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

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.

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

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

[Eyebeam Presents] #ArtsTech: Privacy/Identity

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.

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

http://museumpress.tumblr.com/

Thanks, @museumtweets, for helping with the admin.

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)

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.

When asked by Artlog to come up with my 3 or 4 best exhibits of 2011, I balked a bit, knowing that there was no way I’d be able to remember to hundreds of shows I saw this year. Luckily my Foursquare “history” page acts as a handy diary of everywhere I went this year. Scrolling through all the checkins helped jog my memory. Also a quick look at Museum webpages to fill in the blanks. All photos are my own.

1. Curator Eric Doeringer’s “I Like the Art World and the Art World Likes Me” at EFA Studios (NYC)

2. “The Making of Americans“ at The James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center (NYC)
3. “Bye Bye Kitty” at Japan Society (NYC)

4. “Alpine Desire“ at Austrian Cultural Forum (NYC)

5. Judith Linhares at Edward Thorp Gallery (NYC)
6. Hans Op de Beeck at Hirshhorn (Washington, D.C.)
7. R. Crumb at Society of Illustrators Museum (NYC)

8. “Tracing the Unseen Border“at La Mama Galleria (NYC)
9. “Bernard Faucon: The Most Beautiful Day of My Youth“  New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA)
10. Birney Imes at Ogden Museum of Art (New Orleans, LA)
11. “Get on the Block“ at Camel Art Space (Brooklyn)

12. Curator Jason Bailer Losh’s “Chinese Take Out“ at Art in General and nearby Chinese Restaurants (NYC)
13. “George Condo: Mental States” at New Museum (NYC)
14. “The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910–1918” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC)

15. Francis Alys at MoMA PS1 (Long Island City)
16. “Richard Serra Drawing“ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) And… Yes… of course Alexander McQueen at the Met too.
17. “Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection“ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC)

18. “The ‘S’ Files“ at El Museo del Barrio and partner galleries BRIC Rotunda, Lehman College Art Gallery

Special Mention: Public Art Fund’s “Total Recall” in Brooklyn’s Metrotech which opened in 2010, but was up for most of 2011. These Matt Sheridan Smith’s inflatable sculptures were a great source of delight as one wondered if they’d by tumescent or not upon each visit.

Here in Part 1, I’m up through June, 2011 on Foursquare and twitpics. Part 2 (coming soon) will include July-December, anything I missed here, and Museum Nerd’s “NYC Art Exhibit of the Year.”

*This list is highly personal and only includes shows I actually visited. They are almost all museum and nonprofit-art-space exhibits from 2011 listed in chronological order of my first visit. I went to many of them more than once. I left out commercial gallery shows unless there was some special reason to include them. In the case of Judith Linhares, it was pure awesomeness and underknownness.

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 little look at how a medium-sized museum in the middle of a great, but relatively remote, city has leapt (in my estimation) to the absolute forefront of the entire museum field.

Women Directors with Cojones

Kathy Halbreich, former Walker Director looking bad ass.

The Walker Art Center had long been on my radar before I’d even visited. This image of former director Kathy Halbreich sporting a bad-ass leather jacket became iconic in my mind as the image of a director who directs. Toward the end of her 16+ years at the Walker, Halbreich led the museum through a major renovation that brought it a lot of attention and press. Halbreich left the museum at the height of this publicity to join MoMA as an associate director where she’s unfortunately a bit less visible.

On the Walker’s blog, in an August 2007 farewell letter to Halbreich, Paul Schmelzer (who’s the editor of the new website*) cited that she had implemented, “a new Walker mission statement that emphasizes the engagement of both artists and audiences and a deeper understanding of society on individual, community, and global levels.” This legacy lives on in another bad-ass woman.

Contrary to what science might lead you to believe, the current Walker director, Olga Viso, has bigger balls than any other director out there! She’s decentralized power in a move that many museum higher-ups would be terrified of trying. A lot of top museums are still clinging to their authority, not just about the art that they collect and show, but in their implicit field of expertise. This is reflected on websites that don’t allow comments and interactions from outsiders aside from blogs buried several clicks off the home page.

The Walker Gains Power by Yielding Power

The secret weapon here is that this move to include content from unaffiliated sources on the Walker’s website will actually give the Walker more—and more lasting—power, as the “Idea Hub” Olga Viso describes positions the Walker as the locus of the smartest discourse about the content areas that are central to its mission.

This Is the Future of Museums

Of course actually seeing the art in person is an irreplaceable experience. No one, (except for some fear-mongering, recalcitrant, reactionary higher-ups and board members), is suggesting that a strong institutional web presence will replace the experience of going to see artworks in person. But many completely reasonable museum people still do ask the question, “Will your tweets get us more visitors?”

Walker’s website suggests a future in which visitorship is not indisputably the most important thing. Many funders still need to catch up to the idea that the museum can serve members of the public without ever having them walk through the doors of the “bricks and mortar” museum. Before you cry foul… I know that many museums directors who may appear to be resting on their laurels where the web is concerned, are actually hampered by misinformed funders who aren’t comfortable supporting the most visionary projects.

Folks are agreeing that the Walker’s new website is a “game changer” for the following reasons:

• It is the first major museum website with an editorial focus.
• It is the first major museum website to feature previews of articles from nonaffiliated sources on their home page. See the section: “Art News from Elsewhere”
• The articles include pieces from disparate sources including lesser-known blogs like Hyperallergic (for which I’ve written the occasional piece) right there next to The New York Times. 

Taking a Page from the “Start-up” Playbook: The Walker Pivots

The Walker has made a power move. They’ve “pivoted,” exchanging one set of advantages for a different set. Let me explain. The Walker has long been seen as an important place for contemporary art. They’ve staged groundbreaking exhibitions that have traveled far and wide. They’ve also had a rich programming history.

Up until now, on their website and elsewhere, what the Walker was doing was always central and was broadcast outward to spark new conversations about the art and ideas around it. This is the model that most museums follow on the web. While the Walker will no doubt continue to do these things, they are the first major museum to see the future. Museums no longer need to think of their stakeholders as the people who come through the door. The Walker has positioned themselves at the center of the global conversation about contemporary art. By placing content of others (as well as excellent editorial content of their own) right there on their homepage, they’ve created a website you want to go to if you have any interest in contemporary art regardless of whether you’ll ever visit the museum.

They’re not just positioning themselves as an arbiter of taste (the connoisseurship thing has long been in every art museum’s bailiwick): the Walker is also placing themselves at the center of the conversation that their mission is all about.

I’ve long been saying that museums need to realize they can directly fulfill their missions (especially the educational aspect of those missions) through social media. Museums have often been very slow to catch on to this and only certain places, exemplified by SFMOMA and Brooklyn Museum, have been using social media in this manner and not primarily for marketing. We all read those marketing tweets all the time and if you’re not in the city, why the heck do you want to know that members get a special discount in the gift shop when they visit the museum?!

Now I see a model for best practices for using the museum website to directly fulfill its mission, but for a global audience and a globally, digitally connected constituency. I imagine it won’t be long before Walker Art Center starts seeing donations from people who’ve never visited the museum and have no immediate plans to do so.

*Paul asked me to change the original language which misstated that he “spearheaded” the new website. Paul’s modest. He went on in the email to say, “This isn’t really true. The Walker’s new media team has been working on this for a long time, and I was just brought on in mid-September, so I can’t take credit for the design. I don’t really design stuff, as my blog shows!“

Brooklyn, December 20, 2010 – After a weekend morning of watching great Smithsonian videos, I’ve seen a Dr. G. Wayne Clough who is a distinguished, avuncular gentleman whom you’d want to get a beer with… who speaks eloquently about the unique educational service only museums (especially science and natural history museums) can provide. He’s also a big supporter of the educational resource that all museums can be. I’d want to play poker with him too. I’m trying to be transparent about a political strategy I’m using with #CloughMustGo. Basically, the average person has no equivalent, immediate power to, say, a U.S. Representative. To try to make a change, you must engage more powerful voices. In politics, which I usually avoid for exactly this reason, the way to get heard and get attention is to call for something extreme. It seems to me this is just what’s happened to start this whole issue.

The Catholic League, an organization that believes there should be no public funding for museums of any sort, is very uncomfortable with art being shown that depicts homosexuality, and to get that art taken off view, they inflammatorily say it is “hate speech.” The Smithsonian, reacting out of the fear that people will say, “My tax dollars are supporting hate speech at the Smithsonian,” pulls down artwork that has been willfully misinterpreted by the Catholic League to substantiate a specious claim (that the artwork is “hate speech”). What further complicates the situation is that artwork from the 80s and 90s that deals with AIDS has become an emblem of a horrible tragedy in US history. This particular tragedy is one that has been used by some to disparage gay people in the U.S., which I hope is as appalling to you as it is to me. I believe one of two things happened: either Clough handed down the decision, or NGA Director Martin E. Sullivan made the decision and Clough is admirably taking the heat. For the sake of politics, I have to take Clough as a man of his word when he says the decision was ultimately his.

Another thing I learned watching those videos on youtube is that Clough does not rhyme with “though,” but is more like “cough” or “bluff.” Speaking of which, let’s get back to poker. The reason I’d like to play poker with Wayne is not because playing poker with a guy named “Wayne” has a keen, crazy-raisin’ appeal, but because even when short-stacked by far, you can bluff Wayne Clough and he’ll fold. That’s why #CloughMustGo has been cancelled and replaced with #Let’sBluffClough!

In the end, #LetsBluffClough didn’t last very long and was probably too unwieldy to explain and have catch on. I certainly never meant any harm to the man himself, but thought it was very important to make a strong statement about the kind of leadership we need for museums in Washington.