Play: A Biennial of Creative Video
Posted inArt

How the Guggenheim’s “Play” Failed

by Kyle Chayka

The first offering of the Guggenheim’s Youtube Play biennial kicked off with a lot of spectacle, not limited to a ladder-perch musical performance by Ok Go and a stage setting more suited to a television show than an art exhibition. From the emcee to the nightclub vibe, this was no normal biennial exhibition. In fact, judged as an art exhibition, I think Play was a failure.

However, that doesn’t mean the whole event was a failure. In evaluating Play I think we have to first carefully state our terms- what we’re judging the show as and what we’re judging it against.

Posted inOpinion

Guggenheim’s “YouTube Play” Greeted With Ambivalence

by Kyle Chayka

If you happened to be hiding under a social media rock for the past few days, you might have missed the Guggenheim museum’s short-lived multimedia/indie band/internets extravaganza that was their Youtube-sponsored “Play” biennial. The biennial was in reality a juried exhibition that anyone could submit a video to, the only requirements being that the video had to be made in the past two years and come in under the 10 minute mark. More spectacle than art experience, commentators seem generally down on the show.

Posted inArt

Guggenheim’s “Play: A Biennial of Creative Video” Wows

Avatar photo by Hrag Vartanian

Last night, Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum was transformed into a futuristic new media award’s show venue as the finalists of the first Play: A Biennial of Creative Video biennial were announced to a crowd of Google, Intel, HP, Guggenheim employees (all sponsors of the event), artists, and new media types who were wow’d by the large projections on the interior and exterior of the Fifth Avenue landmark.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright could’ve never predicted that his building would serve as an ideal screen for a 21st Century online video awards show but it was the ideal venue for the whirlwind of projections that provided the backdrop for a livestreamed event prepared by the online video giant, YouTube.