Live: Damien Hirst (more likely assistants) at work

Two years ago it was Marina Abramović at MoMA. Now you can watch another artist at work: Damien Hirst, who has set up a live feed on his website with two views into his studio.

Advice for Art History Jedis

There’s a mysterious new web presence called The Art History Jedi, who has a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and two videos on YouTube, all giving sage advice to current and prospective students of Art History.  The videos talk through the processes of applying for graduate studies and internships using XtraNormal Movie Maker, software that converts typed text to voice, often with amusing results.  Despite the humour, there’s a lot of helpful advice here:

Letters to a Young Art History Jedi, part I: Applying to graduate school

Letters to a Young Art History Jedi, part II: Applying for museum internships

European Film Gateway available online

European Film Gateway (EFG) is a web portal to selected archival material held in European film archives. EFG contains over 26,500 videos, 500,000 still images and 15,000 texts on filmmaking and film-related issues in Europe from the early days until today. You can browse by collection or search for specific videos or images. Most object titles and descriptions come in the language provided by the contributing archive but sometimes translated into English if not the original language.

Additionally, if you subscribe to My EFG, you can receive news alerts and have access to a free personal work space that allows you to bookmark, comment and tag objects within MyEFG.

Creating interactive images with Speaking Image

The online application Speaking_Image lets you create, edit and share interactive annotative images. After uploading images (those without copyright infringement), you can isolate and annotate areas of the image for your viewers. Students can also edit these images so they can create interactive and collective study guides as a group (edits are listed so everyone knows when and by whom an image is edited). For further information, check out video tutorials here and an example using Picasso’s Guernica.

New applications for social media in museums

More and more museums are now using social media and other new technology both to engage their existing audience in new ways and to bring in a new audience.   Forward-thinking museums are creating iPhone apps and Facebook pages with interactive elements, and posting myriad content on their websites.

There are also interesting new partnerships among museums.  One such collaboration is ArtBabble, a site with video content from 60 partner museums (including short curator talks, conversations with artists,  full  lectures, performance pieces, and more).

Some institutions, like the Guggenheim, are inviting video input which they post on their site YouTube Play.  A recent call for content received 23,000 submissions!

If you want to read more, there’s a good profile in the New York Times of  people directing innovative social media initiatives at the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

How to read a Chinese handscroll painting

The newly-appointed Curator of Asian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maxwell Hearn, discusses the intimate relationship between object and viewer with a 14th century Chinese handscroll painting in this video from the New York Times. For other videos from the museum, see their YouTube Channel.

Experiencing the earthquake in Toyo Ito’s Mediatheque in Sendai

Culture Monster has posted a video someone took during Friday’s earthquake while braving it out under a desk in Mediatheque cultural center in Sendai. As Christopher Hawthorne points out, both the length of the quake and the sway of the building are amazing to watch, especially since the structure seems to survive roughly intact.

Exploring museums and hi-res images with Art Project, by Google

Google has collaborated with art museums in the US and Europe to offer Art Project. The viewer navigates each participating museum with the same technology as Google’s Street View and can zoom in to view specific works of art in high resolution. With a Google account, you can create a personalized Art Collection to view and share with others. For more information about the technology and project, including YouTube videos, click here.

UPDATE: Here is a review of the project by the New York Times.

Colbert Report, Steve Martin, and Art

In honor of finals week, here is a link to the recent Art edition of the Colbert Report. Especially interesting is Colbert’s “Tip of the Hat” to Rep. Eric Cantor (VA) and the censorship of David Wojnarowicz’ video “A Fire in My Belly” at the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek exhibition. Later in the show Steven Colbert tests Steve Martin on his knowledge of art (or “Art”) and special guests—including Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey and Andres Serrano—lend a hand in trying to sell Colbert’s portrait.

UPDATE: This painting, “Portrait 5, Stephen(s)”, was auctioned off on March 8, with the proceeds to go to school arts projects through DonorsChoose.org.

Public domain newsreels and films online

Two wonderful sources for public domain film footage are available online

• Universal Newsreels: created between 1929 and 1967, these newsreels cover the major topics of the day.  They were put into the public domain by University City Studios.   (There are also many more recent pieces of news footage in this college.)
• Prelinger Archives:   a collection of “ephemeral” film: amateur, advertising, educational  and industrial material from a variety of government and commercial sources.

Try a search on “atom bomb” in either collection – in addition to several still-shocking film images, you’ll find the original “Duck and Cover” Civil Defense film.