Art Curation Videos

1. Key Concepts

West Coast Pop Art: Concepts for this video included the definition of "lowbrow" as an art theory/movement - what was being struggled against in the art world.  "Lowbrow" was meant to be the opposite of "highbrow" - the term for the elite art scene.  In the eyes of these artists, art had become too intelligent, to uppity, and too hard to understand.  It wasn't made for the everyday audience, and that's who they wanted to appeal to.  It also related "lowbrow" art back to other art forms/schools like surrealism and pop art.  The other major concepts concerned the evolution of the "lowbrow" art form - the pioneers of the form, where their inspirations came from, and the types of art they created & influenced.  These artists were very much inspired by the culture that emerged after WWII in the late 1940s and 1950s - the suburban & specifically West Coast surfer/skater cultures that emerged.  These nostalgic cultural influences merged with the uneasy political climate of the 1960s & 1970s, and expressed itself in the evolution of animation, comics, and record cover artwork.  The video also commented on the broad influence this West Coast movement had, inspiring artists up to the north in Canada.

Tate Modern: The main concept of this video was a showcase of the newly remodeled Tate Museum of Modern Art.  It highlighted some goals of the new administration, such as the effort to include more diverse artists - more women, more artists form non-Western countries, etc.  It highlighted the expansion of the collection; how the museum was trying to expand what was considered as art, not just installations but digital, interactive pieces and a performance art space.  The video even gave a little peak at the warehouse that stores the pieces that are not currently on display. The video also worked hard to show how the museum was trying to remain accessible to a large audience despite being so vast as to be intimidating.

An Acquiring Mind:  The main concept of this video was the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) and its longest-running director.  One of the focuses of the video was a portrait of the director (Philippe de Montebello), how he got to his position and what the focus of his administration was.  It spotlighted a bunch of works that distinguished the collection and how this man obtained them.  It also showed the broader work of the museum in how they go about getting permission to acquire pieces for the collection, how pieces are restored and otherwise conserved, and how gallery/exhibition spaces are physically set up.

2. Relation to Project

West Coast Pop Art: This particular video could be helpful - it was really interesting and inspiring because I am already a fan of pop art in general and found this particular subsect of it to be graphically pleasing.  I am toying with the idea of doing a pop art theme for my curation project, but as I am unsure of my theme, this video may or may not be helpful.

Tate Modern: This video certainly got me thinking about gallery space and how to use it.  The Tate is really vast and they had to choose exactly how to fill each space, even if that space was just going to have paintings.  The way the works are set up in each room is important, because not everyone likes the same kind of art but you want everyone to find something of value in the rooms that they visit.  It was a good lesson on how to make art available to everyone without seeming too elitist about it.

An Acquiring Mind:  Now this video is super helpful for the project.  It adds onto the Tate lessons about gallery space and exhibition set up.  In addition, it makes you think really hard about what artworks to pick and why; how they are going to work with one another, what the flow of the exhibit would then look like, what the relations to the pieces are/how obvious you want to make that.

3. Opinion of Video

West Coast Pop Art: This video was very entertaining.  There wasn't a lot of narration; it was mostly interviews with art history experts/artists/critics.  These interview pieces were very interesting, engaging and even humorous, containing an awful lot of personal experience/encounters with this particular school of art.  The interviews were cut away from for shots of artwork examples relating to the particular aspect of the movement that was being discussed.  It was very colorful, showing not just gallery examples of artwork but pointing out artwork that I was more familiar with; aspects of culture like cartoons/comics (I'm a fan of comic artist Robert Crumb from a while back now), drug culture, and music.  The video did a good job of showing a movement driven by a rapidly changing culture, while influencing/changing it at the same time.

Tate Video: This video was also very entertaining, though set up more like a television news article than a documentary.  This video had two narrators of sorts that took us through the pieces of the video.  The female reporter was very active - she was the one that took the audience on the tour of the gallery, and asked questions about the rooms and the exhibits of the administration.  She was very friendly and accessible, asking questions that allowed the admin to go into detail about the topic.  The male was usually cut to when more complex questions - questions about what is considered art and how should the Tate go about collecting/displaying/etc - were being asked.  He was less friendly and more professional - reminded me a lot of the old 60 Minutes reporters.  I also enjoyed how the video talked to some of the lesser known artists that were going to be displayed - it wasn't just about the museum stuff, it was about the art too.

An Acquiring Mind: This video wasn't quite as entertaining as the other two.  The narrator was very engaging and had a sweet voice, but the topics being discussed were dryer than in the other two videos.  I did really enjoy it when they talked about the artwork in the collection; both the highlighted coups of the collection and the conservation pieces that were shown were fascinating, and I found the whole conservation section very fascinating on its own.  I noticed the video tried to tell a story of the Met and this director, but because it focused so much on the behind-the-scenes work life of a museum and less on the artwork, this storytelling mode made the video lag a little.