 |
 |
I wrote this message the other day but it seems to keep getting held up... ---- I think you have a point Manu, about audience outreach. Eno's 'paintings' (which we endured here in the north of England in his exhibition at BALTIC) being shown in SL strikes me as similar to the Arts Council having a myspace page - colonising a space for marketing/visibility purposes, without always engaging with the network of users/subscribers related to it. I'm not sure what the 'boomerang back' into real life is. Eno says he wants it out of the gallery where few can see it, and yet visitor numbers at places like BALTIC are certainly not on the 'few' end of the scale, neither are they outside the windows of Selfridges department store, where the 'paintings' were shown beforehand. It might not be about few people seeing it in a gallery as much as few galleries now offering to show it? In any case, I think the Eno project is an example of what Patrick called a virtualisation of 2d art, aiming for that 'magnification of perspective' that Patrick pointed out SL provides. There was a wide-ranging discussion about SL on the IDC /Collaboration list that Trebor Scholz runs back in February, but there they seemed to agree that the interesting thing about it was how it could be seen as "a model for civic participation and cultural production" - namely for community initiatives. Using it as another 'distribution' means for already existant real world art doesn't quite seem as meaningful. To move the conversation slightly: we've seen some interesting examples of curators and artists generating activities within the SL community (opening a gallery, hosting residencies, etc); what is the role of the curator in these environments? How are they different to real life curatorial task? Patrick mentioned his curatorial efforts on myspace last year (the summer of myspace project) and Rob L is 'curating' a project on facebook; I was shocked to discover there is not a single curator curating a 'channel' of video art on YouTube (can this be true? can anyone name one?). Any thoughts? Sarah