{"id":2068202,"date":"2026-07-29T20:24:05","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T17:24:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2068202"},"modified":"2026-07-29T20:24:05","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T17:24:05","slug":"harvard-art-museums-used-ai-to-animate-painting-for-marketing-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2068202","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Art Museums Used AI to Animate Painting for Marketing Campaign"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tThe Harvard Art Museums, a consortium of three institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tested out a marketing campaign aimed at increasing visitor engagement and membership that makes use of generative AI in order to animate a 18th-century painting in its collection.<\/p>\n

\n\tJohn Connolly, the director of marketing for the Harvard Art Museums, and Julian De Freitas, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, recently spoke about the initiative on Open Call<\/em>, a podcast produced by the Harvard Business Review <\/em>and hosted by Brian Kenny HBS\u2019s chief marketing and communications officer.<\/p>\n

\n\tDe Freitas\u2019s research \u201caddresses questions about how consumers perceive, adopt, and interact with AI systems,\u201d Kenny says. For the case study, which De Freitas published earlier this year, he and his team created a talking video version of Fran\u00e7ois Boucher\u2019s Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour<\/em>, a 1750 portrait of one of French king Louis XV\u2019s mistresses, as well as a chatbot that people could have a conversation with. The video version of the episode includes a short snippet of the animation. <\/p>\n

\n\tIntroducing the episode, Kenny asks if subjecting the Boucher portrait to this type of generative AI, \u201cwould it help people connect with art or distract from it? Could AI broaden engagement without compromising authenticity? And who gets to decide what an artwork would say?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe adds, \u201cThis case is about far more than a marketing experiment. It\u2019s about innovation versus stewardship, technology versus interpretation, and how institutions rooted in history navigate a rapidly changing future.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the interview, De Frietas says the campaign was beta-tested with some participants receiving one version of the AI instantiation, and others receiving the other. The museum hasn\u2019t officially rolled it out as a public campaign, and it\u2019s currently not accessible on the museum\u2019s website or social media channels, though, as Connolly teases in the podcast, \u201cIt could suddenly drop.\u201d (Connolly declined to comment further on the project to ARTnews<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd what did the participants make of the campaign? Connolly says, \u201cThere was some positive feedback. There was some negative. The negative feedback generally fell with the perception of AI out there. \u2026 That was the problem. But people did appreciate what we were trying to do and were blown away by the technology itself. And some people have found it funny, good old-fashioned humor.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Fran\u00e7ois Boucher\u2019s original 1750 painting, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour<\/em>, in all its glory\u2014sans AI. <\/span>\u00a9 President and Fellows of Harvard College<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDe Freitas says one main takeaway from working on this project was that, in the context of an art museum, a certain level of sensitivity toward people\u2019s concerns around AI is required. \u201cYou can\u2019t just assume that because it worked in that other domain, it\u2019s going to work here,\u201d he says, noting that people likely won\u2019t respond to the use of AI if it comes off as performative or a cost-cutting measure. \u201cWhat they want to see is that you\u2019re doing something that you really couldn\u2019t do without AI and that it\u2019s adding some real value,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also says that initially they faced internal pushback from curators who were \u201cconcerned with representing the artwork accurately as the artist might have wanted it to be perceived\u201d; conservators who \u201cwant to preserve the artwork exactly as it is\u201d; and art historians who \u201care worried about this idea of losing the skill to be able to analyze art and talk about it, which is also resonating with broader societal concerns around how AI is going to lead to de-skilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDe Freitas explains that he first became interested in partnering with a museum because \u201cI had a sneaking suspicion that by studying an organization that preserves history and tradition, we might learn something broader about these types of questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor his part, Connolly says that from a marketing perspective he was interested in working with AI to \u201cpush and flip [people\u2019s] perceptions\u201d of museums as hushed environments that not everyone might easily feel welcomed at. He adds, \u201cHow do you engage without tipping over something else?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith this marketing goal, Connolly says, \u201cThe goal here was to use AI to bring people closer to art basically. And to also maybe do something a little unexpected because Julian says museums are evolving, so we should evolve as [we] market the museums.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Harvard Art Museums\u2019 collection holds over 250,000 objects, and it reopened in 2014 after a renovation that brought all three institutions under one roof. At that time, the museum also returned to being admission free. \u201cThere\u2019s such pressure on museums to bring in visitors to generate revenue and also build a membership base, which is a challenge now for us because admission price was a membership benefit that went away. We face that now as a new healthy challenge that we\u2019re embracing,\u201d Connolly says.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPrice is a barrier when we\u2019re talking about accessibility,\u201d Connolly adds. \u201cSo that was a big move for us. And then from a marketing perspective, we had a new challenge of sometimes free can equate to lesser. So we were out there trying to beat the drum that we are not lesser.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tDe Freitas adds, \u201cNow this isn\u2019t just an artwork that exists several centuries ago that\u2019s stiff and unapproachable, but it\u2019s talking to me in an accent and I can ask it questions. And so it makes it approachable. Related to that idea is more broadly this idea of democratizing art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOne way to go about that, Connolly says, is that this AI approach could \u201cdeepen someone\u2019s understanding that they will want to move to the next level of understanding with that object\u201d and even turn them into a repeat visitor the museum. He adds, \u201cI really subscribe to the whole Oscar Wilde thing that art should be playful. There\u2019s a lot of truth telling in art, but it should be playful too.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/File.jpg?w=1024″] The Harvard Art Museums, a consortium of three institutions in Cambridge, Massachusetts, tested out a marketing campaign aimed at increasing visitor engagement and membership that makes use of generative AI in order to animate a 18th-century painting in its collection. John Connolly, the director of marketing for the Harvard Art Museums, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-2068202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2068202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2068202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2068202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2068202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2068202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}