Curate Award: Anyone’s Curatorial Project Can Be a Reality (If Their Idea Is Good Enough)

Curate Award, “a global search for curatorial talent,” co-presented by Fondazione Prada & Qatar Museums Authority, was announced this morning in Venice as thousands flood into the city for the 55th Venice Biennale. Curate is a broadly defined competition that’s open to the public to apply. Whoever submits the most compelling idea in a two-minute video will have their project become a reality!

The award was announced by Jean-Paul Engelen, Head of Public Art, Qatar Museums Authority; Astrid Welter, Project Director, Fondazione Prada; Abdellah Karroum, newly appointed Director of Mathaf (Modern & Contemporary Art Museum in Doha); and Serpentine Gallery’s Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is one of the Curate judges. (L to R in the above photo)Speaking about the evolution of who’s played the role of curator over the years, Obrist hoped that the Curate Award might push it further. “There are relatively few curating prizes which allow the project to become real,” he said.

For inspiration, Curate Award shared artist Bill Viola’s idea for “The World as a Living Organism” on their Facebook page:

A curator to send a selected group of artists, musicians, poets and dancers into outer space to orbit our planet so that they may see themselves and the entire world as one single living organism and share their experiences through their creations.

Looks like this one is wide open folks. I would’ve said the sky was the limit, but if Bill Viola’s idea is any indication… Good luck curatin’!

Deadline December 31, 2013. More info and application details: http://curateaward.com

2012 in Review – Some Unwanted Search Traffic

Hahahahaha…

Some visitors came searching, mostly for museum nerd, ass women, brooklyn museum, museumnerd, and museum websites.

Writing about “bad ass women” museum directors seems to have gotten me some unwanted search traffic. Oh well.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

James Huang The Gospel of Skills at AUXILIARY PROJECTS

Great “Rough Cuts” by James Kalm on James Huang’s brilliant sculptures at Auxiliary Projects in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Watch more on MUSEUMNERD TELEVISION here: http://bit.ly/nerdovision

[Eyebeam Presents] #ArtsTech: Privacy/Identity

Copied and pasted (a bit remixed) from here: http://www.meetup.com/Arts-Culture-and-Technology/events/81330672/

In the age of “transparency” and big data, questions around privacy and identity loom large. While some people want to create what are essentially “driver’s licenses for the web” that will link back to your personal identity wherever you go online (i.e. Google+, Facebook profiles), others warn of the costs associated with giving up our right to anonymity and what this might mean for free speech and censorship online. This is a BIG topic that affects all of us as denizens of the web, and in this meetup we’ll merely be skimming the surface. Our panel of speakers will present a variety of perspectives on these issues to help get the conversation started.

• Tuesday, September 18, 2012 | 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM

• EYEBEAM | 540 W 21st St, New York, NY (map)

• Price: $10.00/per person | Refund policy

• Schedule:

  7:00pm – Doors. Mingling over wine and snacks provided by Tumblr

  7:30-8:45pm – Presentations and short panel discussion with the speakers

  8:30-10:00pm – Conversation continues over wine

  Speakers:

  Museum Nerd will be giving an anonymous presentation via Skype. In lieu of a bio, he has provided us with the following crowdsourced descriptions of himself:

  “no physical description, no fixed address, no discernible motive, digs James Turrell” – @MDammit

  “social web’s most-extensive aggregator of museum exhibitions and events.” – @zoebfox

  “A source for museum-related flâneur love and general feel good art vibrations in 140 characters or less.” – @hragv

  “Museum Nerd is a nerd. A nerd of museums and the sort.” An IRL talk? Will you be wearing a mask? – @art21

  “…faster than a speeding bullet…” – @theBoBartlett

  “@museumnerd is a cultural Twitter icon (Twicon) who has been getting people interested in museums for the past [insert number] years”- @AlizaySteinberg

  “expert in collections at many museums you’ve never heard of” – @resuitener

  Since March 2010, Museum Nerd has checked in at museums 247 times on Foursquare.
  

  Cole Stryker is a freelance writer and media strategist based in New York City. He is the author of Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity, and Anonymity on the Web (out this month from The Overlook Press), as well as Epic Win for Anonymous, the first book to explore the underground Internet meme culture factory called 4chan, and Anonymous, the hacktivist collective it spawned. His writing has appeared in Salon, Vice, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. More at colestryer.com.

  Kyle McDonald is a media artist who works with code, with a background in philosophy and computer science. He creates intricate systems with playful realizations, sharing the source and challenging others to create and contribute. Kyle is a regular collaborator on arts-engineering initiatives such as openFrameworks, having developed a number of extensions which provide connectivity to powerful image processing and computer vision libraries. For the past few years, Kyle has applied these techniques to problems in 3D sensing, for interaction and visualization, starting with structured light techniques, and later the Kinect. Kyle’s work ranges from hyper-formal glitch experiments to tactical and interrogative installations and performance. He was recently Guest Researcher in residence at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan, and is currently adjunct professor at ITP.

Museum Press Release Clearing House on Tumblr

I started a new Tumblr to help museums get the word out about exhibits and new hires by posting their press releases in a place where interested people can find them through tagging and searching, then share them with their networks.

Just click the “submit” button, cut & paste, and voila!

http://museumpress.tumblr.com/

 

Thanks, @museumtweets, for helping with the admin.

Hey Museums, WordPress now Pushes to Tumblr

Update (moments after Publishing) - Here’s what the following WordPress post looks like when pushed to  Tumblr:

What this blog post looks like when pushed to Tumblr using WordPress’s new option in the “Publicize” feature.

I just read a couple articles about the new integration of a push-to-Tumblr option for new WordPress blog posts. This may be helpful for museums who’ve established a large following on WordPress, but want to share easily with the growing community on Tumblr.

Caveat: I don’t ever recommend sharing with a community that you don’t check in on. If you’re posting on Tumblr, but not checking to see if you have messages, reblogs, etc. there, you’re not really part of that community at all. The obvious analogue for this is the infamous pushing of Facebook posts to Twitter!

The one thing which seems to be missing is a preview feature. I’ll test it out with this post and see how it looks. Apologies if it’s incoherent, but here’s hoping it looks clean and works well. Articles:

“Earlier today WordPress.com turned on the ability to push new blog posts to Tumblr, alongside the existing capability to do so for Twitter, Facebook, et al. This is interesting for a few reasons….” – Matt Mullenweg

“The second you publish a new post on WordPress.com, you can instantly share it on Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and now Tumblr with a feature called Publicize. This helps you get exposure to multiple audiences without having to manually share your content on all your favorite social sites.” – Justin Shreve (WordPress)

Best Art Exhibits 2011* – Part 2

As I’ve gotten insanely busy, I thought I’d release what I’ve completed of the follow up to Best Art Exhibits 2011* Part 1. The last part will also have my “NYC Art Exhibit of the Year.” For now, here are ten more of the best art exhibits I experienced in 2011.

In rough chronological order of the Nerd’s visits…1. “Mark di Suvero” at Governors Island: Presented by Storm King Art (NYC)

2. “Alice Austen: Her Photographic Works” at Alice Austen House Museum (Staten Island)

3.  “POWHIDA” at Marlborough (NYC), but only when paired with “William Powhida: Derivatives” at Postmasters (NYC)

4. “Washington Color and Light” at Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.)

5. “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities” at the Museum of Art and Design (NYC)
6. “North by New York” (Curators Rob Storr and Francesca Pietropaolo) at Scandinavia House (NYC)

7. “Chelpa Ferro: Visual Sound” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (Ridgefield, CT)

This was an art installation at the Bronx Museum, NOT my living room. I was JOKING.

8. “Taking AIM and Bronx Calling: The First Artists in the Marketplace Biennial” at Bronx Museum and Wave Hill (Bronx)

9. “Loren Monk, Location, Location, Location: Mapping the New York City’s Art World” at Leslie Heller Workspace
10. “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore” at the Jewish Museum (NYC)

It’s exciting times in nerd world these days. Stay tuned and we’ll see when I can get the next installment to you! (All of the above photos are my own, mostly culled from my Twitpic and my Foursquare.)

***edit*** Things got so busy that I never was able to add my last batch of great 2011 shows. Feel free to add your Best Art Exhibits of 2011 in the comments.