October/November 2010 Theme of the Month: The Jury is Out!
This month on CRUMB we look at the curatorial role of filtering and
selection, and how the online world continues to change what the term
curating has come to stand for.
The Guggenheim Museum has just announced its longlist for its YouTube
Play Biennial of Creative Video, and On October 21, 2010, up to 20
videos selected by the jury of experts* will be presented on
youtube.com/play and at a celebration at the Guggenheim Museum in New
York, with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in
Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice (http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/
interact/participate/youtube-play). In their advertising for this
project, curator Nancy Spector comments that the project is about
"how to reach an audience" and that the Guggenheim doesn't "create a
hierarchy among mediums...." (which is just as well because we're not
sure yet quite how "creative video" differs from video art and videos
distributed online). The Guggenheim's accompanying blog, The Take
(http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/interact/participate/youtube-play/
the-take/play/3574-the-take-what-and-why) seeks to illuminate the
process and discuss digital content, online video and the like.
In December of last year, CRUMB members attended a symposium in the
Netherlands organised by the Graphic Design Museum excitedly titled
"me and you and everyone we know is a curator" (http://
www.graphicdesignmuseum.nl/en/events/calendar/symposium-me-you-and-
everyone-we-know-is-a-curator/455). The symposium was about "looking
for quality in a messy world; more specifically about looking for
notions, ideas and ways of working in online culture, and asking
ourselves how these could be applied / assessed / made into
qualitative content in the offline world (and vice versa)." At the
symposium Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, reduced the
notion of curating to simply gatekeeping and following his keynote
most of the discussions about curating were limited to the editorial/
selection/quality-control aspects of the profession.
The online blog VVORK, http://www.vvork.com, organised by Oliver
Laric and others, continues to garner fans and result in offline real-
world exhibitions due to its brilliant take on informal research
online, displaying images of artworks which take the bloggers fancy,
'tagged' with just title, year, artist and link but no comment.
So how do you reconcile the often-assumed most important part of a
curator's job - wielding personal choices in the name of quality -
with the ways in which art research has changed with online tools,
online art and the online distribution of other art forms such as video?
(This discussion may be completely overshadowed here in the UK later
in October when the Government's spending review details are released
and we see exactly how processes of selection in the arts and culture
are enforced.)
Meantime, confirmed respondents this month include (with others to be
introduced as the discussion goes on):
Hanne Mugaas, curatorial associate at the Guggenheim Museum, manages
the blog The Take and is part of the team organising the YouTube Play
biennial. http://www.hanne-mugaas.com
Sophie Krier, designer, filmmaker, writer and organiser of the
conference Me, You, And Everyone We Know Is A Curator. Her ICI blog
is at http://www.sophie-krier.blogspot.com/
Ele Carpenter, lecturer in Curating at Goldsmith's College, London
and CRUMB research alumni. Goldsmith's is one of the named partners
in the Guggenheim/YouTube Play project. http://
www.eleweekend.blogspot.com/
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*The YouTube Play jury is comprised of: Laurie Anderson; Animal
Collective, featuring Deakin (Josh Dibb), Geologist (Brian Weitz),
and Panda Bear (Noah Lennox); Darren Aronofsky; Douglas Gordon; Ryan
McGinley; Marilyn Minter; Takashi Murakami; Shirin Neshat; Stefan
Sagmeister; Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Nancy Spector (Jury Chair)
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