Besties I

et al, that's obvious! that's right! that's true!, Christchurch Art Gallery, 2009.
Photographer David Watkins. Photo from the et al website.

Best show

et al's that's obvious! that's right! that's true! at Christchurch Art Gallery. A brave piece of programming for the Gallery, and a triumph of a show.

Best comeback

Under new director Cam McCracken, the Dowse feels like a place to go to see art again. Unfortunately the Dowse website seems to have gone AWOL this morning, so you can read this old piece instead.

Best (new) (New Zealand) blog

Over the net is still reliably informative & entertaining, but this year's hat tip is to the Starkwhite blog, which moves beyond promoting the dealer gallery's shows & artists and into the wider issues of the New Zealand and international art world.

The Besties: 2009

The last post of the year, dear readers, and a summary of events:

Best news

Shane Cotton's long-overdue Laureate award, Elizabeth Caldwell's appointment to the DPAG director role, Emma Bugden's appointment to Artspace.

Best PR campaign

It's gotta be Te Papa and the colossal squid. Hats off to the comms team there - they've turned a pile of old seafood into a national phenomena.

Best new NZ blog (with best origin tale)

The Paint and Bake

Best philosophical stand-off in a public space

Wystan Curnow and Bronwyn Lloyd at the Rita Angus symposium

Best attempt at online engagement

The AAG blog. It's somewhat sporadic and has reached McCahonian levels of existential angst, but the AAG are the only people I'm aware of trying to foster community online.

Best international online engagement

The Commons on Flickr

Best photographs of a modern painter at work

John Xceron

Best art experience

All things being equal, this year I got the most out of the Rita Angus retrospective, mostly because I spent a heck of a lot of time with the works. However, 2008 lacked a stand-out magic moment with a individual work or collection of works.

Best place to hang out

Hamish McKay's wood-panelled art-den

Best discovery (and temptation to abandon blogging)

Twitter

Best font

Vogue, 1930

Best use of a single adjective in multiple reviews

John Hurrell

Best art-related video

SFMOMA erasing a Sol LeWitt

Best interpretation of a Rita Angus painting

Annah Oxley

Best place to see art

In people's houses.

Best wishes for the holidays

Best of 3 will be back around 5 January 2009.

The Besties - bits'n'pieces edition

Best collection of images I saw online this year: The NSW Police Department mug shots on Picture Australia.



Best art work I saw in real life this year: Maurizio Cattelan's We are the revolution in the Guggenheim show at the NGV.

Best news item about pre-pubescent art collectors: from the Wall Street Journal

Best reason not to let your curator blog

Images, from top:

Mug shot of Hazel McGuinness, Central Police Station, Sydney, 26 July 1929. From the Picture Australia website.

The Besties: Best Online Resources (local edition)

You can't go past the Auckland Art Gallery here. While their website is starting to look a bit geriatric, I think the online collection and the digitised resources are the best in NZ.

Word on the digitisation grapevine is that the AAG will be releasing a new digital product next year, which will add wiki-style commenting to a heritage resource.

Also worthy of mention:

Christchurch Art Gallery with their growing collection of Audio on Demand.

Te Papa's new mini-exhibition sites are nice to look at, and the Zoomify is cute. At the moment though there's no sectional nav (not even breadcrumbs) and you can get foisted out unexpectedly into TP's main site, which is a bit disconcerting. And this leaves me wordless.

The 2007 "Besties"

It's the time of the year when people start publishing their Top 10s and Best Ofs, and so Best of 3 is inaugurating the Besties.

First of: Best Online Presence

I've been incredibly impressed by the Brooklyn Museum this year. They're blogging, flickring, youtubing, myspacing, and more.

For those of you still focused on physical people through the door, it's time to think about promoting the value of the engaged virtual visitor at management level. I might visit a big exhibition at a local gallery three times, and not write about it or talk to other people about it (flatteringly).

Meanwhile, I subscribe to the BM's blog feed, I check out their Flickr page regularly, I follow their other endeavours, I write about them here, and I promote them to other people who are thinking about these kind of things. I'm more of an evangelist for these guys than I am for my local institutions - and I've never been to Brooklyn. So - what value the online visitor?