The New Museum in New York City has been a pioneer institution, a leader in supporting digital arts since the late 1970’s. In recent years they have created several platforms, projects, and reports to address the current digital era.
“In the 21st century, culture is mainly mediated through a smartphone or a tablet. Artists have become software designers, museums grow into online digitized spaces, art agents are now virtual visitors and curators’ expertise extends to curating the web. When in the 1990s artists used digital technologies as a tool, in the 2000s they used the web as a medium and exhibition space itself.”
"Remembering and documenting exhibitions to ensure its place within art history have been decisive concerns for curators in the post-modern era. With New Museum’s First Look: New Art Online initiative, the museum has provided a solution by conceiving an open online space in which artworks are accessible at all times. This new format conveniently transcends time and space but eventually raises an innumerable amount of questions: How is the curator’s role changing in a situation where the exhibition space and the work become one overlapping entity? Could the experience of online exhibitions definitely replace physical exhibitions? If exhibitions are no longer tied to a specific historical, social and physical context, what will be the future of art history and museums’ infrastructure?"
This article provides a critical dialog regarding the digital era, presenting information and practices from the perspective of a well-known art museum. While digital art practices, platforms, and virtual audience engagement are not new, large scale institutions and art museums must grapple with the evolution of this technological age to respond to a new generation of viewership, sustaining their purpose and engagement with their audiences.
"The ubiquity of the digital realm and social media as a source for information, connectivity and experience has compelled museums to actively engage with the digital sphere in order to meet the needs of a new generation of visitors for whom accessibility and immediacy have become categorical imperatives."