Today, Guggenheim Art Curator Becomes "Mayor" of a Second Life City

Today at 7pm SLT is a Second Life event [SLurl teleport link here] that conceptual art lovers should enjoy: Alexandra Munroe, who is Asian Art curator at New York's famed Guggenheim Museum, will assume the role of new Mayor in RMB City, the landmark mixed reality Second Life city created by my friend Chinese artist Cao Fei. Known in SL as Supernova Sibilant, Dr. Munroe will be in-world to draw from an RMB City tarot deck to meditate on the milestone figures of the city (which is a hyperreal version of Beijing, in the tradition of Calvino's Invisible Cities), and predict its future. (Disclosure: I was a contributing artist in RMB City last year.) Like Fei, Alexandra Munroe is a stellar figure in the international art world: She co-organized the Guggenheim's epic Cai Guo-Qiang show, the one where exploding cars were hung in the museum's foyer. Here she is talking about Cai's work, which has a lot of intellectual and cultural affinity with Cao Fei's art:

And now you can meet her in Second Life as an avatar: Click this link to teleport to RMB City. The event announcement is also interesting in itself (in my somewhat biased opinion), rendering a number of avatars associated with RMB City as Tarot cards -- check it out after the break:

Ms. Munroe photo credit: walkerart.org

Comments

[Wizard Gynoid]

i have experienced firsthand Cai Guo-Qiang's exhibition of suspended car bodies with fiber optic lights shining out of them over the foyer of the Seattle Art Museum. I'm sorry. I found this RL work boring and unimaginative. I found it vacuous and empty of emotion or meaning. Perhaps i have been spoiled now by the excellence of virtual art and artists in Second Life and the Open Sims.

[Hamlet Au]

I tend to like anything with exploding cars (action movies, high art.) But I really loved Cai's recreation of the famous Chinese propaganda sculpture Dr. Munroe mentions in this video, very subversive and powerful IMO.

[soror nishi]

Hmm...RMB leaves me cold.