Curating.info

Welcome to the August edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of curating-related things:

- I've finished writing a short report on the IKT (the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art) Congress that was held in Montreal in May. Have a read!

- This interview with João Ribas by Ceci Moss on Rhizome is a good read. Quote: "Curatorial practice, to me, is about mediating such frames in the end--different contexts, different readings, different publics."

- "Curator crowds" are all the rage it seems, I've blogged about them briefly before, and they keep cropping up. Recently the Brooklyn Museum of Art produced Click, a photography exhibit that was curated collaboratively by anyone who wanted to take part. Via Art Fag City, I took note of a link to an interview with Jennifer Blessing, curator of photography at the Guggenheim, who offers her thoughts on this phenomenon of "curator crowds". The interview is excellent food for thought.

- Just a reminder to my readers that I really enjoy getting your emails (seems most folks are too shy to comment publicly!). Keep them coming, and any suggestions you might have about what I have on offer here are much appreciated. So send me a note, and then turn off your computer and enjoy the rest of the summer!

Welcome to the July edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of things that caught my eye over the course of the previous month. Check it out:

- A new Curating.info Conversations e-book has been released! Download it now.

This edition of Curating.info Conversations is with Karen Gaskill, the Director and Curator of Interval, and a Researcher at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool. She is also currently completing her practice-based PhD in Digital Media and Social Practice at the Digital Research Unit, The University of Huddersfield. The interview with Karen covered topics ranging from getting outside of the white cube to the expanding role of the audience.

- I recently discovered a blog called "Sideshows", written by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy. Recently Ms Chong Cuy has been publishing some really interesting interviews with young curators in China and Hong Kong. Recent examples include an interview with Kate Fowle, International Curator at the Ullens Centre in Beijing, wherein the notion of what "international" practice is today is discussed, and the second interview in the series is with Zoe Butt, Director of International Programs at Long March Project in Beijing, China. Well worth a read!

- Ms Chong Cuy, author of Sideshows, asked Kate Fowle to elaborate a bit more on the meaning of her title of "International Curator". Similarly, in this article we find founding film curator of University of California San Diego's ArtPower!, Rebecca Webb, discussing the difficulty of a title like "Film Curator". "A lot of people – when I'm here, anyway – say, 'Oh, do you work in a library or something?'" Ms Webb says. As curators, we all know titles have power and meaning, and this is usually why it is important professionally to seek appropriate credit for the work you have done. These specialist titles that were created for Ms Fowle and Ms Webb are meant to indicate an area of expertise, however, it is clear that it remains confusing for some people (sometimes because they don't understand what curators do in the first place, other times because the notion behind the specialism is so new?). Nomenclature is no small thing. I'll simply wonder aloud here: what can be done to indicate specialisation without inducing confusion?

- CultureGrrl (among other outlets) reported on the "leave" taken by Curator and Deputy Director David Franklin of the National Galleries of Canada. For me, this news story raised several ethical questions. Among all of the very obvious questions around the obligations of the gallery to its employees and to its public, the next issue that arose for me was of Mr Franklin's privacy. Curator at the National Galleries of Canada is a prominent position, to be sure, but did Mr Franklin ever imagine that his decision to take extended leave (or to effectively leave his post) would be fodder for the national and international press? I'm not sure that he did. Whatever his reasons, he isn't appealing to the press to make a case against his employer -- yet -- so perhaps he should be left alone, and we should presume his colleagues are capable of continuing his work, until we hear a statement from Mr Franklin himself. Or do any readers here think otherwise?

Welcome to the June edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of things that caught my eye over the course of the previous month. It's a real jumble of stuff this month! Check it out:

- Firstly, this recent article in LA Weekly talks about MOCA’s Paul Schimmel and the concept of "curatorial ecstasy". Schimmel recounts a moment wherein he reflects on a mentor moving him "...very quickly from the idea of art museums being places that just maintained a history to the museum as a place where you define culture at the moment [...] It was a very activist, engaged approach, stemming from a belief that to begin to define what later will be understood as the history of your particular moment is one of the richest aspects of being a curator."

- I've just noticed that the Icebox in Philadelphia, USA takes curatorial proposals. It's also one of many curatorial proposals wherein it specifically requests that the curator be present for the installation. What it actually says is this: "Curators may not include their own work in the project/exhibition proposal and are expected to be involved in and on-site during the installation process." This statement leads me to two questions: (1) Have artist/curators not got the message yet that including their own work is beyond tacky?, and (2) Do curators feel they do not need to be involved and engaged in the installation process (possibly one of the most interesting moments in the manifestation of your curatorial concept, except in a few (obvious) cases)? I admire the Icebox folk for laying it on the line, but I have to say that confronting what should be clear points like these makes one wonder about that black, white, and grey area called ethics.

- Again on the notion of ethics, but with a different approach, I was intrigued by this post about intangible digital cultural heritage on iCommons: Sarah Kansa and her husband Eric Kansa head The Alexandria Archive Institute, an institution in digital open access for world cultural heritage. Sarah Kansa writes:

"There is no lack of digital content out there. Each community, institution or individual creating and sharing it needs to also take responsibility for preserving it. Currently, content isolated in silos stands the least chance of survival because of its inaccessibility and the lack of portability and re-usability of content. An open access (and open licensing and open standards) approach will go a long way towards preserving our digital cultural heritage in perpetuity, albeit a few years at a time."

Curators who are in the position of making or breaking accessibility to intangible cultural heritage surely feel this pressure. Are institutions supporting moves towards openness, or do curators have to take the lonely path of advocating this alone?

- I had a wonderful time at the IKT Congress in Montreal, and shortly will be posting a report on the Congress here, so keep your RSS readers and browsers poised at attention!

Welcome to the May edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of things that caught my eye over the course of the previous month. There are just two quick items this month, as a sort of "compare and contrast" exercise:

- In one of my web trawls, I found this lesson plan for teaching children what a curator does. I thought it was interesting to take a look at because despite high level discussions about the role of the curator, what emerges in more reductive definitions (for example, something that a child could understand in one short lesson) highlights what may or may not be a conventionally agreed aspect of the role. In this case I noted that beyond the obvious step of selecting work, the lesson plan includes a section on writing didactic texts for the student's imaginary audience, explaining their curatorial choices.

- Then over at Time Out New York, a timeline indicates some of the key tasks that the curators of the most recent Whitney Biennial performed. It obviously doesn't indicate all of the tasks that the curators completed, but unlike our lesson plan for kids, it doesn't mention writing, and meeting with artists and negotiating the media are highlighted.

These two short items provide glimpses into how the role of the curator and the key tasks within that role are presented and described to others, which might make us ask ourselves: What do I emphasise when I talk about curating a project to someone else, and what does that indicate about my favourite/least favourite aspects of the role?

Here's the April '08 edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of little news items in the realm of curating.

- The Whitney Biennial is generating the usual column inches. Of interest in the coverage of the Biennial is the ongoing commentary about the curators themselves, and their intentions. Jerry Saltz's recent column discusses the significance of their age: "I was thrilled that the Whitney was prepared to give itself over to young curators. [...] no sooner had Huldisch and Momin been named than Whitney director Adam Weinberg pulled back the reins, announcing that the two would be "overseen" by the museum’s chief curator, Donna De Salvo, and that they'd "work with" three older "advisers," Thelma Golden, Bill Horrigan and Linda Norden." A piece entitled "The Facebook Biennial" in NY Magazine, offers a detail-rich portrait of the two curators, from the ways their careers unfolded (apparently, Momin's highly planned, Huldisch's not as as much) to the technology in the room: "Momin pulls out an iPhone, Huldisch a battered Motorola".

- In a recent post on Tara Hunt's blog, she talks about the example of how the now-ubiquitous Post-It note came into being. (Stay with me, here.) Tara writes about the three personalities that were responsible for the Post-It note's success: the Creator, Catalyst, and Champion.

"...the Creator, Spencer Silver, had come up with the glue that makes the Post-It note work almost a decade before the Catalyst, Arthur Fry, found a use for the glue (keeping his church choir sheets staying put). But even then, it didn't even make it past corporate scrutiny until they found Champions: the people who were able to take the idea and sell it to others. [...] Creators are the inventors, the coders, the people who come up with a crazy idea. Quite often, though, they aren't able to connect that crazy idea with a real life issue to be solved. That's the Catalyst's job. Catalysts are really awesome at understanding real life applications of wacky ideas. They are connectors. But Catalysts aren't always good at marketing their ideas nor can they replicate themselves, so they need Champions (many of them) to take that awesome application of the wacky invention and spread the word. The three types of people behind innovation are necessary to make ideas come alive and spread."

And so, in the cultural domain, are curators catalysts or champions? A bit of both? Are they also sometimes the creator? I found this example to be an interesting way to think about the ways that the role of the curator can shift and requires a wide range of skills and roles to be played.

- And now, for a little light bedtime reading... A recent paper by London-based think-tank Demos about cultural learning provides food for thought. "In the context of recent government announcements about cultural education, Demos today challenged cultural professionals and educationalists to provide a new and coherent direction for creative learning and for encouraging creativity through culture. Culture and Learning: Towards a New Agenda, a consultation paper written by John Holden, is published today to invite debate and responses." Demos is a very interesting think tank, I recommend you browse their full collection of cultural papers at their website.

First of the month again... even with an extra day, February seemed short! Here's the March '08 edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of little news items in the realm of curating.

• A fascinating article on the state of museums and galleries in China on ARTnews notes that a concern in the face of explosive growth "...has been the absence of training programs for museum professionals in China, a country where the term "curator" did not exist ten years ago. Even now, there is only one program in curatorial studies, run by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, which is graduating its first class this year. "In China, we didn't have degrees such as arts management or curatorial studies, so most of the museum directors were originally artists," says Fan Di'an, who like many directors in China got his position through political appointment." The artist/curator model is well-established, particularly in North America, and so the reaction to a similar model emerging (albeit under quite different circumstances) is one to keep an eye on.


• If new media, Internet art and networked art are your thing, there's lots of good reading at this page at the BAM website, with several downloadable documents detailing conversations and interviews with curators, artists and directors by Karen Annemie Verschooren. The interview with Christiane Paul, Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney, is particularly fascinating and candid in its description of the early days of exhibiting new media artwork in a prominent museum.


• Thomas Krens is leaving the Guggenheim, and this act has sparked a lot of reflection on his years at the helm. Charlie Finch on artnet.com characterizes the influence of Krens on curatorial practice as "...turning everything into an art that was at once contemporary and exchangeable in ever increasing increments of value." It's a very critical standpoint that also claims that "...the land of Krens evoked the carnival and the circus. Whether showing Spanish painting gems, Aztec war toys, garments or bikes, Krens' vision included the kitchen sink, the golden bidet and everything in between." From that statement out of the USA, let's jump (gently) across the pond for a moment. The new Director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny, made a statement saying that as far as he was concerned, the era of the big, sexy blockbuster is over, and Guardian writer Jonathan Jones discusses how the blockbuster itself is not to blame, but that one should blame "sloppy curating - curating that is addicted to short cuts, allergic to the years of research and negotiations it takes to put on a really good exhibition." Food for thought.


• Finally, the New York Times reports that "nine months after taking over, Jeffrey Weiss has resigned as director of the Dia Art Foundation, saying he had realized he was not cut out for the job." Mr Weiss says: "It took me too far away from curatorial and scholarly work [...] I had an idea that being director of Dia would be different because it is such a small place. [...] My hope is to return to curatorial and scholarly work, but right now I'm taking a breath." It'll be interesting to see both who Dia hires next and what Mr Weiss does next, and serves as a point of reflection on where a curatorial career can be said to "terminate" -- does a curator need to stay in jobs expressly about curating, and leave museum/gallery direction to those with deeper interests in business/administration?

Welcome to February's Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of interesting tidbits that have captured my attention recently.

• I found this post about the "Video Vortex: Curating Online Video" symposium in Amsterdam really interesting, especially towards the end where there is this quotation: "...there was a short panel discussion about the role of the curator. [...] Hierarchies are changing and curators have to respond to those things. From the audience comes the remark that curators were the middle person between the artist and his audience. This position is threatened due to 2.0. Maybe it's a solution to look at the curator's role to help to rate and analyze the work. This would make a shift instead of being an audience seeker he would become an intellectual."


• "Who gets to tell the story?" is a great question that Rebecca Durkin asks on the Burke Museum blog. Ms Durkin expresses concern about photographs of Native Americans taken by a white person who "felt he was documenting a "vanishing" race" being displayed simultaneously alongside an exhibition of Native American artifacts and taped interviews. Ms Durkin says: "I'm excited to see the shows open this weekend and compare the stories the two shows are telling. Will This Place Called Home serve as a test of sorts for the authenticity of the images in Peoples of the Plateau? And how will the historic photos in Peoples of the Plateau inform the context with which we look at the cultural materials in This Place Called Home?" In this case, it seems that the Burke Museum is valiantly attempting to let more than one story be told at the same time, giving the viewing public some space to reach their own conclusions.


• There are some very critical and challenging statements being made in a text "Terminal Souvenirs: What is wrong with curatorial practise today" by Maia Damianovic, a critic and independent curator based in New York. The whole text is excellent reading, but I thought I'd excerpt some quotations that were very resonant for me.

  Too often, we can discern in current practice the insidious an implacable macula of conservative constraint trying to disguise itself behind critical, ideological and political posturing. Our theories and our practices, for the most part, simply do not match, Over and over again, we are confronted by didactic, pedagogic and formulaic curatorial mechanisms that glamorize a gamut of dull, dry or safe conceptual choices. Are the mechanisms surrounding curating so elaborately enshrined that we are confronted with a symptom of overwhelming conservatism, of being stuck in the pursuit of easy prescriptions, but also perks and rewards? In any case, curating today opens to a whole field of different investments, that seamlessly slip into the arena of politics, power and finances at the mercy of all their jumbled forces. But, politics and ideology can also become packaged commodities.

  Why are we so complicit? A transformation of curating and exhibiting today could amount to an ethical and political change of destination. A change of destination that would eschew comfort, self-gratification and success, and open itself to insecurity and anxiety; moving from protected to vulnerable contexts. lt could also move from pragmatics to poetics.

  A little confusion and chaos would work wonders. Why not swim against the current a little more; against the large survey show, 'against curating as a formula of success by default. Perhaps the curating and exhibiting of art today should be anxious, insecure practices.

  
  (via)
  

Happy new year! I hope your holiday was a good and restful one. I was so rested I nearly didn't get this out in time... but here it is - the latest Pick 'N Mix!

• "Top ten" and other summary lists were thick on the ground as 2007 closed out. A few of my favourites in the art realm are New York Magazine's 2007 Culture Awards, the Guardian's Top Ten list (including a few turkeys and special awards), 2007's highlights according to the New York Times, and the top 100 cultural highlights of the year, selected by the CBC. Also, a last minute addition - check out curator Hans Ulrich Obrist's answer to the question "What have you changed your mind about?" at edge.org.


• MC2 is a really smart project by two very interesting curators. Mark Coetzee (Miami) and Mark Clintberg (Montreal) use SMS messages to exchange information and formulate a text around art exhibitions that they saw together. Crediting writing to "MC", their shared initials, they produce probing texts on contemporary art that also question notions of authorship. The final texts are then distributed via the web on their project website.


• I don't want to give you the impression that I am obsessed by curators producing projects in hotels, but... I couldn't resist mentioning a recent "curating contest" that took place in L'hôtel La Louisiane in Paris. Fourteen curators were each randomly assigned one room in the hotel, given a month to ponder the concept and the space, and then given ten days to mount an exhibition in that room. You can see the full list of participants and more details at the website of the gallerist who devised the contest, Olivier Robert.

It's the first of the month again! Hard to believe it's November already. Time for the November edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of bite-sized items that have captured my attention recently.

• "CURATE OR DIE" is the title of a series of discussions at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.
  "The focus of classical museum work seems to have changed in the past fifteen years. The balance of exhibiting, collecting, researching, and conserving activities has shifted towards a marked concentration on exhibiting. Both the public eye and possible sponsors tend to privilege the spectacular potential inherent in exhibitions. In collaboration with the Berlin-based Bureau des Arts Plastiques, KW Institute for Contemporary Art is planning a series of panel debates addressing these and related questions. Curate or Die seems to be the only possible future perspective."
  The two remaining talks in the series are taking place November 29 and December 10 at K-W.


• A recent article by the Washington Post asks the question: Is There a Future for Old-Fashioned Museums? It focuses primarily on the story of the "Newseum", a new museum being erected in downtown Washington, while a copy is simultaneously being "built" in the online platform of Second Life. It has not yet been decided if this virtual copy of the museum will go fully public, but if it does, it will allow a global audience to have some experience of the museum. The article explores the notions of emotional attachment and collective experience that we have when visiting physical museums, which pose a series of questions as to the similarities and differences to the way we share experiences online. As well, the article looks at the ways success is measured for museums and how this is changing.
  
  

  Maxwell L. Anderson, CEO of the Indianapolis Museum of Art says: "The root of the problem is that there is no longer an agreed-upon method of measuring achievement. Half a century ago, art museums were largely measured by a yardstick comparable to that applied to libraries of the time: the size and importance of their collections." But today, he argued, art museums increasingly "are to their detriment places that privilege entertainment over learning."
  
  This year, in the journal Curator, he argued, "The message has been conspicuously entrepreneurial: we can be compared with theme parks, so we matter."
  
  He calls for measures of success that focus on the visitor's experience of the "resonance and wonder" of artworks -- "an intangible sense of elation -- a feeling that a weight was lifted."

  
  Anderson's words remind us that while some of these buildings may be architectural or technological marvels, what really impacts audiences is personal and collective perceptions of the contents of museums - in other words, the fruits of labour by artists and curators.
  


• An old webcast came to light via bellebyrd's blog: "Global Curating in the 21st Century" was a panel discussion held in 2003 at the Walker Art Center, as part of "How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age".
  
  "Five visual arts curators discuss art in a global context. Participants are: Kathy Halbreich, Director, Walker Art Center; Vishakha Desai, Senior Vice President/Director, Galleries and Cultural Programs, The Asia Society; Hou Hanru, Paris-based, independent curator-critic; Paulo Herkenhoff, independent curator and critic (Sao Paulo); and Latitudes exhibition curator Philippe Vergne."
  
  You can access the stream of the panel discussion by clicking here.


• File under slightly unusual curatorial careers: being a curator of a hotel's art collection. Jennifer Phelps is the curator at the Chambers, a luxury hotel in downtown Minneapolis, USA.
  
  

  "My first job was to catalog everything and use the floor plans to place it in the rooms," Phelps said. "That was fun, like a puzzle, because there are 60 rooms, and each got two or three pieces, depending on whether it was a suite or a single. "
  
  One recent addition is a bronze sculpture by British artist Gavin Turk. It sits in a hallway near the hotel's banquet rooms and looks like a pile of black plastic garbage bags stuffed to overflowing with trash. It's Phelps' job to tamp down the ire of outraged hotel guests who stumble upon it en route to a soiree.
  
  "They call up, furious, because they're having a party and what are we doing with garbage bags dumped in the hallway?" she said. "When I tell them it's art, they burst out laughing."

  
  

A lighthearted note to end this month's Pick 'N Mix on, I'm sure you'll agree!

Welcome to the October edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of bite-sized items that have captured my attention recently.

• The "five questions" format for an interview seems to be as popular as ever. Here are two that have caught my eye: five questions for Matthew Higgs, guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and five questions for Ou Ning, founding curator of the Get It Louder exhibition, a four-city showcase that explores the increasingly blurry line between art and design in China.


• This little morsel is stretching the mandate of this blog a little, but I thought I'd include it here anyway: William Gibson, godfather of cyberspace, recently (and very briefly) mused in an interview on the idea of "curating" via eBay. As Gibson says: "Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. eBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. eBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement." The interview is available on the Washington Post website. (via ExhibiTricks)


• This UNESCO position paper gives a good overview on how the role of the museum in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage was considered at the expert meeting that took place in 2004. The paper deals with this subject in very plain English and raises some very interesting points. One of the most thought-provoking segments for me was this bit:
  

  Museums are already, in this sense, involved with living heritage: collections that look dead to us in their depots and showcases may be very much alive to descendents widely separated in space and time from this material and conventional ways of dealing with it. And here is a conundrum: if the dead collections in museums (dead, anyway, except to the few who can lay hands on them!) can 'come alive' under certain circumstances, can currently ‘living cultural heritage’ die (inadvertently) if it is musealised in a certain way? What does it mean to speak of ‘safeguarding’ living heritage when the outcome of musealisation is so unpredictable?

  
  


• "How Many More Curators Will Leave the Trade?" cries the headline at the Art Newspaper. The article discusses a perceived "brain drain" from the curatorial roles at museums, because of low salaries and increasing pressure to fundraise and deliver outside of job descriptions. True or false? Read the article, and you be the judge. This article is no longer available, because the Art Newspaper keeps their archived articles for paying subscribers only. It appears that even an abstract of the article is unavailable without paying - how disappointing.

Welcome to the September edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of bite-sized items that have caught my eye recently.

• An interesting article about the curating scene in Singapore recently appeared online. In it, Ahmad Mashadi notes that the curator's role has become more complex, becoming implicated in marketing and sponsorship, where previously it might have been more focused on "research, growth and display" of a museum's collection. The article also discusses the emerging trend of the artist-curator in Singapore.


• Jerry Saltz writes an excellent article on the alchemy of curating, in which he makes several bold (but astute) statements:
  "...curating is becoming less of a dark art and more of a science or profession."
  "The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three."
  "...one of the first rules of curating should be "Stop Making Sense."'
  The article goes on to dissect the curatorial strategies and pitfalls in the big three: Documenta, Venice Biennale, and Münster Sculpture Project.


• It's rare that one has occasion to read a line like this: "No, the most interesting part of the show is that excruciating pile of false, overweening enthusiasms that make up that curatorial statement, not for what they say, necessarily, but for what they assume." In Artfag's "Toronto Manifesto", we get these kinds of critical, nearly brutal, statements and so much more. If you have anything invested in the Toronto art scene, this piece will certainly interest you; if you don't, it's worth a read anyway, as many of the observations made in this manifesto are universally applicable - such as this note on the importance of recently-graduated artists: "gallerists in New York and Los Angeles keep a keen eye on the goings on of the graduate students that are pumped out every year. Any art scene needs a constant supply of fresh blood, and most gallerists and buyers know exactly where to find it." (Discovered via Sally McKay's blog.)

Welcome to the August edition of Pick 'N Mix.

• Out of all the online coverage of the "Grand Tour", I found Petra Chevrier and Cheryl Rondeau's documentation of their cycling tour of these mammoth art events one of the most entertaining sources. Art Ride 2007 is a terrific first-hand account of this confluence of art events, with lots of video footage to spice it up. Check it out!



• John Szarkowski, named "the single most important curator that photography has ever had" by Vanity Fair in 2005, has died at age 81 from complications arising from a stroke. Credited with launching the careers of Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, Szarkowski was the Director of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991, and was also a highly influential critic.



• The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate in Sofia, Bulgaria is looking for proposals for its "Curator Season". Exhibition and event proposals must arrive by September 30, 2007, so check out their website for more details, and give yourself plenty of time (it's summer after all, so everything moves a little slower!) to respond to the call.

Welcome to the July edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of bite-sized items that have caught my eye recently.

• If you aren't already on the CC mailing list, perhaps you should join. "[CC] "circulating contexts--curating media/net/art" is a slightly moderated mailing list as part of a series of experimental long-term research projects hosted by the Vienna-based organisation CONT3XT.NET. From June 1st to August 31st, 2007 five common topics will be the starting point for discussions around current tendencies in the curation of (New) Media and Internet Art. Excerpts of the contributions to the mailinglist will be published in a catalogue, presented in October 2007." Recently, there was an interesting discussion on notions of how curatorial models might be democratised and how the term "curator" may be being stretched to its limit. Sign up to the list by going to the list info web page.


• Blogumenta, unlike the art-world behemoth that is Documenta, is an un-curated, open exhibition space within Facebook, the online networking site that is taking the 18-29 demographic (and beyond) by storm. It raises questions about what the response to the "grand tour" could and should be - should the pendulum swing to the other extreme, in which no one claims a curatorial credit?


• A new website in Canada aims to offer ways for emerging curators and administrators to connect with each other. The Emerging Arts Professional network has articles, interviews, and a podcast that touch upon a wide range of topics relevant to individuals in the field. The most recent interview, with Luminato festival director Janice Price, provides many quotable gems, including: "If we can’t have fun doing this, we should all go home."

Welcome to the June edition of Pick 'N Mix, my monthly annotated list of bite-sized items that have caught my eye recently.

• Art fair season is upon us, though many collectors and curators seem to lament the lack of desirable objects to purchase, even at one of the biggest of them all, Art Basel: ""We don't buy much at the fair,'' said Todd Levin, who oversees the $100 million Sender Collection from New York, in a telephone interview. "Art fairs have morphed into a 'fairorama' and consumer paradise or hell that is not conducive to spending time to investigate a work.''"


• Cynthia Beth Rubin adroitly notes on the iDC mailing list that there is in fact, plenty of quality work to collect, there is simply perhaps not enough that is 'on trend'. Rubin writes: "We know that we live in a curated time, a time in which the interest comes not from the artists but from those who envision and organize exhibits around conceptual movements that they either identify or invent (who knows?). If work falls outside of the parameters of the curatorial mission, then it is not shown. If work is too similar to already selected work, it is not shown. But if work goes too long without being shown, it fall out of view of the curators, and it is difficult to resurrect it." Rubin is reacting to this article in the New York Times, about the hot (or not, if you are an ambitious collector?) market at Art Basel.


• The word "curator" is increasingly coming to mean someone whose taste you trust to sift through mountains of blog posts every day, and present you with the golden nuggets (which is a little bit like what I am doing with these "Pick 'N Mix" posts, I suppose). Björn Jeffery at Good Old Trend explains why he believes journalists need to move from being gatekeepers to being "curators" in the this sense: "Imagine an art curator running a gallery for instance. You don’t go to the gallery because you necessarily know the artist exhibiting, but you trust the curator enough to go anyway. You respect his/her taste and choices enough to check it out." Being trustworthy was always part of being a journalist, and now with this expanding definition of curator, journalists are also expected to have taste.


• A rose by another name would smell as sweet, right? Perhaps, but that hasn't stopped the powers that be at the Museum of Television in New York City from renaming it so that it will no longer be known as a museum. “'Museum' was not a word that tests really well with the under-30 and 40-year-olds,” especially in the context of radio and television, Pat Mitchell, the museum's chief executive said. Henceforth, it will be known as the Paley Center for Media, after the late CBS founder William S. Paley.


• And finally, tank.tv has put some interviews with curators from their Fresh Moves project online.

Let's start May off right with another Pick 'N Mix!

• At the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the patrons are invited to curate the show. “I’m hoping that this discussion will shed more light on the institution and give us a better sense of who our audience is,” Acting Curator Christopher Cook said. “I see this as a way of building relationships." The project ends when the walls are full.


• The inimitable Momus asks: "Why not give us little video tours to entice us to visit, sneak previews of shows, interviews with artists, curators and docents?", among other relevant questions directed at art museums. I'm with you, brother (though he does note some museums are leading the way).


• In case you were wondering, here are some short profiles on the curatorial team behind the Seattle Art Museum.


• AddArt is a Firefox browser plug-in that allows you to block advertisements on a web page, and replace them with works of art, from a curated database. I'm looking forward to the the final launch of this one!


• If you are in London on the 10th of May, you may be interested to drop in on the Thursday Club, which features Kelli Dipple, Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow, Armin Medosch, and Janis Jefferies speaking about curating interdisciplinary arts. It runs from 6-8.30 PM in the seminar rooms at the Ben Pimlott Building, New Cross, SE14 6NW, and it's free. Here's hoping someone blogs the conversation!