iPad opportunities 2

I wrote last week about my first idea about how how the visual arts world could use the iPad, looking at a new publishing model for Art New Zealand. That post has a bunch of introductory stuff about this three*-part series.

2. A mega-magazine for art lovers

Our arts institutions are busily pumping out content, print and digital: Te Papa's blog, City Gallery Wellington's new little room guides, Christchurch Art Gallery's 'Bulletin', Auckland Art Gallery's 'Reading Room' journal, the video produced for the Venice Biennale shows in 2009, not to mention endless catalogue essays, some of which make it online as PDFs, some not.

Then you have all the money and energy being put into digitising our public art collections. There's a better job being done here to aggregate content - to whit Matapihi and Digital New Zealand - but there's room, I think, to take this available stuff, throw it into a grid, whip together a quick intro or hooky narrative, and boom: a photo or art essay is born.

With not-too-much effort, this could be aggregated into one place - preferably, beautifully presented, and with an editor who balanced coverage and maybe commissioned or wrote the odd piece. Sure, it wouldn't be 'objective' or 'critical' coverage - but it's good stuff that's scattered around the web at the moment.




Add to that a regional exhibition guide - I'm rather taken with the work for Art Month Sydney 2010 - and you have an interesting and useful, easily update-able, nation-wide voice for the arts in New Zealand.


*Or more, if I come up with more ideas