Digital Biennale at The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna) Opening April 30, 2021

The Magic Hummingbird by Joseph Martin Waters

A new kind of art museum popped up online earlier this year, and its New York-based founders, cari ann shim sham* and Joey Zaza, say to expect no pop-up windows, data mining, advertising or any of the exploitative methods used by most free online platforms and websites. However, The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art, with its bold yet whimsical name, is not free. It is a virtual, for-profit museum, conceived by artists for artists, featuring mostly new media and technologically-oriented art. Seventy percent of proceeds from ticket sales go to the artist, and 30 percent are used to maintain the museum up and running. 

What might be of immediate interest are the museum’s unique ethical stance and its upcoming Biennale show, intended to replace the Whitney Biennale, which has been postponed until 2022 due the the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have a unique, one-of-a-kind collection of curated art, all in one place, without ads or distractions, without cookie agreements or pop ups, without login requirements and data mining…we want our visitors to enjoy the art without manipulation,” says cari ann shim sham*, when asked about how the museum’s generous business model might compete with platforms that provide art content free-of-charge online.

Artists Speak asked cari ann shim sham* to go into detail as to why the founders of The Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (mowna) think it's important for their museum to be ethical, what that means to them, and what is the relationship between technology and ethics to date. After citing the Center for Humane Technology as a pioneer in the fight for ethical technologies, she was quick to characterize GAFA as fundamentally unethical. 

Since mowna is a digital art museum, it also functions as a developer of new technological platforms for appreciating art, but it does so without exploiting artists or the viewing public. In order to highlight and support the role and freedom of the artist in the world, mowna pays artists a substantial commission and does not claim ownership over their copyright. The museum consults the artist in determining how his/her work is going to be displayed online, gives the artist the ability to remove an artwork from its archival collection or online store, and allows the artist’s work to be displayed elsewhere simultaneously. “We do not own the work, we simply store it,” says cari ann shim sham*. “We are pro-artist,” she says, emphasizing how a living wage for the artist is the goal. She thinks the Biennale might attract as many as one million viewers, which would translate to roughly $175,000 per participating artist, through ticket sales alone. While that’s an ambitious figure for a new arts organization, it is not inconceivable for a well-attended Biennale event. 

The mowna Biennale opens at the end of April and runs until September. It is intended to be a recurring event, to be held every two years, as the name suggests. This year’s show is curated by cari ann shim sham* and Joey Zaza and features 100 artists, including individuals, collectives, organizations and AI from 44 countries. It is viewable on any device that connects to the internet, and individual tickets are $18. While they are only valid for a 24-hour period, an interval modelled on traditional museum practice, a monthly membership costs $15 and provides around-the-clock access to the shows, collection and museum store, as well as special events, like meet the artists, curator talks, parties and mowna founder’s chats.

Black Man in America by Vance Brown and Justina Kamiel Gray

This year's Biennale features virtual reality artwork from Canada centering on the theme of the lockdown due to COVID-19, autobiographical visual and sound art meant to elicit the empathy of the viewer for the experience of a black Lebanese-Senegalese artist living in Ghana, a portrait series by Baltimore-based Zachary Z. Handler, who will photograph museum guests three time a week during May 2021, interactive virtual reality and video sculpture art from Brooklyn, a film about what it means to be a black man in America from New York City, a new media installation using soft robotics from Austria, comical gif art from Italy, and a series of experimental music videos from California, among others. For a list of some of the participating artists, see the press release here. Kicking off the Biennale on April 30 at 9 p.m. Eastern, mowna will host a special screening of the feature-length documentary The Faithful: The King, The Pope, The Princess, by Annie Berman, who will subsequently answer questions from the public. The screening will be followed by entrance into the virtual mowna party room, and an overview of the Biennale.   

As a reader, you may be skeptical of how the museum experience translates into a digital setting. I certainly am, but cari ann shim sham* assures us that it is an “intimate experience…there are no crowds in the way of the art or people taking selfies…the art is available 24/7, and you can spend as much time as you want with it.” And most importantly, it is a pandemic-free experience, or almost. Without the spread of COVID-19, this museum may in fact never have been created. So, artists, art lovers, tech geeks, students, teachers and people in search of something new from the comfort of your home, alone or in the company of friends and family, mowna invites you to explore the world of wild and newfangled art online.

Translation: Salvatore Quasimodo The Wall

Giorgio de Chirico, The Uncertainty of the Poet

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of the poem The Wall, Il muro in Italian by the 20th-century Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo who won the 1959 Nobel Prize for Literature. The poem reflects on the solitary nature of the poet's social standing and profession, and below the translation, you will also find a translation of an excerpt from Quasimodo's 1959 Nobel Prize speech in which he criticizes the "adulators of culture" who are the very people who appropriate it for their political purposes.

The Wall 

They build a wall against you

in silence, stone and limestone stone and hate,

each day from higher up

they drop the plumb line. The masons

are all the same, small, dark

in the face, evil. On top of the wall

they mark judgements on the duties

of the world, and if the rain erases them

they rewrite them, with even larger

geometric forms. Once in a while, someone falls

from the scaffolding and immediately another one

runs to take his place. They do not wear

blue overalls and speak an allusive tongue.

The stone wall is high,

in the holes of the beams now crawl

geckos and scorpions, dark weeds hang.

The dark vertical defence shirks

from a certain horizon only the meridians

of the earth, and the sky does not cover it.

On the other side of this shield

you do not ask for grace or mayhem.

From Quasimodo’s 1959 Nobel Prize speech:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1959/quasimodo/25676-salvatore-quasimodo-nobel-lecture-1959/

The corruption of the concept of culture, as seen in the masses, who believe they have obtained access to the paradise of knowledge, is not a modern political phenomenon; however, the methods used to manifoldly diffuse the meditative interests of man are new and faster. Optimism has become tangible. It’s just a memory game. Myths and fairytales (let’s say human anxiety about supernatural events) have degraded into the “murder mystery,” undergone visual metamorphoses in the movies or in epic tales about innovators or crime. We cannot choose between the poet and the politician. The irony of “the worldly circles,” which sometimes can be a facet of constructed indifference, reduces culture to the dark corner of its history, affirming that the framework of dissent is dramatized, that man and his pain have been and will be trapped in their usual confines, over the years, today as tomorrow. Certainly. But the poet also knows that there is an ordeal, an exacerbation of the drama; he knows that the adulators of culture are also its fanatical incendiaries: the collage of writing composed under any regime corrupts, at their center and periphery, literary groups that vie for eternity with their scant calligraphies of the soul, with the varnish of their impossible intellectual life. At particular moments in history, the cultural secretly unites against the political: it’s a temporary unity that serves to tear down the walls of dictatorship. This force establishes itself under any dictatorship, when it coincides with the quest for the basic liberties of man. This unity disintegrates as soon as, beaten the dictator, the chain of factions arises.

The poet is alone: the wall of hate rises around him as literary companies of mercenaries throw the stones. The poet considers the world from this wall, and, without going from town square to town square, like the bards, or into the “worldly” world, like men of letters, but precisely from this ivory tower so dear to those who seek to tear to shreds the romantic soul, he enters the realm of the people, not only of their desires and feelings, but also of their jealous political thoughts.