Going Digital? New Media and Digital Art at the Stedelijk

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has an extensive collection of
time-based media art from the 1960s onwards, which has been expanded into the digital field in
recent decades. The Stedelijk makes an interesting case study for this special issue on “Art Curation:
Challenges in the Digital Age,” because it has had a reputable history of dealing with time-based art
since the mid-1970s but presently faces the same challenges with regard to curating and collecting
digital art as other museums of modern art. The Stedelijk’s history began in 1974, when the first curator
for time-based art was hired, Dorine Mignot, a pioneer in this field. After Mignot’s retirement in 2006,
the museum was closed for almost a decade, but under the leadership of Beatrix Ruf (2014–2017), an
innovative agenda was set again for new media and digital art. In this paper, Sjoukje van der Meulen
mobilizes the museum’s rich and varied history of new media and digital art to think through some
of the issues, challenges and concerns raised by guest editor Francesca Franco for this special issue
such as “What are the issues involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting artworks made in the
1960s and the 1970s?” and “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?
Original languageEnglish
Article number97
Pages (from-to)1-16
Number of pages16
JournalArts
Volume8
Issue number3
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2019

Keywords

  • New Media
  • Digital Art
  • Museums
  • Collections
  • Curating
  • Stedelijk Museum

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