Three takes on the VIP Art FAir

From Over the Net

... on balance VIP did feel like the future. The future in much the same way early laptops and brick-sized mobiles phones did back in the day. Awkward and a bit cumbersome but, once you'd had a taste, impossible to live without.

From Art World Salon

The VIP Art Fair is not Facebook. It’s not a social media platform and was never billed as one. Rather, it is the first successful attempt at bringing something like an Art Basel or Armory Show to your browser. But here’s the thing: “Users are fickle.” And VIP learned that lesson the hard way.

From Art Fag City

Since the fair launched this weekend (it runs through January 30th), the first and only online art fair, has been riddled with problems ranging from connectivity to disappearing chats and navigational problems. I’ve heard rumblings from many dealers wanting their money refunded, and many collectors claiming they aren’t going to deal with the site any longer. “[It] was a complete day of collector torture,” collector Mike Mao told me over Facebook the day of the fair’s debut.

[VIP Art Fair was a week-long online-only contemporary art fair, an experiment in moving the art fair experience into the digital/social medium]

Mostly unrelated: How Artists Must Dress

Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.

More MoMA goodness

Last week I pointed to MoMA's Dali online exhibition - not my cuppa tea artistically, but a lovely site.

So here's another beauty from MoMA: the online exhibition that accompanied the Colour Chart exhibition earlier this year.




Can I email you a link to a page within the site? No. Can I use my best-beloved Picnik plugin to manipulate a screenshot? No. Can I copy & paste text for my personal research use? No. Does it have a purity to its layout, a playfulness to its navigation, and a plain-spoken tone in its language? Oh, yes. Yes it does.

I don't like Dali

But I do like this MoMA online exhibition of his work.

Subject matter and the entry page* aside, it's got a lot going for it. My three favourite things:

1. The opening page. Even if the 'click to navigate' is a bit touchy, it's a lovely way to let people browse the content without having to make any real choices

2. The use of a small number of focus works, flanked by related works. Although the actual show may not have been set out like this at all, it gives a nicely curated feel to the online version.

3. Most of all, the simple and beautiful image enlargements. They're a joy to use.

So, the site has some clunky aspects (like all the navigation instructions - click to open, click to close, click to navigate, click click click). But what I like about MoMA's online exhibitions is that it looks like a designer who loves their job gets to work on them, and it shows.

*I hate entry pages. Honestly - what's it there for? To ask people if they really, really, want to visit your site? Would you stand at the door of your gallery and ask visitors that?

Holding hands with Olafur

More Olafur Eliasson visitor engagement, as the SFMOMA show 'Take your time' tours to MoMA and PS1.

I recently wrote about the SFMOMA experience of trying to get visitors to the show to share and discuss their experiences. At MoMA/PS1, visitors are being invited to apply for a "special cell-phone camera" to hang around their necks. As they walk around the show the cameras take pictures at random intervals, "documenting the visitors' journeys through the exhibition in a candid and experiential way".

Some of the photos are then being incorporated to "appear in the background" of the online exhibition (which is nice, but BEFORE YOU CLICK know that it's a slow loader). I wasn't sure initially what 'in the background' meant, but I think now that it means 'underneath this long piece of expository text'. After a bit of back-and-forward buttoning, I got this page, which shows just the visitor images. (It's not listed in the nav, as far as I can see).

The online exhibition is very beautiful, btw, and has a nifty little feature where when you hover over images it displays the title and the site where the work is on show - subtle, but useful for a multi-site exhibition.

At first, I wasn't sure about this hang around your neck, random timing thing. Why not let visitors decide what to photograph and how? And then I thought, if the whole Eliasson thing is about experiencing the work, having a visitor thinking about documenting the work instead of just being in it constitutes failure (or at least, the failure of the museum to fulfil the artist's intentions).

So I came around, and although I reckon some visitors must be subverting the instructions and pointing the cameras at things they hope to photograph, I like the idea that I'm seeing fragments of people's visits in quite an unmediated way (except - god, it's always except, isn't it? that they're being selected by someone inside the museum. Maybe they could put the whole unfiltered set up on Flickr).

Image
Olafur Eliasson, 1 m3 light, 1999, photograph by Matthew Septimus. From www.ifweranit.com

They were the only ones in the room

Quite a few months ago, I briefly blogged SFMOMA's online project for their Olafur Eliasson show - a kind of virtual visitors book for people to record and share their experience of the exhibition.

Last month, I had a chance to hear Peter Samis from SFMOMA speak about the project, in one of the most open and generous presentations I've heard. As Samis explained in his talk, Eliasson wanted to put the visitor's voice, rather than the curator's, at the centre of the dialogue around the show (sorry - that's a terribly art-history-essay sentence, but I'm sure you know what I mean).

For Eliasson, the visitor's experience completes the work. The objective of the virtual visitors book was to "encourage visitors in their own critical process of self-observation". The site included some multi-media interpretive material from the Museum, but the point was to engage the visitor to build the discussion of the works.

So, people came, they saw, and they wrote. And what they said was a mixed bag. But the key point for me in Samis's presentation, in his own words, was this:

We said our piece in our multimedia voice(s)
We opened the blog door to let visitors voices in
... And we left

They were the only ones in the room.

SFMOMA staff didn't respond to the comments on the blog. I find this fascinating, and not totally unexpected. It's one thing to get people talking to you. It's quite another when you suddenly realise you might have to talk back.

If you're looking at ways to engage (with) your visitors online, I'd really recommend Samis's paper, which gives a description of the why and the (technical) how of the project, an analysis of activity on the blog, staff's feelings about the visitors' comments, the kind of insight into your visitors you get from this sort of project, and what you could do with that information. Slides from his presentation (which you can follow pretty well without reading the paper) are on Slideshare. And some great notes from another attendee are here.

War art goes online

Archives New Zealand has just released their online War Art database.

The War Art site puts the National War Art Collection of approximately 1500 works online - searchable (warning: selecting the 'advanced search' option when you're on an image record page seems to take you through to Archway, Archive's collection database), browse-able (although I wish there was an easy option to browse by artist name), tag-able (Web 2.0) and over all, elegant and interesting.




Whatever you can say about the quality of the art, this online resource is immensely useful. But the thing that I found most entrancing isn't one of the images.




On the 'What is War Art' page, Archives have loaded up two newsreel clips: 'War Artist ... Introducing Captain Peter McIntyre' and 'Artists in Uniform'. The latter is especially fantastic.

In it, Russell Clark introduces a 1944 exhibition of war art, and we are given 'candid reactions' from the crowd. But the real guts of the short clip lie in the question Clark is asked: What do New Zealanders think of artists? You've got to check it out for yourself.

Images:

Russell Clark, Assault course, Linton, c.1943-1944. Ref #: AAAC 898 NCWA 138. From Archives New Zealand's War Art website.

Peter McIntyre, Blood transfusion in desert dressing station, c.1941-1943 . Ref #: AAAC 898 NCWA 171. From Archives New Zealand's War Art website.

Allan Barns-Graham, Daily ration party, September 1943-1944. Ref #: AAAC 898 NCWA 92. From Archives New Zealand's War Art website.

Funny ha ha?

MoMA have created a nice little Flash site to accompany their exhibition 'Comic Abstraction: image-breaking , image-making'.

Comic abstraction online exhibition

[Note - if you've upgraded to IE7 your Adobe Flash player may not have automatically upgraded, and you may have to de- and re- install to view Flash applications.]

Jerry Saltz described the exhibition as 'unfunny'.

Image: Rivane Neuenschwander. Zé Carioca no. 4, A Volta de Zé Carioca (1960) (Edição Histórica, Ed. Abril). (detail) 2004. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Getting it right ...

The exhibition 'Heroes and Villains: Australian comics and their creators' closed yesterday at the State Library of Victoria. I didn't see the exhibition in the flesh, but I like what they've done with their web accompaniments.

Heroes and Villains online activities

The Library ran a three day blogging session with Australian cartoonists, loaded up a podcast for use in the exhibition or for using for a virtual tour, and created an interactive Flash thingie (with too many exclamation marks for my liking).

The first thing that caught my eye was the online competition, where people (mostly - purportedly - kids and young teens) could submit drawings of their own superhero, with a few snippets of information:

The Tunnel Killer (Nicholas, age 6)

My superhero wears: He wears black pants, a chain mesh shirt, and a mask with spikes on his arms.

My superhero looks like: He looks tough and strong.

My superhero has a gadget: Spikes and weapons.

My superhero can: He has spikes and weapons and is very strong.

My superhero lives: In tunnels.

An adventure my superhero has had: He was trying to get some people that had crawled into some tunnels and he won.

That's Anggry Dud, by Callum, age 7, at the top of the post.

Superhero Gallery

But I'm also really impressed by the online catalogue:

• it's in HTML, instead of being a PDF of a print publication, making it more accessible and eliminating download time
• the left-hand nav replicates a contents page, making it easy to move through
• despite the all-caps font, it's still clean and easy to read
• the design seems to have been made for the online environment instead of transposing a print design onto a website.

Heroes and Villains online catalogue