July 5, 2006
Museum library websites
My job requires that I find out about art-world exhibitions and events happening well into the future, and my interests encourage me to find out about those that I missed. Occasionally I am asked how I stay on top of what's going on. The simple answer is that I have put my name and e-mail address in just about every contemporary-art gallery guestbook I have set foot into, and consequently receive innumerable press releases; I have subscribed to the e-mail lists maintained by e-flux, ArtCal, Art Cards, and other valuable information clearinghouses; and I talk constantly with a wide network of critics, curators, dealers, and artists, all of whom like to discuss their current projects. This is all, perhaps, obvious. It's a bit more difficult to discover information about exhibitions one never hears about or misses. One habit I've found worth adopting is glancing at artist biographies whenever I'm at galleries, even if it's someone whose work I'm not particularly enthusiastic about. A less obvious answer, however, is to take advantage of museum library websites. If an exhibition generated some kind of publication, there is a good chance that the document ends up in the library at MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, or elsewhere. Several of these museums make their research collections accessible online. The Whitney, for example, allows you to peruse a list of its recent acquisitions. While browsing recently, I discovered not only that a group show of New York artists whose work I follow had taken place, but that some kind of publication was printed to accompany it, and I was able to request a copy. In another case, the description of a book created by Philippe Parreno makes it seem related to (and reminds me of) a giveaway DVD presented during a recent New York solo exhibition.
After one amasses a certain amount of information, one can also attempt to read the tea leaves, so to speak, and draw conclusions from even the smallest scrap of data. This hard-to-find Gordon Matta-Clark catalogue, also recently acquired by the Whitney's library, is currently checked out, which reminded me that next year the museum will present a retrospective of the artist's work (which was mentioned in this September 2005 exhibition review by Michael Kimmelman).
Now is perhaps an odd time to mention this resource, as both the Whitney and MoMA libraries are currently closed, but getting into the habit of checking their collections online is one way (among many) to lessen the number of interesting exhibitions and artists that slip past one's radar.