Curating Immateriality…
Yes, the issues here are pretty clear. My feelings towards these things are, I believe, rather well informed. My time as an art student has been extremely interesting. I have been determined to find out about this thing called art & am now mixed up in the civil-war within it. We are in changing times and it is painful for the old world to adjust to new ideas. I find it absurd to suggest that art can’t or shouldn’t be immaterial. What could be more immaterial then the imagination? Art has always originated from the imagination. So art has and will always have some immateriality to it. Our minds can obviously make sense of things which are not in our reality. We are not mere animals, our brains work on levels far beyond anything else here. That being said, I do realize that things like our feelings and consciousness could be constructions of nature which have formed to help us survive. (My thoughts are echoed at TED by Michael Pollan http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/214 )
Anyway, the most important thing I got from chapter 1 of Curating Immateriality by Joasia Kryss can be triggered with the statement “transformed the nature of art”. If we can accept this idea that “the nature” of art as something that will change depending on the culture and society around it, then new media will soon be considered a credible high art. I see the "nature of art" statement, even for those diehard old art types, to be impossible to deny. The museums and art galleries of the future will be very different than those of today and the past.
I don’t see the whole archiving thing to be that big of a deal. I must not understand the full story or something? Are they worried about media getting damaged or outdated? Can’t we record these works it by writing about them or using technology like video? ARS Electronica and communities of artists are still kind of archiving this history...as we are making it.
It's like the established museums don't know what to do with us. It would be a challenge to curate the immaterial but it’s far from impossible.