YouTube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and YouTube have announced the launch of YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. A collaboration with HP, YouTube Play was conceived to discover and showcase the most exceptional talent working in the ever-expanding realm of online video. Open to the global online community, the competition is accepting submissions now through July 31st.

A jury of experts from the worlds of art, design, film, and entertainment will select up to 20 videos submitted from around the world to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum on October 21, 2010, with simultaneous presentations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin, Bilbao, and Venice. The works will also be available to a worldwide audience on the special YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play.

YouTube Play is just the latest in YouTube’s run of innovative events. In 2009, the YouTube Symphony Orchestra gave everyone with access to the Internet a chance to play in Carnegie Hall, and in 2007, the CNN/YouTube debates gave everyone a chance to ask a question of U.S. presidential candidates. With YouTube Play, YouTube expands upon the traditional curatorial process in a way that gives every video creator a shot at international artistic recognition.

Upload Creative Video
The goal of this project is to discover and celebrate work that expands the notion of what video can be. Submissions may include any form of creative video, including art, animation, motion graphics, narrative and non-narrative work, or entirely new art forms. YouTube Play hopes to attract innovative, original, and surprising videos from around the world, regardless of genre, technique, background, or budget. Participants can be art students or amateur video makers as well as creative professionals. To help video creators generate the best possible submissions, the YouTube Play channel will post HP Make tutorials, featuring editing, sound, and other video-making techniques.

How to Participate
Participants are invited to submit new or existing videos created within the last two years to a YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play. The maximum running time for a video is ten minutes. Each participant will be asked to provide a written statement regarding his or her work. Only one video per participant will be considered. The deadline for submission is July 31, 2010, 12:00 p.m., Pacific Time, 3:00 p.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Selection Process
The Guggenheim will identify up to 200 videos which will be viewable on the YouTube Play channel at youtube.com/play. From the 200, up to 20 videos will be selected by a jury of experts, comprised of distinguished artists, filmmakers, designers, and musicians, to be presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York during a special event on October 21, 2010.

Check out the video below for more details, and/or visit YouTube.com/Play.

*above: Design by Jeff Baxter adapted from a photograph by David Heald; © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 2010

*above: Design by Jeff Baxter; Courtesy of Google

*Images courtesy of The Guggenheim.

Iranian born photographer, videographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat first rose to the international stage in the mid-90s with a photo series called Women of Allah, an intense body of work exploring women and martyrdom in Islamic culture. Since then, her work has progressed from photographs to video installations and short films, covering difficult topics like Eastern and Western boundaries, men and women, the sacred and the profane, exile and belonging.

A new book out this month entitled, simply, Shirin Neshat, explores the evolution of Neshat’s potent imagery (see below!). Featuring a foreword by world renowned artist Marina Abramovic and an essay by art critic Arthur Danto, this stunning collection covers everything from Women of Allah, focusing the lens on militant Muslim women, to her first feature film, Women Without Men, based on a novella by Shahrnush Parsipur, which was banned from the author’s native Iran. The film follows the lives of four women during the summer of 1953, when an American-led coup d’etat brought down Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister and reinstalled the Shah to power. Notably, Women Without Men makes its U.S. debut this year, and has already earned the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival and been selected as part of 2010′s New Directors/New Films program of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Neshat’s work is boldly beautiful, incredibly powerful, and at times even stark: women cloaked in black veils with excerpts of Farsi poetry inscribed across the surface; videos of clans of men and women in barren landscapes chanting, sacred burial rituals, groups of men and women listening to rousing moralistic sermons in a public hall, and more recently, magical realist works in which women fly or plant themselves in gardens to ensure their fertility.

Shirin Neshat is available now through Amazon or Rizzoli.

Shirin Neshat
essay by Arthur Danto
foreword by Marina Abramovic
Published by Rizzoli
Hardcover, $75.00

*above: Shirin Neshat, Women of Allah Series, 1994. B&W RC print (photo taken by Cynthia Preston), 31 x 46 1/2 inches (79 x 118 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

*above: Shirin Neshat, Allegiance with Wakefulness, 1994. B&W RC print & ink (photo taken by Cynthia Preston), 46 3/4 x 37 1/8 inches (118.7 x 94.3 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

*above: Shirin Neshat, Stories of Martyrdom, 1994. B&W RC print and ink (photo taken by Cynthia Preston). 11 x 14 inches (27.9 x 35.6 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York.

*above: Shirin Neshat, Production Still. Rapture, 1999. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

*above: Shirin Neshat, Rapture Series, 1999. Gelatin silver print. 44 x 69 inches (111.8 x 175.3 cm). Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

*above: Shirin Neshat, Passage Series, 2001. Cibachrome print. 51-1/8 x 63 inches framed. 130 x 160 cm framed. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

*above: Shirin Neshat, Passage Series, 2001. Cibachrome print. 51-1/8 x 63 inches framed. 130 x 160 cm framed. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

*above: Shirin Neshat, Passage Series, 2001. Cibachrome print. 42 x 63 1/8 inches (106.7 x 160.3 cm) framed. Copyright Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

*All images courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York

“Architecture affects everybody…” Julius Shulman once said. And he’s right – it’s all around us, and far too often taken for granted. Sadly, Shulman passed away earlier this year. Now, director Erik Bricker‘s new documentary, “Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman,” celebrates Shulman’s life and work as the world’s greatest architectural photographer.

Click HERE for a list of screenings.

And check out Dwell Magazine‘s interview with director Erik Bricker HERE.

H/T FreshCreation

Personal Edition Crochet Chair by Marcel Wanders

The Philadelphia Museum of Art welcomes visionary Dutch designer Marcel Wanders in a self-designed, self-curated exhibition called “Marcel Wanders: Daydreams.” This dreamlike, multimedia installation of objects was personally selected by Wanders to represent pivotal points in his 20+ year career. Video images, lighting, and sound illuminate his creative development over the years.

New films—detailing Wanders’s design process and philosophy in projects ranging from manufactured products, hotel interiors, and design art—also make their public debut at the retrospective. The films’ soundscapes provide Wanders’s personal views on design.

“Marcel Wanders: Daydreams”
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Curated by Kathryn Hiesinger
November 22, 2009- June 13, 2010

For more information, visit Philadelphia Museum of Art.
And look for my interview w/Wanders in the winter issue of Clear Magazine!

Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993); Directed by Henry Selick; Shown: Sally, Jack Skellington; Credit:Touchstone/Photofest ©Touchstone Pictures

Beetlejuice (1988) aka Beetle Juice; Directed by Tim Burton Shown (center):Michael Keaton (as Beetlejuice); Credit:Warner Bros./Photofest; © Warner Bros.

Tim Burton. (American, b. 1958); Untitled (The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories); 1982–1984; Pen and ink, marker, and colored pencil on paper, 10 x 9\

Tim Burton; (American, b. 1958); Blue Girl with Wine. c. 1997; Oil on canvas, 28 x 22\

Throughout his career, Tim Burton has always pushed the cinematic envelope. This November, the Museum of Modern Art presents a major retrospective of his work. Tim Burton considers his evolution as both a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer and writer. The show will trace Burton’s creative history, from his earliest childhood drawings through his mature work in film.

The exhibition will bring together over 700 examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, and include an extensive film series spanning Burton’s 27-year career. Artworks and objects will be drawn primarily from the artist’s personal archive, as well as studio archives and the private collections of Burton’s collaborators. His student films and early, nonprofessional films will also be on display. International and domestic posters from Burton’s films will be on display in the theater lobby galleries.

The show will also include little-known drawings, paintings, and sculptures created in the spirit of contemporary Pop Surrealism, as well as work generated during the conception and production of his films, such as original The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride puppets; Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, and Sleepy Hollow costumes; and even severed-head props from Mars Attacks!

In conjunction with Tim Burton, MoMA presents The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, a series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton. Taking as its starting point a screening of
horror movies that Burton organized in Burbank in 1977, the series includes such films as Jason
and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), and Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974), and will be screened from December 2, 2009 to April 26, 2010.

The show runs through April 2010.
Images courtesy of MoMA. For more info, visit www.moma.org

“Hate advertising? Make better ads.” So says Doug Pray, director of Art & Copy, a documentary study of art, commerce and human emotion. Pray’s newest film focuses on advertising’s best, featuring a series of interviews with the industry’s leaders: George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Lee Clow, Hal Riney (who sadly passed away last year), Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby and other trailblazers, who bring honor to a profession all too often clouded by mediocrity.

In the spirit of other recent, great art/design documentaries – such as Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica and Objectified – and for a world so happy to embrace this under-represented industry – Madmen anyone? – Art & Copy considers the creative minds and passion of those who, generally without our awareness, sculpt so much of our world.

Art & Copy premiers tomorrow at the IFC Center in NY. For more information – and the trailer – visit artandcopyfilm.com