The Art and Care of Online Curating

When museums began turning their curatorial attention towards the Web, these new exhibitions effectively mirrored their offline efforts, being the same thing simply presented in a digitised format. Normally, this form of digital curating was characterised by an approach to the display of artworks that presented rows of thumbnail images to the user with catalogue descriptions attached, enabling them to make selections for viewing based on themes, genres, periods or artists. At the same time, artists, designers and independent curators started moving beyond the standardised white cube galleries and began exploring the seemingly boundless and unrestricted space of the Web. This essay will examine how online curating challenges the traditional models and methods for presenting, accessing and distributing art by discussing practices of collaboration and networked curating. By focusing on the socio-technical aspect of curating, it will address how these practices question established museological values and precipitate alternative ways of understanding curatorial authority.