Museums: The Guggenheim and YouTube Seek Video-Art Talent:
“NEW YORK—
It’s a great time to be a video artist. Recent institutional surveys — the 2010 Whitney Biennial, last year’s New Museum triennial, and P.S.1’s current quintennial “Greater New York” — are overflowing with the medium. Even actress Isabella Rossellini has declared herself a fan, chairing a new video art prize. Now the Guggenheim has joined the act, announcing that it has partnered with YouTube to select artists for a new video-art biennial that will be called YouTube Play.Through July 31, anyone interested in being featured in the Guggenheim’s show can submit their work through YouTube, according to a report by Carol Vogel in the New York Times. Videos must be shorter than 10 minutes and created in the last two years. Guggenheim curators will narrow the entrants — and they’re expecting thousands, according to curator Nancy Spector — to 200, which will be judged by a jury of nine people from creative fields ranging from filmmaking to graphic design. The lucky 20 winners will have their videos displayed at all four branches of the museum: in New York, Berlin, Venice, and Bilbao, Spain. (Meanwhile, the winner of another vaunted art-world contest, Bravo‘s “Work of Art,” merely gets a show at the Brooklyn Museum.)
While the Guggenheim is marketing the exhibition as a radically egalitarian gesture, at least one art-world denizen is skeptical. “It’s time to stop kidding ourselves,” Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr told Vogel. “The museum as revolving door for new talent is the enemy of art and of talent, not their friend — and the enemy of the public as well, since it refuses to actually serve that public but serves up art as if it was quick-to-spoil produce from a Fresh Direct warehouse.” YouTube’s interest in the project is less complicated — the Google-run video service is said to be seeking higher-end advertisers through the glossy partnership.”
(Via ARTINFO: News.)