The very exciting Guggenheim Museum/YouTube collaborative competition – YouTube Play – is on the hunt for the world’s most creative videos. As we reported last month, 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.

And now the competition’s all-star and eclectic jury from the worlds of art, design, film, and music has been announced. The impressive dream-team panel includes Laurie Anderson, Animal Collective, Darren Aronofsky, Douglas Gordon, Ryan McGinley, Marilyn Minter, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Stefan Sagmeister, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

According to jury chair Nancy Spector:

“We will be looking for work that will test, elevate, and experiment with video as it is manifest online. We are less interested in what’s ‘now’ than in what’s next.” YouTube Play is open to students and amateur video makers, artists, and creative professionals. Submissions may include animation, motion graphics, narrative, nonnarrative, documentary, and music videos. The jury will review a short list of up to two hundred video works that have been prescreened by the Guggenheim from the pool of videos submitted by the international YouTube community and uploaded to youtube.com/play. From the short list, the jury will select up to twenty that they deem the most creative and inspiring, regardless of genre, technique, or budget. The short-listed videos will be on the YouTube Play channel (youtube.com/play) beginning in September 2010.

To learn more, visit YouTube.com/Play.

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