According to the New York Times:
The Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday that it had created a new curatorial department to focus exclusively on the growing number of contemporary artworks that use sound and moving images in gallery installations. The media department, once part of the department of film and media, will deal with works that use a wide range of modern technology, from video and digital imagery to Internet-based art and sound-only pieces, said Klaus Biesenbach, who was named chief curator of the new department. Mr. Biesenbach, who has been a MoMA curator since 2004 and the chief curator of P.S. 1, the museum's Queens affiliate, since 2002, said that works relying on media techniques and ideas of conveying motion and time had become much more prominent over the last two decades at international art fairs and exhibitions.'And it's even more visible now,' he said. 'I think artistic practice is evolving, and so museums are evolving as well.' The creation of the new department brings the number of curatorial departments at the museum to seven. The other six are architecture and design, drawings, film, painting and sculpture, photography, and prints and illustrated books.
Metadata: net art, MOMA, collecting
Originally posted on Professor VJ by Rhizome
Anyone who has ever visited a major art fair knows that the conditions under which the works are presented have a very strong impact on their interpretation. This includes not only the architectural site selected for reincarnation as an art mall, but also the lifestyle associated with fairs: namely, late nights. It is fitting, then, that the narrator of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES' newest Flash-based text art piece would be an insomniac. You see, the piece was commissioned by the Tate and its launch coincided with the launch of this month's Frieze Contemporary Art Fair, also in London. 'The Art of Sleep' is the newest web-based work by this Korea-based artist duo whose use of film noir plot conventions extends to jazzy soundtracks and fonts reminiscent of the detective's typewriter. Even the narrator's commentary is textbook noir, in its hazy recollections and foggy declarations about the nature of 'the international contemporary art market from the artists' perspective.' The animation is just over eighteen minutes long and, by the end, the reader becomes the ultimate detective, piecing together an interpretation based on discreet, if humorous, bits of evidence. - Elizabeth Johnston
marc garrett