 |
 |
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/ --- *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)