Curatorial practice: Curating ephemeral work

One of the questions I asked Dan Byers during his class visit was whether there is difficulty in curating ephemeral works such as performance, participatory events, and social practice. I'm interested in this question in relation to some of my own work and trying to figure out how to show that work outside of school as well as how to maintain a "sustainable" practice.

I read an article on Hyperallergic which explores the question of curating performance:

How to Curate Performance Art, and Other Problems (by Jen Ortiz)
http://hyperallergic.com/62007/how-to-curate-performance-art-and-other-problems/

The article discusses the complexity of curating, showing, and funding performance in galleries and alternative spaces as well as museums. Two main concerns are cited from curators. The first problem is the question of labor in visual art institutions. Are the artists being paid, fed, and given a place to rest? Otherwise, what means do they have to travel to and perform in that space? The second problem is, what exactly is a collector acquiring if he or she buys a performance? Is it the score, choreography, documentation, or rights to re-perform it? This question ties back into the first: how can the artists be funded to give the performance if the work is difficult to sell or convince others to invest in? This all ties into our later discussions about labor and capital.

Another interesting article I read:

How to frame ephemeral art: curating before and after the Web 2.0 (by Elena Giulia Rossi)
http://www.ny-magazine.org/PDF/06.05.EN_How_to_frame_ephemeral_art.pdf

This article focuses more on net art and new media. What is their context within museums and how can they best be exhibited? Because of the rapidly-changing nature of technologically involved work, what does net art and new media become once within a museum? How do these genres continue to evolve outside of the static nature of the museum?

It also brings out an important different between galleries and museums: galleries are concerned with putting art on the market and museums are concerned with display and preservation. Once a work enters a museum, it becomes "historicized":

"Museums, even the most contemporary ones, are the last place where artworks arrive in the art system. It is a natural consequence that any work that enters the museum's doors in any form becomes historicized by the mere fact of inhabiting that 'sacred' space."

Rossi argues that museums should have a role in keeping track of contemporary art as well as preserving it, becoming a space that evolves as much as the work being created outside of it.

The Whitney Museum maintains an online gallery space for net art and new media, Artport. It's fun to browse:
http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/Artport

From "Screening Circle" by Andy Deck, through Artport