The Whitney - Contributing to Community Discourse on Art by Sharing

I've been looking for new books on live art and sound this morning. An odd inclination considering the fairly intangible and the dynamic nature of these forms. Definitely challenging forms to find well documented in books.

To get started I looked up a Paul McCarthy show I saw this past summer at the Whitney in NYC hoping to find a nice monograph of his work or possibly a DVD. Instead, I was delighted to discover that the Whitney has begun to create editorial content of their past shows with commentary from the curators. The truly delightful part-- the video pieces are enabled for pass along, hence this post. Now I have a high-quality video document that I can share.

This find on the Whitney site also touches on an important discussion I've been participating in of over the years as a faculty member at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago about how the distributed content model can be utilized in the curriculum. Without taking a deep dive into facets of that discussion I'd just like to say that the world's collective, virtual library is in need of quality content on art and culture and it's a huge plus that it's enabled for distribution. There's plenty of teaser content promoting shows but this is the good stuff.

I hope art institutions and galleries will follow and enable their archives of documentation to be integrated into online community discourse. It will definitely help me in my job as an educator to inspire and inform students of contemporary work.

Check out Whitney Focus where they push content to the space where the masses are searching:

Whitney Focus on blip.tv

Whitney Focus on YouTube


'Whitney Focus features interviews with artists and curators, as well as other video-based content, offering a unique and up-close view of Whitney exhibitions and programs.'