public inclusion. But, there has been little attention paid to how mediums such as YouTube provide access and transparency, for the public to conservation practices. As conservator Maria Grammatikou writes, conservation is not “a de facto interesting subject that can aid in redefining a museum whatever the circumstances”;¹¹ exposing the museum’s inner workings to the public does not inherently equal public interest or public inclusion in the institution. Yet, careful interpretation of conservation, placed in context with the object and its story, draws in the visitor, even if only superficially during their time spent in the gallery or watching videos on YouTube. In the Star-Spangled Banner conservation, Thomassen-Krauss notes that the reason for the mass popularity of the exhibit was that the “visiting public wanted personal contact; they wanted to have an intimate experience.”¹² Ian Mclure makes a similar observation when writing about exhibits put on by Cambridge and Yale University centered on the conservation process and the many uncertainties and instances of trial and error in its history and present. Mclure notes that visitors wanted these exhibitions to become permanent, significant considering many of the objects on display needed preservation work to remain stable in their current state, and yet it was this liminal, “opened up” state of objects under conservation that drew in the public.¹³ One vital way transparency and accountability to the public can be achieved is through providing informed access to our collections and how our institutions intend to care for them through conservation. We must locate the success of these YouTube ASMR videos in this context of didactic access and visibility, not in the ongoing debates about the participatory condition of social media.

YouTube allows conservators to share their work directly with an audience, a digital museum visitor, who can access it anywhere.¹⁴ Kidd, in discussing transmedia experiences like these videos, describes how the transmission of narratives from inside the museum to the external public “implicate the audience in their telling—challenging them, acknowledging and problematising their agency.”¹⁵ While we must remain cautious of overstating the power of any media to change the long history of the museum’s role as a hegemonic, exclusionary, and colonial institution of knowledge production, these videos, which present conservation in an intimate manner that acknowledges its past failures and its ongoing uncertainties, have the potential to renegotiate the museum/visitor relationship and produce a new audience agency, amplified through, rather than produced by, mediums such as YouTube. It is also of note that these videos provide the viewer choice in how they engage with the museum’s collection—they are given the experience of looking at the object in a new way and engaging with it on their own time, in their own space. While staring at an object through a museum case, or even the glass windows of a see-through lab, determine a specific, externalized position for the viewer — always looking onto something but never experiencing it intimately — the visibility of the medium of YouTube offers a new kind of interaction in which the relationship between viewer and subject can still be negotiated and remains vitally unstable.¹⁶

While these ASMR YouTube videos might at first glance come off as just a fun gimmick, I believe they represent a unique recognition of what sorts of new media interventions might hold real potential for opening up the museum and offering greater agency to the public/the viewer. Instead of assuming what inherent democratizing participatory qualities a medium such as YouTube a museum can take advantage of, we must instead ask how we might use these platforms’ affordances in the ongoing process of sharing a more transparent and ultimately more participatory experience of conservation with the public.