Thoughts on my Internship
In case you can't make it to my talk on Tuesday night - here's the transcript of my Ron Brown talk.
In the past decade, the Guggenheim has made a name for itself as a global art institution specializing in American and European modern masters. Beyond its well-known and beloved museum space, a quarter-mile ascending ramp in modernist white, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, The Guggenheim has opened branch museums in Bilbao (Spain), Venice, Berlin, Las Vegas, with plans to expand to Brazil, Taiwan, and China. By its nature, this Museum is fragmented. Prior to this year, the Guggenheim operated several satellite offices throughout New York City. Due to financial constraints in the sluggish post-September 11th economy, the Museum recently laid-off 1/5 of its staff. With a bare bones crew, and the Museum is in the process of consolidating many of its satellite offices. In this context, I was assigned to assist three curators in the film and media arts department: John Hanhardt, Jon Ippolito, and Maria Christina Villasenor. I worked in the SoHo office at a time of great internal restructuring and institutional transition.
My responsibilities were divided among several large projects. I initiated the research for a future retrospective on the Italian filmmaker, Federico Fellini. To get primary research materials on this explosive personality and creative genius, I went to the MoMA film archives, the New York Public Library, and Anthology Film Archives. For another assignment, I complied a list of forty films that will eventually comprise a film series called philosophers in film. I also did some development work, that is to say proposed possible fund-raising sources, for a film festival and an upcoming exhibition about the Internet and art called Mind Sets. Since the curators lacked support staff, from time to time, I did some clerical duties like filing or returning slides to artists. Overall, I became better acquainted with research libraries in New York, trends and debates in New Media art, and how the Guggenheim�s priorities measure up against other art institutions.
I was lucky enough to have been placed with a curator who is particularly adept at having interns around. Jon and I share a similar outlook toward the non-obvious but convergent disciplines of art history and political science. Specifically, a book Jon Ippolito is writing, entitled The Edge of Art, draws thematically on what he calls, �the politics of new media.� Although he is an art curator and responsible for projects like the Internet Art Commission, his expertise ranges from government intervention on non-compete clauses for Internet service providers, attitudes created by peer-to-peer file sharing services like Napster, and federal taxes an artist's estate. He has strong political convictions regarding content-based censorship laws the ability of the profit motivated art market to transition into a free-access network. In the contemporary world art and politics are one in the same in experience, personality, and academic breadth. Our personalities were well matched and our work habits complimented one another. In this respect, the combination of personality and fields of interest made both of our summers a success.
Generally speaking, I was granted a lot of independence. I was given assignments and left to complete them on my own. The biggest challenge of the summer occurred when Jon Ippolito accepted a teaching position for the coming academic year at the University of Maine. This decision turned our routine on its head as he moved out of the City and subsequently spent several weeks out of the office. When Jon was away we communicated every day by phone and I held down the fort. During this time, I concentrated on my Fellini research and tasks for the other curators.
I really enjoyed this internship because it was intellectually stimulating and related to academic topics like video art and film that I have been introduced to at Middlebury. Following the advice of my curators, I have decided to apply to graduate school immediately following my graduation from Middlebury. In order to get your foot in the door in the art industry, a master�s degree will set you apart from other candidates. Once I realized that the academic side of museum work, curating exhibitions and writing scholarly essays, is for me more rewarding than the business or fund-raising aspects, the graduate school decision seemed obvious.
To round out the experience, I participated in a weekly field trip / speaker session with the interns from other departments in the museum. This experience really enhanced my time at the Guggenheim because it provided insight into other aspects of the museum world � it provided a forum for people to come together and talk about their day-to-day routine and the personality of departments ranging from the Director�s office to membership. We met with several people involved in the Moving Pictures exhibition � I included some literature about this on my poster � and visited the studio of artist Vito Acconci and other museums like the Met, the Dia Center, and the Guggenheim�s art warehouse.
In my opinion, the art world is surprisingly accessible to those who are willing to make an effort and pay their dues. The community is small and name-dropping is common, but professionals have freely doled out advice and shared their breadth of experience. Despite the comparatively low salaries of the non-profit sector, the main allure of the art world is that it allows you to work with something you love and is fascinating on many levels. The exhibition openings and parties aren�t a bad perk either. Someone once described to me the incurable condition of the �art bug.� He said that once you�ve been bitten, it is hard to imagine yourself doing anything else but working late nights curating shows and spending free Saturdays going to galleries in Chelsea. If nothing else, the summer confirmed that I have been bitten and want to work in the culture industry.
posted by lmjasinski at 9:18 PM
