Page 174 - The Black Box Book

ogies since the 1990s that is largely unknown to the general public.
The perceived ‘newness’ of digital media in the art world the article al-
ludes to, I want to argue, is thus only a matter of perspectives: of fields,
histories, institutions or intellectual discourses. The point that the article
seems to be proving is that in 2020 the contemporary art world and
its market got finally interested in the digital. But how did this interest
manifest, which new strategies and tactics were put in place and what
institutional models were endorsed?
Reflecting upon the international example listed in the Guardian’s ar-
ticle, Italian contemporary art museums, such as the Triennale in Milan
or Mambo in Bologna, boosted their presence on social media, swiftly
building new formats, such as podcasts, and created online displays of
their exhibitions and collections. These online viewing rooms were often
relying upon services such as the Google Arts & Culture Project, which
provided swift solutions to the problem of translating the museum’s identi-
ty online. However, it is important to bear in mind that that these services
are not transparent interfaces, which is a condition that most museums
have failed to acknowledge. As the digital curators Marco De Mutiis and
Jon Uriarte have argued, Google’s operations call into question serious
issues about artwork reproduction rights and the monetization of audi-
ences’ attention as well as the redirection of online traffic from the art
institution’s websites to Google’s platform (Uriarte & De Mutiis, 2021).
Overnight new digital-native institutions and initiatives were cre-
ated on social media, which focused mainly on quick documentation of
the experience of the pandemic. Some of them were based upon the aggre-
gative logic of users generated content, like the case of the Instagram CAM
(The Covid Art Museum) which was open for contribution of artworks
under a specific hashtag such as #CovidArt or #QuarantineArt; other en-
terprises, such as the CPM (Covid Photo Museum), attempted to organize
visual documentation of this historic moment by arranging photographs
according to conventional curatorial templates such as thematic exhibi-
tions, solo series, and commissions. Other projects functioned as quickly
assembled visual archives aiming to reflect on such initiatives across
the media and photography worlds as they were happening. This was
the case for the Tumblr blog Curating The Pandemic Image, put together
by Marco De Mutiis, digital curator for the Fotomuseum in Wintherthur.
A remarkable number of galleries and museums invited their on-
line audiences to produce and circulate photographs of their remakes
of historical paintings from their collections with domestic props to
exploit the engaging power of social media. The phenomenon went viral
Figure 1: Tussen Kunst en
following the widely popular Dutch Instagram page Tussen Kunst en Quarantaine. (2020) Retrieved from
Quarantaine (Between Art and Quarantine) created by Anneloes Officier, https://www.instagram.com/tussenkun-
a 31-year-old communication specialist from Amsterdam. The account stenquarantaine/?hl=en
inspired the Getty Museum Challenge, as well as other similar museums’
online endeavors, showing that the experience of art and its creation can
be a distributed process.

174 175