Factoid-Full DMA Dashboard Offers Real Time Museum Stats, But No Dirt

On Friday, the Dallas Museum of Art unveiled its new Dashboard website, offering the public access to real-time statistics on the Museum. They’re extensive, but not surprising, and laid out in such enormous blocks of space that it takes a lot of clicking and scrolling to view what, in the end, is a very limited amount of data. While no doubt promoting the appearance of institutional transparency, it’s more of a dull promotional tool; the site gives an up to the minute number for “Total Annual Spending on Employee Benefits” and “Total Size of the DMA’s Endowment,” there’s no stat on  “Number of Pending Lawsuits” or “Number of Drunk Artists Crashing in the Shrubbery,” or, less frivolously, “Mean Wages of All DMA Staff Expressed as a Proportion of Director’s Salary.”