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Sunday, April 19, 2015

“The Sea” at Mu.ZEE

Photo by Steven Decroos
(link)

Museums spend capital to produce lavish publications, generously donated more and more -as seen here - to CAD's archives for the people's dissemination under CAD's hosting bill. Ignoring the ol' internet truism that if something is free the consumer is the product - and an economic system in which treading water is the survival baseline - the expensive creation of physical catalogs to service the exhibition promotion would seem a vestigial form yet to accelerate to the speed of today. The money/time/energy might be better invested making the museum's generous image host, CAD, a little less contextually barren, and begin taking time to assign the relevant image information to the images, to give credit to artists and not just photographers of artists, rather than the current system's shot in the dark of mouse hovering, and bringing it's viral distribution inline with the elegantly produced and inflammatory blowhard of yesteryear's lushly accosted catalogs.  CAD has - for better or worse - become the museum's catalog, and working with it to make these massive online exhibitions anything more than a sea of decontextualized images would be in everyone in power's favor, looking less like a gigantic e-flux announcement cast to sea, and finally get rid of the exorbitantly redundant 15 Bill Viola image stills.

see too : Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at Salts , Dai Hanzhi 5000 Artists at Witte de With , "Pattern Drill" at Hacienda