Design by Jeff Baxter adapted from a photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 2010.
The biennial event YouTube Play, put on by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube, and sponsored by HP and Intel, was announced on June 14. The contest celebrates creative online video, and because the videos can be by anyone from students to professionals, and can be in any genre from animation to documentaries, 6,600 videos have already been submitted since the announcement. From this growing collection (the deadline for submissions is July 31), the Guggenheim will select 200 videos, which will then be passed on for review by YouTube Play’s jury. Made up of some of the most prestigious names in art, performance, film, and design, the jury is responsible for choosing the 20 most creative and inspiring videos.
The thirteen jurors were announced last week and come from all over the world and have a diverse range of experience, knowledge, and abilities. Performance artist Laurie Anderson, for example, is a musician, inventor, and filmmaker, and was NASA’s first artist-in-residence. Also on the jury is internationally acclaimed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. American Director Darren Aronofsky has won numerous awards over the years and is best known for the features Requiem for a Dream (2000), π (1998), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008), and soon-to-be-released Black Swan (2010). The jury also includes Josh Dibb, Brian Weitz, and Noah Lennox of Animal Collective. Artists Douglas Gordon, Marilyn Minter, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, photographer Ryan McGinley, filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Nancy Spector are on the jury, as well.
Once this jury selects the 20 videos they deem the best and most innovative, the videos will be put on the YouTube Play channel (youtube.com/play) in September and displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York from October 21-24, 2010. They will also be shown in the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. YouTube Play also includes a blog (guggeheim.org/thetake) on the history of video and includes commentary by the art community on the emerging art medium of online video. As Spector put it, “We will be looking for work that will test, elevate, and experiment with video as it is manifest online. We are less interested in what’s ‘now’ than in what’s next.”
Design by Jeff Baxter adapted from a photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 2010.
Design by Jeff Baxter. Courtesy of Google.
