Caine's Arcade & Contemporary Art Museums

If you look at this blog, then surely by now you have seen Caine's Arcade. If not, watch it now. (Then, like it on Facebook, check out his site, give him money, follow him on Twitter, etc.)

Ok, yes, awesome, sweet, tear jerking, and wonderful. Obviously, I love it. Personally, as much as I'm into the phenomenon surrounding the story, this is the exact sort of thing I've been noticing in day-to-day life for years now. No resentment here, I think it's awesome that the kid is getting all the props. Even the filmmaker, good for him. Truly. (Even the theme song, omm, ok, sure.) But I'm equally if not moreso intrigued by the actual objects in Caine's Arcade. The games. The art. (This includes the arcade as a Social Practice piece.)

And, I tweeted this today:

In favor of art institutions like @MoMAPS1 @newmuseum @whitneymuseum or @Guggenheim to be nimble enough to set up Caine's Arcade next week.

As the information age becomes wiser, there's clearly something to be said for taking time to develop things, and the lack of development that can be all too evident in the name of SPEED. But there also seems to be a HUGE potential for a museum space that can program on the fly. Not an online museum but brick and mortar. Dollars to donuts (is that a phrase?) says that Caine's Arcade would draw more people than the Whitney Biennial at the moment, and think of the money that has gone into development of both. So, it wouldn't be a museum of viral videos, or of clever awesomeness although many would see it as that. Instead, it would be a contemporary art museum in the truest, or at least truer, sense of the word (contemporary) than what these other dinosaurs are able to do these days. MoMA is clearly trying with things like Talk to Me, video game nights, and they're all doing events for the hip crowd. But even Talk to Me featured things that had gone viral years prior, rather than weeks. The word "contemporary" is really changing as the nature of time changes.

As I.....type......this...... sentence..... culture.......... is..........evolving........ faster.........so, is that a good thing? That's not the point here. The fact is, it's happening. The focus, instead, is that contemporary art, as something that develops over time, is changing faster and faster and we need to understand this phenomenon, as a culture. ("We" sort of always have, right?) Institutions are our cornerstones for this understanding. Or, are they? They always have been, but this collective understanding has clearly moved online. Experimental expression that happens on the streets, in galleries or other spaces, DOES have an impact on culture. But, where is the actual reach as far as our collective digestion? Online. Then, eventually, successful art is elevated to the museum setting. The problem I'm pointing out here is that the content in museums is moving further and further into the past because of the increasing acceleration of the changing culture.

Alas, the need for a contemporary art museum that curates based solely on viral art, and does so while the art is viral, so the emotional impact of the live exhibition carries the weight of the meaning, rather than our current situation wherein that meaningful impact occurs as we experience things on screens.

UPDATE

THIS JUST IN. That makes me think that institutions like The Exploratorium, OMSI and the New York Hall of Science are positioning themselves to be able to program on the fly. (Bjork didn't choose to perform at NYSCI out of random whimsy you understand.) The Maker Movement is moving in. There have been a lot of recent writings on the New Aesthetic art movement as well, I'm curious about overlap with this idea of insta-Museums as it relates to cultural digestion of contemporary art apart from the internet.

p.s. Just a note that I made this (relevant) neon sign in collaboration with TJ Norris a few years ago: