19 steps to creating a good open source practice by Olav Henriksen

(Appropriated from Eric S. Raymond 19 steps to creating good open source software.)

1.    Every good work by a curator starts by scratching a personal itch.

2.    Good curators know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

3.    Plan to throw a project away; you will, anyhow.

4.    If you have the right attitude, interesting projects will find you.

From the Cathedral to the Bazaar and back again

“Bazaar full of cathedrals – being open is to be condemned to be managed.”

More than ten years later, it is fair to say that a clear-cut division of “bazaar”- and “cathedral”- style development methods no longer exists in Free Software development. The development of the Linux kernel has become more hierarchical, with several layers of developer hierarchies that a patch needs to go through in order to be accepted into the main line kernel, while on the other hand the development culture of GNU and BSD software has adapted itself better towards the Internet than in the 1990s. (The now-standard use of networked version control systems like ‘Subversion’  and ‘Git’  is a clear empirical indicator.)

How does open source (trans)port to art?

Posed by Mary Anne Francis during Open Congress, October 2005, Tate Britain.

“ During the Open Congress I invited the participants to ‘open source’ the work The Blooming Commons – I had simulated a flower stall using brightly coloured cleaning products: scourers, feather dusters, clothes and plungers. My offering was an attempt to put the theory in to practice, practical engagement research. In order to encourage enactment with open source the Tate called it a Congress rather than a ‘conference’ however it tended towards the reflection on art and open source rather than its conjunction.”

“This must have been intensified due to the fact that is was being staged at the Tate.”

Curating as a practice

Curators as artists is a fairly recent notion, one of which that has gained significant widespread acceptance in recent years. So what is their medium; art, artists, practice, culture, experience, space? What are they trading?

Much attention has focused on architecture of a space and how this affects our experience of art, but I need to examine the invisible architecture, the conceptual system, the theories and practices of curatorial work regardless of space, minus the brand, something transferable.

Who are you curating for?

…Curators are the world’s biggest contemporary pests. The Tate is overrun with them. Twenty years ago, they barely existed. Now every ambitious display of modern art is a curator’s handiwork…

Januszczak, Waldermar, The Tate: pompous, arrogant and past it? Times Online, February 8, 2009

This was Waldermar Januszczak’s response to the fourth Triennial show of British modern art held at the Tate early 2009. Waldermar isn’t your usual “it’s a waste of tax payers money” type of guy; his wife is an artist (he describes her as a modern artist). It is his life, career and sustenance. So what’s gone wrong?
Waldermar is on a huge Brit Art come down; he has a massive Hirst hang over. Maybe the British art scene is in for another revolution, another significant modern movement. In the early 80’s we had Lissen Gallery sculptors, with Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Bill Woodrow and the like. The next decade saw the arrival of Brit Art and the world became intoxicated by the candid behaviour of Tracey Emin, the media magician Damian Hirst and the controversy of Marcus Harvey.

The ‘Cathedral’ and the ‘Bazaar’ urban myths – A software development conversation

“Retrospectively, I think there have been many confusions and urban myths about Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral & the Bazaar. Like Roland Barthes’ The Death of Author, it is a text that, polemically speaking, nobody seems to have read yet everybody has an opinion about.”

“What do you mean?”

The Curators Cathedral needs F/OSSing (According to the Bazaar)

In conversation with Olav Henriksen

“The bazaar is a marketplace of Darwinian competition.”
Anonymous source via email

The Norwegian writer and curator Olav Henriksen told me that appropriation is inevitable but none the less worthy. All things are appropriable. He liked my attack vector but he could see several areas I needed to negotiate, which (he saw) where problematic and which could defeat my best intentions.

*It should be noted that the primary distinction has to be made between ‘Free’ which is a social movement and a matter of freedom, and ‘Open’, which is a developmental methodology.

∴∴∴∴∴∴∴

World Builder

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

artistic deceptions

During almost two years, dozens of people in Bologna, Milano, Ljubljana, Roma and Venezia have staged ‘one of the biggest artistic deceptions in recent years’. A performance that elevated media manipulation to the status of art, and that transformed the most radical mythopoeia in one of its highest forms. If we didn’t kill him – declares Franco Birkut spokesman of 0100101110101101.ORG – and later revealed the prank, Darko Maver would have gone on living and making people speak about him through exhibitions, articles, documentaries and catalogues, nobody would have stopped us in continuing our narration, because this story is just too good to be false.

more…

a formula for the 21st century curator

italiano

l’arte si è trasformata ed amalgamata nel mondo, come procederà con i nuovi media quotidiani, internet, cellulari, continua connessione?

Il mercato ha reso l’arte sempre più un bene di consumo (lusso?), qual è la formula più interessante per una grande distribuzione?

Oggi che tutto è stato affrontato, detto, scritto, si può ancora creare o si opera soprattutto in modo trasformativo?

Ornella Calvetti