Programmer and blogger Andy Baio thinks fans should commission work from their favorite artists (particularly through Kickstarter, where Baio is an adviser). His recent article for Wired is mostly about music and events, but micro-patronage could just as easily work for visual art. There are barriers in both cases—we’re talking about challenging entrenched power structures here! But why should wealthy patrons and board members have all the fun deciding which projects get funded? As an added bonus, fan-commissioned work would lend itself best to areas like public art, performance, video, and net art—exactly the kind of stuff that doesn’t sell to conventional collectors looking for trophy pieces. So, anyone want to go in on a Doug Wheeler with me?
Technology
Brendan Chilcutt’s Museum of Endangered Sounds wants to ensure you never forget the sound of your Nokia 3310 or the sound of fingers striking QWERTY keypads.
New York-based photographer John Clang uses Skype to make family portraits—the latest in a string of innovations by the Singapore-born artist.
Artists and students have long contemplated artwork with a sketchpad in hand, but over the weekend, artists and hackers took to the museum with 3-D printers instead.
Over on the Awl, Choire Sicha, “a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot,” sticks up for a job title at risk of being overrun by bloggers with inflated rhetoric (and self-importance):
Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it.
Also, note Greg Allen’s theory in the comments:
I always understood that this sense of “curation” came from retail, when people who were too overeducated to work in retail needed to be doing something besides buying and merchandising and window dressing.
The first one hundred days of Google+ saw more than 3.4 billion photographs uploaded onto the platform. This prompted Google to take its Art Project clout and launch its own student photo competition with a Google-sized grand prize: an exhibition at London’s Saatchi Gallery and an all-expenses-paid trip to anywhere in the world to shoot under the watchful eye of a professional photography coach.
A project five years in the making, Maya Lin’s latest (and last) memorial has finally gone public. Titled What is Missing?, the ambitious endeavor is based around an interactive website that is spreading awareness about environmental loss and sparking hope for change.
Marking the anniversary of his eighty-one-day detention by the Chinese government one year ago, dissident artist Ai Weiwei is letting us all in on the government’s twenty-four-hour surveillance of his every move. Ai has installed cameras throughout his home and studio—over his bed, at his desk, outside his door, in his courtyard—sending a twenty-four-hour livestream to weiweicam.com.
The Walker Art Center’s new website, www.walkerart.org, launched December 1, represents the most forward-thinking best practices in the museum field today. If you have even the slightest interest in contemporary art and culture, you’ll want to bookmark the website regardless of whether you live in Minneapolis, Minnetonka, or Mumbai. Before I jump into the specifics of the site, let’s take a look at how a medium-sized museum in the middle of a great, but relatively remote, city has leapt (in my estimation) to the forefront of the entire museum field.
Social Media at The Pace Gallery assembles a group of artists responding to the internet, whether as a way of bringing people together, as an aesthetic influence, or as a state of affairs to regard skeptically and even satirize. Social Media takes a long view that starts in the 1960s with Robert Heinecken (the show’s one pre-internet artist), who altered magazines like Time and Mademoiselle with his own collages and put them back on supermarket racks for others to stumble on. Since Heinecken, the idea of pulling from, responding to, and feeding back into the media has become more commonplace – Twitter, Tumblr, conceptual art video games, supercuts, and super supercuts attest to the prevalence of Heinecken’s media interventionism.
If YouTube cat videos now seems like a natural artistic medium and The Art of Video Games seems like a natural choice for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Cory Arcangel had something to do with it.
This past Saturday, digital arts champion and non-profit Rhizome held its second annual Seven on Seven conference at the New Museum. The premise is simple: seven artists and seven “technologists” – their term – pair up, and each team brainstorms, builds, and ships a project within 24 hours. High-profile artists Ryan Trecartin and Tauba Auerbach were involved in the inaugural Seven on Seven, and notably, this year the newly rebranded AOL was a major sponsor, an affirming move for the scrappy but well-recognized Rhizome that enabled participants to fold Microsoft Kinect gaming systems and Apple iPads into their work. (The event’s official hashtag was #AOL7on7; ironically, the basement auditorium in which the presentations were held had zero phone reception.) What transpired was a day full of surprising clashes and harmonies between the art and tech worlds.
