The Whitney's David Ross knows that the museum will be completely transformed by the new technology.
A self-proclaimed child of the '60s video revolution, David Ross is the director of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. Ross came to the Whitney in 1991, after nine years as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Under his leadership, the institute became one of the foremost venues for independent film and video, performance art, and new music. Now, he has big plans for the Whitney's Web site () and has become involved with an online conference on American art organized by the museum on the Echo BBS in New York City. Michael Sand captured these thought bites in Ross's office a week before the opening of the museum's closely followed 1995 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. by Michael Sand
On the ubiquity of collage imagery:
The collage aesthetic remains one of the great innovations of the 20th century, and it continues to burrow through artistic and technological practice. It engages any new technology. It's omnivorous. It demands new technologies to feed the jump-cut of the collage - the essential mind-set of the 20th century. There's so much velocity, there's so much capacity, there's such a volume of imagery that one of the only ways of responding to it, besides going white, like the paintings of Agnes Martin, is just to dive in. Get into the volume, accommodate the velocity, work with it, learn how to surf. Few artists have, and it may take even longer than our lifetimes to see a kind of implicit mastery of the medium.
On new media (and old):
It's a pretty complex task to get objects into this building and people here to see them. We just take it for granted. It's pretty complex to make bronze sculpture. Really complex. It's so much harder to make bronze sculpture than to compose in HTML. I mean, I can't do things in bronze, but I can already do things in HTML. So, it's not like novelty should be substituted for difficulty or craft.
On when video will really be art:
We can paraphrase the artist John Baldessari, who said, essentially, that video would become an art form when it is used like a pencil. He expressed it more poetically: "Video, like a pencil, won't bite your leg."
On art money:
Here we are in the most proto-anarchic environment in existence today, and we are imposing a set of social, political, and institutional controls within that space, which we call an art museum. An art museum that is patronized through the generosity of very rich people whose money comes from capitalist enterprises of one sort or another, ranging from the benign to things that many people would consider horrifying. But that's what museums are. We try to use those resources to support artists, and to provide an experience that we think is valuable to a range of communities. We are part of a process in which capital is transformed into aesthetic experience.
On museums as physical places:
There's no doubt that the museum as we know it - the museum as a social instrument, the museum as a site for the contest of ideas and values - will be completely transformed by this technology. That's not to say that what the museum does now will no longer be done in museum buildings. Rather, the Web will help place into a new context what museums do now, and that range of activities will never supplant physically entering a space and looking at works of art. That doesn't get lost.
On forecasting media:
Media don't die. They just transform and get placed in a different context. The issue is to embrace this extraordinary transformation. I take pleasure in mucking around in it, and making mistakes, and maybe even making some progress. That's one of the joys of being the director of an art museum. If we can't take those kinds of risks within the framework of an institution whose mission is so clear, and so clearly open to embracing these kinds of transformations, then who can?
On the Internet:
Here is an environment whose baseline vocabulary is being formulated by a wonderful congregation of anarchists, artists, technofreaks, and other assorted weirdos; as a result, it's very rich and very open. My fear, of course, is that the forces of Newt Gingrich will descend upon it, regulate it, regularize it, commodify it, and kill it. And that would be cause for real mourning. If I were Newt or any of those assholes, I would be scared to death of the Internet. I'd be trying to embrace it as if I already owned it - just like they are doing. But they can't own it. Not yet. And there will be an awful lot of underground resistance. The Internet is not only going to be a site for the contest of ideas and values, which is what museums do; it could very well be the site of a serious struggle for control of our culture. I have no doubt about which side I would take in that struggle.
