Page 184 - The Black Box Book

the web to produce a universal archive, cast as digital heritage” (Dewdney,
Dibosa & Walsh 2013, p.330). Gervais also speculated on this conundrum
when she observed:
“Too bad museums are always late and getting on with stuff once its
history. I often wonder if it is that way because they want to make
sure the general public is following them or because they need to
have an historical point of view on things once they can grasp it as
an actual thing.” (Gervais, 2019)
The MoI project’s denomination and its archival mandate suggests
the urgency of narrowing the divide between the museum and networked
culture and points to the necessity of reassessing the very premise of
the museum’s mandate, starting from its formats and operations. Under
this light, what arguably presented itself as a discrete, almost accidental
and light-touch artistic operation, provides today a valuable insight when
assessing the complicated relationship between the museum and net-
worked culture. Even before the pandemic, this relationship was already
being challenged by the widespread use of social media as platforms for
art documentation and the parallel outburst of museums of various kinds,
such as the Museum of Ice Cream, designed with the intention of acting
as stage sets for the production of selfies and for brand engagement.
As artist and writer Dena Yago argues, what can be defined as a cultural
experience has expanded greatly over the last decade, as something
increasingly defined by the eye of the individual user rather than by
the mandate of the cultural institution. This bears some important eco-
nomic consequences, since, as she states, “the social media feed has
flattened any experience into content that is immediately shared on
centralized platforms, such as Instagram or TikTok, where that content
profits the platforms, not the content creator” (Yago, 2022, p.111). How
the museum is enmeshed within such a complex ecosystem is a question
which would require further scrutiny and a self-reflexive engagement from
the side of the cultural institutions themselves.
In spite of the museums’ fervent engagement with social media
during the pandemic, it was rather surprising that no cultural institution
attempted a systematic operation of archiving the richness and variety
of memes and visual content that was created and exchanged by users
worldwide during the lockdowns via WhatsApp chains and social media
platforms. Such a task was left to be uncovered by research institutes and
academic projects which identified social value in these forms of cultural
production, pointing to the agency of creativity and humour in a time of
crisis (see Giselinde Kuipers & Mark Boukes, 2020).
As the aesthetic current of the global pandemic began to decelerate
in early 2021, another strong participatory wave surfaced: the phenomenon
of the Bernie Sanders meme and the virality of the site Bernie Sanders
goes place. This was a particularly interesting case not only for its spread
and the kind of performativity it produced – a truly networked performance
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with a wild geotagging flavor – but also from the resilience shown by
the public figure whose image was being curated. Sanders benevolently
accepted the spotlight and reclaimed his own image only for the greater
good: to raise $1.5 Million in support of Vermont Charities through the sale
of his line of meme merchandise. How come, then, that museums remain
largely indifferent to these aesthetic currents and their wider social and
political implications? How can these aesthetic currents be redirected to
produce new forms of cultural value?
As I have argued elsewhere (Tedone, 2022), the answer to these
questions considers two distinct yet interrelated factors, both of which
are a consequence of the unresolved clash between the old paradigm of
aesthetic modernism (Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh, 2013) and the current
conditions of online circulation and “circulationism” (Steyerl, 2013) that
characterize the dissemination of content on the Web: first, the difficulty
for the galleries and museums to radically rethink the notion of aesthetics;
second, the resistance to reimagine its categorical distinctions, as well as
its curatorial formats and the whereabouts of its operations.
The theories put forward by new media theorist Olga Goriunova are
very useful for reframing aesthetics as simultaneously a practice in a con-
stant process of becoming, whose very constitution is being changed by
networked technologies and as a “major mode of operation for contempo-
rary society” (Goriunova 2012, p.94). To acknowledge this expanded defi-
nition of aesthetics, I would argue, is the first step for rethinking the role
of the museum within networked culture and for framing online curating
as a processual and networked practice that transcends the traditional
category of art – what Tyzlic-Carver refers to as “not-just-art-curating”
(2017) – in order to embrace a more fluid and inclusive notion of creativity.
GLIMMERS OF HOPE: TOWARDS
N E T WO R KED C O - C U RAT I O N
Several initiatives were set up during the pandemic at both ends of
the curatorial digital divide, that pointed to the possibility of approaching
online curating as a distributed, collaborative, networked and performative
process and practice. In other words, as networked co-curation: a process
forging strategic alliances between different agents (both humans and
machinic), objects (art and mundane objects) and practices (independent
and institutional curating, hacking and commercial endeavours) and that
aggregates each time a specific constellation of relationships (Tedone,
2019, Dekker & Tedone, 2019).
One of such initiatives was the 48 hours live streaming of the work
by artist Arthur Jafa entitled Love is the message, the message is death
(2016) initiated by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden in consultation with the artist. Thirteen
art museums and collections around the world, each of which holds
an edition of the artwork in their collection, were gathered to orchestrate
a simultaneous streaming of the work to make it accessible to the broad-
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