The God of planet art

After being named the most powerful figure in the international art world at the end of last year, what does 2010 have install for Hans Ulrich Obrist? What will the superstar curator do next? I intend to find out and document where he goes next …

Hans Ulrich Obrist – the god of plant art

Power Curators

superstars listed at the end of 2009

Klaus Biesenbach
The art world is waiting to see how the longtime P.S.1 curator will fare in a more administrative role when he takes the reins at the museum in January.

Daniel Birnbaum
The scholar, international curator and head of the Städelschule, in Frankfurt, received mixed reviews (some found it dry) for his sprawling Venice Biennale this summer.

Francesco Bonami
His massive survey “Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008,” shown in Venice and Chicago, provoked criticism, but he has scored one of the biggest gigs on the curatorial circuit: the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst
The London-based curator at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture is helping its director, the Russian heiress-collector Dasha Zhukova, spend her rubles wisely.

Melissa Chiu
The director of the Asia Society Museum is catapulting the New York institution to the forefront of the field of contemporary Chinese art.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
The chief curator of the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, in Turin, is gearing up for her role as the artistic director of Documenta 13, hitting Kassel, Germany, in 2012.

Alison Gingeras
The Pinault collection curator co-organized the inaugural exhibition at Punta della Dogana, in Venice, this summer and also had a hand in one of the buzziest shows in London this year, “Pop Life,” at the Tate Modern.

Hans Ulrich Obrist
The Serpentine Gallery co-director was at just about every major biennial this year — from Sharjah to Venice.

John Richardson
The biographer and art historian partnered with dealer Larry Gagosian this year to curate a New York show of late Picassos that had gallerygoers lining up for a look.

Ali Subotnick
This former collaborator (with Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni) on the legendary Wrong Gallery continues to breathe fresh life into the UCLA Hammer Museum with shows like this year’s “Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.”

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.

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World Builder

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.