Abstract

New media art is being collected by both private collectors and by museums, but it changes notions of archive, documentation, exhibition and audience. The art is considered here not under conventional media-specific categories, but as presenting different types of ‘behaviour’ to the curator.  My edited book New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art, brought together experience from leading curators, gallerists, artists, archivists and conservators, and deliberately made inks between common themes.  Issues of folksonomy, and economic models are addressed, and artwork examples include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room and Aymeric Mansoux, Marloes de Valk, and Dave Griffiths’ Naked on Pluto.  Rhizome’s Artbase is examined, as well as modes of collecting and exhibiting from Caitlin Jones’ experience at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery and Guggenheim Museum, New York.  Long-term modes of collecting in relation to audience at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, are also outlined. Pip Laurenson of Tate unpicks in detail the intricate connections between documentation, preservation, and exhibition for “new new media” involving software, rather than the ‘old new media’ of video, which has more established precedents for conservation.  Laurenson has described the role of the conservator as that of a “broker” of relationships between the various staff of institutions and the artists themselves.
It is these linked relationships which are examined here, aiming towards models of collecting can function fully in the long term, meaning that contemporary artworks can have a future of lively exhibiting; meeting their audiences in ways including interactive or participatory modes, according to the intent of the artist.