Tower of Sleep

Toronto-based freelance writer and editor. Starting a PhD in Art History at McGill in the Fall. Email: saelantwerdy [at] gmail.com

Free to Do What? - Notes on curating contemporary art after the internet

This is a case study of “Free” at the New Museum that I wrote for a Museums & Galleries course in the fall. The show is up until the 23rd and since the paper isn’t likely to be published or presented anywhere in this form (though I’m submitting a condensed and altered version to a conference in a couple months), I thought I’d just throw it up here for any interested parties. Any comments would be very welcome, and I’d be happy to put any substantial responses up on this blog.

Here’s the part where I state my thesis, which works as a pretty good approximation of an abstract:

Free comes across as a concerted attempt to produce a major statement, one that  represents major trends and significant redefinitions of contemporary practice by institutions  (Rhizome and the New Museum) with investments in presenting the newest developments in art.  The aim of this paper is to closely examine the rhetoric that Free uses to characterize the artists  in the exhibition and the new developments that they represent. How does the idea of the internet  as public sphere manifest in Free? What forms of social interaction does this sphere allow and  encourage, and what kind of art can it produce? How is this art presented in a museum context  and how does it circulate outside of that context? 

Moving beyond the frame of the exhibition itself, this paper will also look at writings by  two artists whose work was not included or referenced in Free, Brad Troemel and Artie Vierkant, who have advanced the notions of Free Art and Post-Internet Art, respectively. My aim  in doing so will be to show that, while Free offers an important and necessary perspective on  crucial shifts in contemporary practice, its institutional function precludes a full reckoning with  some of the more radical implications of the art it includes. I also aim to address, then, what the  limits and blind spots of museums might be with regard to art that engages with a dispersed notion of culture, what challenges curators might face in this situation, and how the function of art  institutions might be transformed in the future.

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