But it’s time to start thinking about my next step. I want to have something at least planned by the end of September.

I’m throwing it out there to everyone who reads this: I’m looking for the next opportunity.

If you might have something, email me pete(at)newcurator.com and let’s have a chat. I’ve got quite a range of experience I can bring, a very high academic background and several thousand social network followers who are all amazing and talented.

Marketing, web, curatorial, project management, exhibitions, collections, getting people excited and interesting things that are important. I have a countless number of skills and an endless ability to learn new things.

Now, whilst I would like to stay in the museum world, that doesn’t mean I won’t listen to any other suggestions.

I can dig out a CV at some point as well.

How about it? Who would like newcurator on their team?

What to do first? Tidying up wouldn’t be a bad plan.

So you try to bring order to the Stuff. Some Stuff is similar. You put these things together in trying to make a Tidy Room of Stuff. Other Stuff has certain links to other Stuff. Slowly, the Stuff becomes organised to your own taxonomy. The process requires much upkeep to stop it turning back into a pile of Stuff again. You label things. You arrange things on shelves. You can give everything identifying numbers and locations if you so wish. You may even wish to find out more information about your stuff.

You may now take some pride in your Organised Room of Stuff. What next?

What if I was to tell you that through a system surrounded by mystery and more complex than any ritual of the occult, you could make your Stuff… Better?

There are two reactions, either side of a very thin line of definition. The first is, “How can I use this to make the Stuff more interesting, significant and as exciting to others as it to me?”. The other is a variation along the lines of, “How can I use this for myself?”

The difference between the two reactions is slight because someone with the first may very well become famous or well-known just as someone with the second reaction may very well make some interesting connections and get people excited. The two sides of Curatorial Magick can easily spin around or balance or become a perversion or the other.

Not once have I given any name to your Organised Room of Stuff. Many of you will assume it is a museum store. It could easily be a stockroom of shoes or a pile of books.

The first side of Curatorial Magick is old, academic and very hard to master. The second side is relatively new, borrowing meanings from other places. It is quick, easy and “push-button”. The First side could turn the shoes into part of a museum and the books into a library or an archive. The world of Commerce is very interested in this second side, where the shoes are merchandise and the books are in a bookshop window display. It appears to the world of Commerce that all you need to say to steal the gravitas of the first side is “Curated By…”, thus improving potential sales especially if the supposed curator is famous enough. “Every Sports Shoe on sale was are Curated By…”, “This Year’s Summer Book Club is Curated By…” You can tell which form of Curatorial Magick is in play by how keen they are for you to buy something.

Let us not forget that both Culture and Fashion use the word “Collection”.

There are people around the world performing all forms of the Curatorial Magick. Some are true masters in changing the perception of objects and the people who view them. Others are only inspiring people to the hedonism of consumable goods. I will also say there must be practitioners of variable successes and without clearly defined paths as to where they fall. It depends on what they find in their Room of Stuff as well.

Those on the outside will struggle to spot the difference. It is easier to generalise the intellectually impenetrable. Name everyone a Curator and label a mundane collective of tasks “curation”. Choose, select, publish and put your name on it. Voilà, apparently, you’re now a curator. This method requires an increasing force of personality behind it so it can be successful. Renown will influence people to like what you like. Then you’re a marketing executive’s or brand manager’s dream.

Oh, you want to be a master of the first method? The one that inspires cultural enhancement? The money and the fame do not interest you as much as effecting True change? For that, your Curatorial Magick has to be powered by the force of your own Will.

Ironically, while the online world moves from content creation to curation, some curators are more interested in being considered content makers, primarily in terms of the exhibition itself as content and not simply a context-providing mechanism. I think this idea might be related to the notion of “the curatorial” which Maria Lind wrote about in Artforum and which I keep beating around in my head (see my earlier posts, but I’m not going down that path again). At the extreme, a few curators consider their function to be equivalent to art [see selected entrees in ICI's Words of Wisdom: A Curator's Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art]. This is probably due in part to the conflation of artistic and curatorial practices enacted by artists themselves, particularly in cases of institutional critique. But rather than such an exalted status as art, I would imagine more curators would greater appreciate the idea that their exhibitions are original creations, which Jerry Saltz touches upon when he considers good curating to be an alchemical process. It’s this concept of magic-maker that feeds into the allure of the “super curator” such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist orJens Hoffmann. I find it amusing to think it might be art curators who lead the way out of this trend towards everything-is-curation and back to good, old-fashioned content creation.

Lastly, until reading the incisive.nu posts, I’d assumed the term “curate” had been rapidly adopted by non-traditional users for its many beneficial associations but that little thought had gone into why this was happening. So imagine my pleasure and sincere gratitude in reading this statement from Kissane:

“And one more for content people, specifically; we shouldn’t be jerks to people who do real curating in museums and galleries. Their work isn’t sacred, but neither is it trivial, and using their jargon without understanding where it comes from is a dilettante’s move.” [Part V]

N. Elizabeth Schlatter

In preparation for a lecture in early June at the National Museum of Iceland, I had a minor epiphany—that the spectrum of what can be defined as “curatorial activity” is simultaneously being expanded in two diametrically opposed directions. At one end, the word “curate” is being used to describe myriad activities not pertaining to museums or art, while at the opposite end is the increasing specialization of the practice as exemplified by introspective theorizing and institutional criticism as well as proliferating academic programs.

Two recent posts illuminate this dichotomy. “Overwhelmed? Welcome to the Age of Curation” by Eliot Van Buskirk for a Wired magazine blog takes Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps to task for suggesting that Apple “curates” the software allowed on iPhones and iPads. Van Buskirk says that in reality Apple polices the software on these devices. But he admires how Epps cleverly manipulates her point by employing the word “curation” and then goes on to give several examples of how “Curation is already fundamental to the way in which we view the world these days …” listing Facebook, news outlets, and devices like smart-phones as examples.

Meanwhile, in his article “Art without Artists ” for the May 2010 issue of e-flux Journal, the artist and e-flux co-founder Anton Vidokle warns of the tendency towards self-inflation and self-infliction within the curatorial profession. Vidokle criticizes the dangers inherent in the concept of the “curatorial” which according to a recent conference on the topic, is “a practice which goes decisively beyond the making of exhibitions,” and which Marie Lind, director of the graduate program at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, has partially described in an Artforum essay as, “an endeavor that encourages you to start from the artwork but not stay there, to think with it but also away from and against it.” According to Vidokle, “Movement in such a direction runs a serious risk of diminishing the space of art by undermining the agency of its producers: artists.”

My intention with this post is not to bolster or argue against either of these permutations of “curator,” which could be oversimplified as the amateur (a Facebook user) versus the academic (an over-educated, overly-theorized professional curator)—hence the title of my post. But I do want to note the concurrent existence and continued escalation of these developments. I can’t effectively argue that there is a causal relationship between the two, but I do think that the increasing use of the word “curate” to describe functions outside of the traditional curatorial profession does enhance the desire for insiders to study what it means to curate to the extent of conceptually formalizing the activity, as in the “curatorial.”

The optimist in me hopes that this increasing spectrum of what can be called curatorial activity ultimately makes our profession more relevant within the art and museum worlds and to society at large. As mentioned in my January 2010 Museum magazine article this trend is already off and running and we might as well embrace it.

My main concern in both these developments is simply that they each move further and further from what was the initial focus of curatorial activity, that being art (or historical objects or natural and physical specimens to make this more applicable to the museum field at large). If either end of the spectrum glorifies the act of curating above and beyond what is being curated—be it paintings, data, or performances—then we move into precipitous territory. I don’t want to halt the process, but rather want to suggest we proceed with “care,” which, as many curators know, is at the very heart of their profession.

UPDATE:

Anton Vidokle has kindly requested I clarify that, unlike suggested in my original post, he is not critical of Lind’s notion of the “curatorial.” He elaborated on this originally in footnote # 2, from his article which I referenced above. The following is the text from the footnote.

“While I agree in principle with the description of “the Curatorial” as it has been articulated by Irit Rogoff and practiced by such figures as Maria Lind—insofar as that curatorial methodology and knowledge is not limited to exhibition-making only, and can be productively applied to many different activities from book publishing to teaching—my concern is with a rather large gap between theory and concrete power relations that exists within the culture industry, and only grows due to misunderstandings.”

The Urbanode Project from VURB on Vimeo.

“To build a set of tools and services, spanning mobile devices and built environments, that can transform a public space into a reactive, collaboratively mediated experience”.

James Burke of Lifesized, who has been working on this: ‘it’s about how cities are are becoming more like networked computers and the Internet’.

If there is something that is on my mind more than anything right now, it’s how the future of museums will depend on the function it provides inside the city. I’m talking less along the lines of educating and providing culture to the populous, but as an ingrained node of a living city.

Every time [The Arts Council of England] give money to us, at the back of their minds they are rehearsing arguments about why it hasn’t gone to a hospital.

The problem with only assessing numbers is that you get funding bodies wanting to put on more theatre, rather than necessarily better theatre.

It is easy to relate these to the museum world. There are more cuts coming despite being “out” of the recession and the lure of the blockbuster exhibition remains. The handbook lays out some really good template surveys and methodologies that creates scores for:

• Concentration and Engagement
• Learning and Challenge
• Energy and Tension
• Personal Resonance and Emotional Connection
• Shared Experience and Atmosphere

There are a few things in the handbook which would need some translation to museums and some that just aren’t relevant. How much Tension is there likely to be in a museum experience? Well, that is if you didn’t work there. There’s a lot said about time passing, which makes sense for a theatrical performance and makes up the Concentration metric. How could this be framed for museums? “I saw a lot in my time there” doesn’t really offer much to measure. You’d think everyone would see a lot in a museum.

Instantly, I think there would need to be a Participation metric. Which brings up another issue to me. All this is done in the form of surveys. Participation, like engagement, could be argued that by filling out the form in the first place is a measurement.

Just how successful can carrying out surveys be? A museum audience would react differently to a theatre one, especially “after the event”. The museum goer is, in part, measuring themselves. The trick is to incorporate the metric-gathering into the experience.

What metrics would you want to see in a museum version of this toolkit? Sensory experience? Identity Building? Thematic Awareness?

There was never a problem when times were rich. The recent manifesto calling for culture to be at the centre of economic recovery is the old method of bolting culture onto other budgets. Another shock and it is back to square one.

Whenever I think about new systems of survival within globalisation, I am always lead to John Robb. This time, I’m drawn to his interest in the Resilient Community. The Community is taken as the smallest unit of support as the nation-state fails to do so. This approach will hopefully tackle the problem of the museum industry having very low average wages. This is a revolutionary approach with many high risks and many obstacles that would required much more thought than this blog post. Museums that like their current situation and feel secure need not change and this revolution is not for them. For the sake of this exercise, this is an act against the slow rot and mothballing of museums and hopefully create something sustainable.

This article continues over at Museos Unite

It managed to turn the music industry inside out. It turned the film industry into a paranoid delusional inmate. It scares the living daylights out of the newspaper and journalism industry. It has proved the fiction publishing industry to be delightfully stubborn.

In response to the Superabundance, the buzzword has become “curator”. There’s too much stuff and even that stuff is being repeated so how do we get to the good stuff? Well, curators just select stuff, don’t they? We need curators to sort this stuff out for us. The definition of a curator is becoming mutated. So, I’ve come up with the carefully designed test.

Ask yourself: Am I a curator?

The correct answer is: If you had to ask yourself that, you are not a curator.

You are, at best, a filter. You may make a name for yourself by excelling at some kind of selection process, but you are not a curator. “Curator” does not mean “I have good taste”. That just makes you some kind of fleshy gauze for the rest of us. The good come to us whilst all the pus and snot that came through your information media streams stay on your side. You are a makeshift step before a more advanced algorithm is invented.

Also, anyone calling themselves a “curator” when it is clear that they are dealing in merchandise should have their thumbs removed. You are not trying to fool us into believing that your job is anything outside marketing, branding and selling. Be proud of what you do without assigning the make-believe title of “curator” to sound more important. You have not reached some cultural apex through the range of shoes you have on offer. You are not a Connoisseur of a Stock-Take.

You Are Not a Curator. Don’t worry, there’s no shame. Just keep repeating it to yourself. You aren’t an editor of a newspaper by just simply choosing what articles to print. You aren’t an army general by simply shouting, “Charge”. So an inflated sense of worth in your Pick ‘n’ Mix does not a curator make.

I have becoming increasingly frustrated by the nonsense being stuck to the term “Curator” because people struggle to find the word for “Someone (Else) to Sort Through This Rubbish”. I still maintain that a curator, a job with actual skills, is starting to be abused by people from industries notorious for abusing definitions. This is why I sometimes despair at my Museopunk group when they start straying into territory that I covered in the Death of the Curator articles and calling it punk. It’s all well and good to get lots of involvement from your visitors/users/patrons/etc. but if you don’t have it based around an honest-to-God curator, do you know what you end up with?

Reality television. Prove me wrong. Very high participation from an audience who get to crowdsource the answers/outcomes/selections to the most base and voyeuristic products of the underculture.

I believe an antidote to this may well be Nina Simon’s new book, THE PARTICIPATORY MUSEUM. At the very centre of everything Nina says in this book is the curator (or more specifically, museum staff) as facilitator, designer and collaborator. Not just a presenter, as I fear curators will become when someone thinks participation means voting for favourites.

I warn you again; there needs to be a proper handle on curatorship before others start claiming it or misrepresenting it (I’m looking at you, U.S. NEWS). The very notion of a museums is integrated with the action of analytical thought. We go to museums to define ourselves, the world and the civilisation around us. If the curator is devalued cheapened through this woolly thinking then museums could lose all respect as cultural bastions. When I asked what the most important function of curators was, we saw how complex and varied the job was and not a single person said “selecting“.

k1p2k1p3k2 p2k2p1k1p1 k1p3k1p3k1 p2k3p2k1p3 k1p1k1p1k1 p3k2p1k2p2 k4p1k1p3k1 p1k3p2k1p4 k1p3k2p1k1

K stands for Knit, P stands for Purl and the number after is the amount of times. This therefore translates into 0s and 1s. so the first five things work out into “011011100″. The whole thing in a binary translation of hex, which in turns say… newcurator.

So these people have knitted in code “newcurator” into their work. Thanks to all those who got involved.

By InnyM - NKI is the red bit

By Christi Nielsen - NKI is the top bit

By joaniesanchirico - NKI is top purple bit

By Yael David - NKI is the top bit

They’re up to Project VI now, what they are calling PlateaKnit. It’s being lead by one-time ArtFriday alumnus Ingrid Murnane.

Using the twitter hashtag #plateaknit, “instructors” call out instructions using the abbreviations set out and “makers” get to dip in and out of the feed and follow whatever comes out of it.

Ingrid herself plans to knit with the full instructions.

This performance goes on between January 25th and 27th. There’s many ways to get involved or to watch the outcomes. Of course, the main blog will be tracking progress. Knitting-social-network Ravelry has a group, as does Facebook. Photos of your work-in-progress can go into the Flickr pool. But most of all, be sure to follow them on twitter.

I’m slightly surprised at the format and rather glad. I was expecting fifteen minutes of academic analysis of single objects. Instead, Mr. MacGregor uses the object in question to hang the rest of the ranging topic to. Case in point: it was far more interesting to listen to and there wasn’t much of an actual detailed physical description of the mummy and coffin. If you want to know what it looks like, you can look online. Why waste the precious fifteen minutes? I like how this whole project doesn’t assumes that everyone lives in a technological dead zone.

The World’s History is being focused on one object at a time. It is going to be a very British-Museum-branded history, meaning a globalised history. A bold approach that edges more on the importance of the journalistic/media aspects.  I applaud it.

Also on today was the Culture Show special (iPlayer link. Probably doesn’t work outside of UK). MacGregor was good. Kermode and Collings did some very interesting reports in the spirit of the project. Neil Oliver was trying too hard to be poignant and proves his 360 spin shots only work on top of a cliff. Tom Dyckhoff almost made the whole thing an episode of Blue Peter. Interestly, usual presenter Mark Kermode was sent off to the Isle of Man and replaced by BBC World News presenter Mishal Husain.

The website connecting all this together is part brilliant and part frustrating. The flash-heavy main page is probably the best way to search over the actual objects because of a great way they’ve categorised and interlinked the data. My God, it takes a long time though. Ignore the “In Your Area” tab altogether and use the “BBC Area” in the sidebar, trust me. The blog looks to be shaping up into a really good resource.

I will make your life easier to linking to the podcast here, which took me too long to find. I will also give you this page, which I think will eventually turn into the list of all the episodes and iPlayer links. How they’ve organised the lists of the actual programming is a bit of a nightmare. I’m surprised there isn’t a dedicated page on BBC’s iPlayer either.

I’m expecting the “Add Your Object” section will clutter things up pretty soon. You’d need a BBC ID, whatever that is. Would have though signing in with Twitter/Facebook/Google would be an option. For some, this aspect will allow them to add to the project as a whole as well as learn some basics in collection management (Honestly, the BBC offers a better collection database than some museums I’ve known). I see this causing problems already, like why is Swansea Museum adding stuff as an “individual” and not a museum?

No dedicated twitter account? I suppose it’s going to be all over the official British Museum one anyway.

All together, this is clearly the beginnings of something impressive. I’m looking forward to the rest.

I pretty much agree with these predictions, so I would like to offer five of my own.

I predict the museum of the future will be:

1) Closed. As in the doors are shut and the staff laid off. Whilst the financial and business world are slowly recalibrating themselves to try to deal with the new systems in places, I imagine there are a great number of museums that just will not have the ability to adapt for whatever reason, or the reasons will be out of their hands.

2) Enslaved. I think this to be the best antonym for autonomous. What I mean is that there will be ever increasing influences or a museum program from outside the museum. Corporate sponsorship of exhibitions, oppressive criteria for funding, government social engineering agendas and media lynch-mobs of ignorance. The actual museum will be very few decision left to make.

3) 3D digital. A more positive one. It only makes sense that the current digitisation projects will move into the next phase and an extra dimension. Considering there are people doing basic 3D scanning using only a webcam and other people doing amazing handheld highly-detailed scanning, museums are going to have to start soon.

Autodesk University 2009: Z Corp from Core77 on Vimeo.

4) Sillier. I agree with the CFM’s statement that future museums will be Flexible, but I feel that’s a statement about requirement rather than actuality. Distributed sites and chameleon spaces are sensible suggestions but urban regeneration through the construction of massive monuments isn’t going to go out of fashion. Well, it’s not as long as our concept of a city doesn’t change too much. As nobody has a set idea about what a museum or art gallery has to look like, they can build ever more bizarre buildings in attempts to be iconic.

5) Curatorless. Celebrity curators (like Shaq rather than Koons) or tyranny-by-majority decision making processes to pick out favourites. I wouldn’t be surprised if the task of curators is outsourced either to voting schemes or freelancers. Those banks sitting on large art collections will probably have more need for curators anyway.

Those are my five. Anyone else want to come up with five of their own?

Here’s the challenge: how can museums (and museos) make money enough to pay salaries while furthering their mission? “If you build it, they will come” is not working. We need to do more. Any ideas on how we can put the profit back in nonprofit?

Mission, as they rightly point out, means you can’t resort to opening cinemas. Getting people through the doors by any means is out of bounds. The museum mission has to be part of it.

If only it was that simple. There are plenty of other unspoken rules. Let’s say you have the opportunity to put on an exhibition that fits your museum’s mission/identity/policy and it has some real star quality to it. Win-win? Nope. You’ll gets all kinds of people crawling over you saying things like “conflict of interest” or “buddy-buddy”. I really feel for the New Museum. They have gone through some real unnecessary treatment. As if a trustee and supporter of a museum would take his resources to some other institution. Why would they want some other organisation to benefit? And why on Earth wouldn’t you want to work with people you’ve worked with before and have a close personal and professional relationship with?

Once upon a time, this kind of action was called an Art Movement

Also, we should be applauding Damien Hirst. I say that whilst not being his biggest fan. He paid money from his own pocket to keep an exhibition free and without having his name plastered next to some corporate logo.

“So museums need to start thinking more like for-profit businesses, right?” says Museo Unite’s Kat Hinkel. Of course there are hints to be taken from the commercial world, but be too much like it and you’ll will have people folding their arms in disgust. Contemporary artists? But they have agents and collectors! Public viewings would raise the prices! Scandal! Scandal!

The philanthropy-grantmaking model was unsustainable, as proved by it didn’t work in an economic meltdown. Well, the other option is go for international megaphilanthropy (via The Art Law Blog), which isn’t always an available option  and I don’t know how this exactly fits within a museum’s mission.

We just can’t win, can we? The required sweet-spot between financial stability, museum mission and corporate interest is a tiny speck surrounded by a lot of foot-stamping and indignation. Be aware when trying to answer the question, there’s a lot more to a nonprofit’s status than just the finance.

So, the Arts of the Samurai exhibition at Met has an increased ratio of male viewers. Maybe because of the interest in a period in history when masculinity was measured upon the integrity of one’s code of honour and that this culture appeared almost on the other side of the world.

Apparently not. This guy seems to think it must be down to the swords and violence. He then goes to suggest future exhibitions on steak, explosion, guitars and naked women.

Is this a joke? Am I not getting this? Have I missed the point a bit? A lot of people are linking to this article and yet not commenting on it.

I’m pretty sure that if this was written by a woman who went on to suggest exhibitions like “Washing Up! A History Involving Dishcloths”, “Shoes – Have Another Pair” and “Keeping Your Man”, feminists and anyone with an ounce of respect for gender equality would be ripping this to shreds. Quite right too.

Tits, violence and meat. That’s how to get men into museums. Because that’s all men would care about. Not history, not craftsmanship, not other cultures, oh no. Did you not hear? The “Manly” demographic has devolved a few millions years and European paintings will probably make you gay.

Dear New York Times, if you’re allowing any old nonsense in your paper, I’m cheap and have a backlog of all kinds of things I can offer as articles.

Join the group. Show your support.

—–

Art Fag City has two parts of a story up. The first outlines Meghann Snow’s rather bizarre “inspection” by gallery owner Mike Weiss and subsequent firing after two days on the job for not looking the part.

She was there as a registrar, by the way.

The second has the response from the Mike Weiss Gallery, which didn’t mention the inspection but made some pretty libelous remarks, insinuated something by her dance background and then saying that she did it for the web-traffic.

Get your rage on

Turns out, its Shaquille O’Neal.

I’d be very disappointed if every label didn’t include RANDOM ACTS OF SHAQNESS.

Here’s is the opening paragraph. Like all good NaNoWriMo projects, it’s rough, full of spelling mistakes and could do with some serious editing. I think I put part of this up here to (a) amuse me and (b) to fill out the time where posts have been lacking. It may also start some thoughts about what on Earth I do with it.

Without further ado – GLYPH: Chapter One

Ben Talisman’s 120th birthday was about a month away and the feeling coming from deep within his bones told him that retirement was rapidly approaching. He had been working at the museum for ninety years, serving as Head Curator for the past forty. Today would be the 50th budget meeting at Civic Centre he was summoned to. Every year, he walked alone with his craggy face set in a graven stare. He used this time to go over his strategy. It took an incredible amount of planning and research to make sure the museum wasn’t shut down or ransacked for financial reasons. The first few meeting, Talisman had relied upon presenting all the good work and all the beneficial effects the museum had. After one close call where the museum was saved from closure within the last forty-eight hours, Talisman took to gaining advantages from researching whoever was the current Portfolio Direktor.

The strategy had worked so far. The problem was no reason or excuse could be used twice. The trick was to stun the bureaucratic system whilst getting the desired result from whoever had the authority to sign off on the budget. This meant these meetings had become increasingly bizarre. One year, Talisman had planted false evidence in the Direktor’s house to suggest that his wife was a keen patron of the museum. He did this when he found out that the Direktor’s brave face hid a deep neurosis over his wife’s death six years previously. Another time, Talisman had found the Direktor was addicted to a rare hallucinogenic made from the sweat glands of poisoned West African Children, so he conducted the entire meeting dressed as a reptilian archangel sent by a Pulsar God from the other side of the Cosmos.

You will also see the first of a regular column written by me. Greg Chamberlain said I could write about anything I wanted. So I’ve entitled it NOT WITCHCRAFT.

Back in May, a minister of the Copperbelt region of Zambia made a statement that museums were academic sites that helped promote tourism and not centres of witchcraft. Zambia still has a Witchcraft Act that can punish practitioners with jail time. There are many who prefer the more traditional process of accusing someone of harvesting child organs and beating them to death. Understand the severity of the situation for a politician to make this statement on International Museums Day where the theme was museums and tourism. “Please don’t set fire to our museums and their staff. We need them so people visit our country”.

Also, thanks to Nick Poole for the shout-out on his column.

To go with the launch of the new site, they commissioned artists Thomson & Craighead to make a short piece of video art, Several Interruption. Nice simple idea. I wonder who it was who would have said, “You’re the Arts Council, how about some art on the website for the Launch?”

Here is the Thomson & Craighead video. (Requires flash, Javascript to be unblocked and sound)

DISCLOSURE: Yeah, I get paid for you watching this video. I get a few pennies per play (all the way through, I think). This is the deal. You watch this interesting piece of video art and I get to pay my hosting fees. I promise to only do these things if they are relevant to newcurator’s editorial, so I won’t be running adverts for films or something. And I’ll say every time if I get paid. Deal?

Working in mixed media, with a real feel for using encaustic, Haley creates captivating work often addressing contemporary issues such as homelessness and cultural rituals like birthdays. The crux of her work is to explore the ‘hidden’.

In the photoessay series Saving Yourself: Steps to Preserving the Chastity of Adolescent Girl, Haley causes her work to interact with its audience by leaving dirty smudge marks on their fingers, in an exploration of the connotations of the word ‘unclean’.

It was difficult to choose only three pieces of Haley’s work, but I have selected the following pieces to show her range. The first is a detail from the artist’s book which first captivated me. The second is from her Seen but not Heard series about the homeless. The third (look closely) shows the subtlety of her latest work.

You can find Haley at her website, Flickr and follow her on Twitter.

Cookbook Front Cover © Haley Nagy

Anything will Help © Haley Nagy

Conceal © Haley Nagy