” ArtWiki applies the principles of the Open Web to the art world. The 7th Berlin Biennale has invited the almost 5000 international respondents to their Open Call from 2010 to join a unique project. Each artist is invited to put their artistic and political statements, biographies, and resumes online. Artists are encouraged to join ArtWiki during spring 2012 so they can help to build one of the most open resources of online portfolios of contemporary art production anywhere, fully controlled by the individual artists themselves and free for any kind of use.
Each artist’s resume consists of a list of people, places, and projects the artist has accumulated over her lifetime. Points of production, which are similarly encountered in other artists’ biographies, are put into relation. These present a network of interconnections out of which the value of artistic “reputation” can be viewed from different angles. The artist statement and CV are forms of prose and artistic expression, although they are hardly ever regarded as part of the art process, nevertheless they function at the core of it. Artists should have full control over these central documents, by means of a user-controlled online library, at any time. The empowerment of the artist community is possible with the same tools which made Wikipedia a valuable source of knowledge. ArtWiki facilitates easier and more democratic access to art.
Until today the gatekeepers of the art system collect thousands and thousands of applications, picked by overworked juries and pre-selectors, to legitimize the openness of their institutional organization. Galleries and other institutions of the art market have an interest in controlling access to the material work. The availability of art online, as a public good, is often scarce or superficial, leaving it to the locally privileged collectors and visitors to exhibition openings to stay informed. We want to question if the circulation of digital representations of original art works in fact conflicts with market interests.
To validate a curatorial decision or make one for yourself, it is now possible to virtually browse through the materials of artists who responded to the Open Call. The potential of such a tool is not only to circumvent censorship and discursive power, but also to allow alternative views and histories, new forms of scholarship and research, or even show trails of plagiarism and innovation to everyone: experts and amateurs together building a collaborative historiography of contemporary art. ”
ArtWiki.org will start with the 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Artas an open platform for artists to share artist biographies as a free and open historiography for contemporary art.
via http://artwiki.org/ArtWiki
