Transcript for Episode 045 – Curator of Digital Culture + Design Collection, Marlies Wirth, MAK – Museum of Applied Arts (Vienna, Austria)

Published January 6, 2020

Full recording here: https://wisefoolpod.com/contemporary-fine-art-podcast-with-guest-curator-of-digital-culture-design-collection-marlies-wirth-mak-museum-of-applied-arts-vienna-austria/

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Matthew Dols 0:12
Please pronounce your name correctly for me

Marlies Wirth 0:14
Marlies Wirth

Matthew Dols 0:17
and you are currently in the position of.

Marlies Wirth 0:20
I’m the curator of digital culture and head of design collection here at MK Vienna Museum of Applied Arts.

Matthew Dols 0:27
Now give me a little expansive digital collection. I think that’s a newer term for museums, like what does that mean here,

Marlies Wirth 0:35
digital culture, it was just recently added to my position title two years ago, to be exact, and it concerns all the new technologies and how we use them and how we use them as new tools of design and how they influence and impact our behavior or knowledge or society, politics, ecology, economy, quite every area of our lives, really. And that’s what we called digital culture. Also, we expanded on the design collection by not only collecting objects in the classical term or products, but also collecting ideas and concepts and increasingly also partly in the digital realm, for example, and life running AI model that creates new moochie, by machine learning and things like that.

Matthew Dols 1:25
Very cool. Yeah, I come from a sort of a new media background, my last teaching job where she was new media, so I’m all about it. Okay, so one question, I always wonder about people, especially like somebody who’s in a position such as yourself, how did you get here? So for instance, all the way back to childhood, or your parents into the arts and creativity? Like Was it a teacher? How did you even sort of get to the point of like, this is what I want to do for a living?

Marlies Wirth 1:53
And very good question, actually, actually, it started in early childhood that I love to draw. And I looked at the art books and architecture books of my parents, my dad was always interested in being an architect, but he never became one. And yeah, they were quite fond of me being interested in that idea. And coming to school I loved like the topics, philosophy and art, education, and to debate and think about how these creative things can add to the way we perceive the world, rather than only facts, or the normal life, how these creative ideas could make us see the world in a different way. So that’s when I decided that I want to study art history, which I did. So I’m actually coming more from the art field and slowly increasingly shifted towards also being concerned with design through working here. And yeah, so I studied art history. And I was always interested in conceptual art. And the way these people think, like our conceptual artists think and try to change established systems, for example, by seeing things differently, or by having even the drastic formulation of the work doesn’t need to be made. It’s just the idea or the concept that is initially to the quality of the artwork. All right. So you can see that I’m rather not so much into what you would, as an American maybe call classic art market art.

Matthew Dols 3:29
Like, you’re not the commercial

Marlies Wirth 3:31
curator, type, right? I was always more interested in insulative art or art that involves new media or different kinds of media that does something to you in the way how you walk around it, or use it or perceive it. Rather than painting even though obviously, as an art historian, I also do love painting, don’t get me wrong, but still shifting, increasingly also more towards art that uses technology, for example, the work of Trevor paglen, I’ve been following him since he started using machine learning to increasingly tell us about what data does to us which data is taken from us. How biased is technology? Our technologies are?

Matthew Dols 4:17
I don’t actually want to know the answer to that question, because I’m sure it’s horribly scary.

Marlies Wirth 4:23
Absolutely.

Matthew Dols 4:24
Yeah. I mean, I lived in the United Arab Emirates. I mean, I can only imagine the amount of surveillance and data gathering that they did on me. I mean, it’s bad enough. I’m an American, but the UAE was very much a surveillance society. And it’s quite frightening.

Marlies Wirth 4:40
We also like China right now with social credit score system that came from an initial idea of like the name says, scoring someone if he is he or she is valid to get credit from the state bank, but shifting towards a complete means of actually yeah, data slave He will mean that surveillance

Matthew Dols 5:02
Well, it’s an interesting idea because like in the in, when I think back to the arts and the history of the arts, it was very much all very personal. It was like, I like this, I’m going to buy this, I’m going to be your patron or an artist producing something, and somebody just says, I like it kind of thing. And it was very individual, unique one on one. These days, I find that a lot of the industry of the arts ends up being based on algorithms, you know, so like, if you make beautiful art, and you build a website, your website’s only going to show up on Google searches, because of an algorithm, you make amazing pieces. And you don’t put great hashtags on it on Instagram or over social media, like the algorithm is going to make it so it’s not going to be as whatever. So like, there’s a certain aspect of the the arts industry that is has become a slave to algorithms, I mean, of various forms that didn’t happen even 10 years ago.

Marlies Wirth 5:58
Certainly that is the case. And also, the question is, how important is it? I mean, it is important that the art market sells art as also through Instagram and hashtags and however platform. But the main question, which is also tied to your initial questions, how did I get there? Yeah, is that I was always interested into, like art that is publicly available, and can do something to you to the way you’re thinking and behaving, rather than something that you just buy like a commodity and hang up in your house. And keep it for yourself.

Matthew Dols 6:34
I ran a public arts program, I get the

Marlies Wirth 6:37
whole I I’m more of a museum person, obviously. And then the gallery, personally, just because also of that very naive and simple fact of saying I want art to be a commons. And in a public museum collection, it can be that more

Matthew Dols 6:54
well. But there’s still a bit of finance in that because it’s all tied, the museum has to buy these things. Generally, sometimes they’re nice enough to be gifted, but but generally, they’re still finances that involve, I mean, you’re going to finance meeting after this podcast. I mean, there’s still, as much as we, we all don’t want to have money involved in the arts. Unfortunately, in many ways, it still makes the whole thing go round. Whether we like it. Absolutely.

Marlies Wirth 7:21
So I’m not saying that I don’t want money involved in the arts, I’m just saying rather than I want more money. Also that, please note, rather than seeing art as something personal, that I can hang in my living room, I was always interested in seeing art as something that is on public display, and therefore can engage multiple groups of people from different backgrounds, educational or interest wise, who can then look at it from different angles and debate about it and have some impact from it.

Matthew Dols 7:54
And that fits with your design part of this as well. I mean, like, I grew up with Heller, dishware, and things like this in my house, because my parents were very creative in their own ways. So I mean, the idea of utilitarian design things that can actually be utilized on a daily basis, but yet also aesthetically pleasing, or tactile II, exciting or whatever. I mean, that’s a an important aspect of the creative industries. So the museum here is focused more on the what’s the foundation of this museum as a whole, so

Marlies Wirth 8:32
not just you know, the foundation of the museum when it was applied arts that’s founded in 1864 was applied arts, what we call now design, basically, very contemporary approach. So they bought things right off the hands of fields of Hoffman, adult floors, and all these grounds, gentlemen of the Vienna modernism, and also the vena vaccinator. And had those as examples of good design, exemplary collection, it was called to show it to the students of the University of Applied Arts next door, which was co founded with the museum and teach them how to become little use of Hoffman’s and adult flows is basically only later the museum began to collect backwards and find also great objects that happened before the foundational years. And also it was expanded with a large Asia collection that we still have,

Matthew Dols 9:29
I noticed that in the store, there was lots of like Japan and other things, I guess, tea sets and stuff like that, that

Marlies Wirth 9:35
also stems obviously from an interest of Vienna 1900 40 sheknows or a year or like the Asian concepts of simpleness and things without ornaments or different kinds of shapes or very classic shapes as we will see now and it was expanded in the contemporary reom. So, from the 90s onwards, the museum was also concerned with contemporary art. And made quite impactful exhibitions with also very well known American artists of the likes of Vito acconci, doll jobs,

Matthew Dols 10:08
finalize names I recognize Yes.

Marlies Wirth 10:11
Different like really? Yeah, Jenny holds a concept of tying the Applied Arts design and contemporary art stronger together without differentiating between them being useful or not useful, which was done, and is still done a lot, saying, like, artists has no function but design has. And I see that a little differently. Many people do nowadays. So define art has a function, but the function is different from the function that a chair has, for you, you know, art functions for you. But maybe as a stimulus of your mind or as showing you something in a different kind of way, then you could be shown by reading a newspaper article about the same topic. So this kind of mediation anyways, so the foundation of the museum reflects back on Applied Arts and applying arts to the society was a big topic also early on, and still remains with us. Currently, since the foundation of the so called Vienna, Vienna, Allah that was inaugurated in 2015, and took place for the third time this year. The Mark together with partnering institutions in Vienna, tried to focus on current topics, or as some guests of mine earlier just called them phenomena of our time.

Matthew Dols 11:37
very eloquent,

Marlies Wirth 11:39
although the word phenomenon might not be accurate, as a whole, because this kind of like technology and what we just talked about how big data and all this surveillance mechanism and surveillance capitalism, as coined by Susana Zubov ties into our lives right now also into the art market, such as you mentioned with the algorithmic pricing, or like the algorithm that determines if you’re up or down or out, is not only a phenomenon, but it’s the current status of our presence and near future and possibly, also the future. So we have to deal with those topics. And for the longest time we have ignored them or art museums are still prone to ignoring these topics with this is something for the technology museums, we have nothing to do with it, which is not true.

Matthew Dols 12:29
Artists are prone to ignoring these things.

Marlies Wirth 12:33
There are few artists concerned with these topics. Not enough yet. My opinion.

Matthew Dols 12:38
I I’m trying I mean, even when it comes to the podcast, I run into these algorithmic issues. Like when I created this podcast, I based it in the Czech Republic, because that’s where I live. And then I found out that because I created in Czech Republic, it’s not showing up at all in the United States. And I’m like, but it’s in English. Yeah, it’s something that people in the United States care about. But because the algorithms because it’s in the Czech Republic, it only shows up in the Czech Republic. And in Europe, it doesn’t show up on searches in the United States. So I’ve had to figure out how to redo that to format it. Because I mean, it’s in English. So more people in the UK in the United States are going to listen, then necessarily in all the different languages and countries in Europe. But because of the algorithm, I got sort of screwed on that. So it’s very, it’s, it’s different. It’s very difficult sometimes for creative people to try to have to think through that logical sense of the how to work with these algorithms and stuff instead of trying to fight them. Because as much as they annoy me to all hell, it’s a fact of life. We have to work with them. They’re not going away.

Marlies Wirth 13:50
Yes and no. So I’m not saying that every one of us needs to become an expert on how to handle the algorithmic service like suppression of podcasts or websites on the global web.

Matthew Dols 14:02
I don’t believe any of us will ever be experts

Marlies Wirth 14:04
now. But what I’m saying is that we should we meaning the museum’s especially design museums, but also increasingly art museums and architecture museums, I think, should concern themselves and their audience with the topic of what how technology influences the way we work we produce how we design processes around us which kind of tools we do have at hand. And not only to have the 3d printing is where old technique by the way, it was invented way back made affordable. Definitely. So the question being How can we speak about and make exhibitions and presentations about these phenomena or these new developments in technology? So to creatively explore them and maybe see them through the eyes of artists or designers. So what we recently did here was an exhibition titled I’m Kenny values artificial intelligence and you know, the

Matthew Dols 15:03
uncanny valley? Yes.

Marlies Wirth 15:05
Have you seen it?

Matthew Dols 15:06
The exhibition? No. But I know the uncanny valley.

Marlies Wirth 15:10
That’s great. It was coined by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist in the 70s, and explained basically an acceptance curve that would drop into a valley. Once you encounter more human like creatures such as robots, or like, how do you call that even? animatronics? Exactly. And what we did with the artificial intelligence show, we took the uncanny out of the valley, and titled The show uncanny values, because of the topic of Vienna p&l, being concerned with the ethics and ethics and values around technology, and how it’s being implemented. And also the uncanny as a term coined by Sigmund Freud in Vienna 100 years ago, the ones familiar now unfamiliar in the familiar, such as you look in the mirror, and suddenly you’re not sure if it’s a stranger, or if it’s yourself, he explained, you could have some episodes like that without being mentally ill. But this kind of suddenly looking at things, or suddenly looking at a bottle, and seeing what a strange shape it actually has, because you’re kind of seeing it for the first time anyways, the uncanny valley effect, but we wanted to draw it away from the physical appearance towards the idea of intelligence and this term artificial intelligence, which implies that there is an intelligence, which is not natural, but artificial, which is basically said, so experts say, a wrong term for the phenomenon that is titled like that.

Matthew Dols 16:42
That often happens. Yeah,

Marlies Wirth 16:43
exactly. And more accurately, what we were doing is inviting artists and designers with existing projects, or commissioned projects, to help us explain and understand ourselves, What is going on here. And, as I mentioned, for example, Trevor paglen, is an artist who was exploring the surveillance states for the longest time, and who has also looked into which kind of data sets are given to the machine to learn. So the actual idea of artificial intelligence is a system that is being trained right now. So it’s trained by us humans by data that comes from us humans, and is therefore corrupted, because we are corrupted, we are biased. There is no objectivity,

Matthew Dols 17:30
as the was the scientific nature of like, if you want to observe something, it’s changed because of the active of the observation kind of an idea.

Marlies Wirth 17:38
Also, that and because of history, which happened, clearly. So we have large data collections, for example, of prisoners in the United States, and most of them are black male, male people between the ages of 20 and 30. So if you give a machine learning algorithm, a data set consisting of all imprisoned people from the 60s up till today to learn from and then predict who would be prone to become a gangster in the future, they will say

Matthew Dols 18:09
it’s a black male from 20 to 30. Yeah.

Marlies Wirth 18:12
So how come? It’s not that the machine is so prophetic and so smart? It’s just based on the wrong data or biased data? Because the data is not per se wrong. Obviously, those people were imprisoned. But why? And you know, this could continue

Matthew Dols 18:27
because the US system is horrible. I’m actually sorry, for the board.

Marlies Wirth 18:31
Yeah, this is the way and you can do that. With nearly every other data set, you can look at why is there data, which woman type of women are considered the most beautiful, so what they did as a learning data set, they took the Miss World pictures of Miss World elections from the past 50 years. So it’s like, it’s a

Matthew Dols 18:52
horrible, horrible data set, like seriously, but one to 1.618, though, that is the good ratio.

Marlies Wirth 19:00
No clue about that. So at this one specific example, it’s interesting to see, okay, how does a machine learn? What does it learn from and how can we counteract maybe this bias because

Matthew Dols 19:16
for me, it’s also still it’s goes back to like, printers, where there used to be like crap in crap out. Like, if you put in bad content, like you’re going to get a bad output. So it means sort of the next level of that, basically, is that if you’re biased or super selective or have a minimal amount of data, you’re you’re going to get a very obvious response by that from this intelligence, this artificial intelligence that favors pretty much whatever data you put into it. Absolutely. Like I said, stupid like that. I can’t believe I’m admitting this on the podcast, but like I play fortnight, the role playing game, it’s really stupid. I can’t believe I just admitted to doing that, but that what I The first thing I thought of with this game, it’s a it’s a battle simulation game. And the first thing I thought of was, oh my god, they’re getting so much big data on how people battle like so like how people either attack or hide or, or, you know, statistically how many people are aggressive? How many are passive, how many you like, the amount sheer amount, I mean, there are hundreds of millions of people playing this game across the world. And that’s things like across the world, genders, ages, everything and and they’re getting, literally this company now has this big data that they could almost sell to military people all over the world saying like, hey, statistically, this is your likelihood of these people being more, you know, the people in this region being more aggressive versus passive and like, the amount of information that they can sell from a game scares the hell out of me.

Marlies Wirth 20:56
Absolutely. I will hope for all of us that this is just a conspiracy theory, like,

Matthew Dols 21:01
totally in my mind, my

Marlies Wirth 21:03
viewers, but of course, you’re absolutely right. These kinds of things can happen. They have happened, and are happening. Absolutely. And just recently, I heard there was a bug in Facebook, where you would open the camera would open. Yeah. And look back at you. So I didn’t experience myself. But I mean, scary AF. And also, you know, you see what kind of backdoors are open through these kinds of technologies.

Matthew Dols 21:29
Oh, there’s so many backdoors in so many technologies. And then it it’s, it’s interesting, because like, I have a friend who I recently tried to look up on social media, and I’m like, I wonder what’s going on with this friend of mine from high school. They have no online presence at all, like no website, no, nothing. They don’t exist and uncanny. What and in some ways, I was sort of like, I’m not sure if they’re falling behind, or if they are somehow enlightened. I can’t tell which is because like, it made me sit back and actually go like, Oh, fuck am I ruining my life by being so online? And they’re doing it the right way by not being online? Like, I can’t figure it out.

Marlies Wirth 22:09
And there’s probably no right and wrong, I think if you’re smart and educated about how you use your social media, and we really also try to tell that to young people who visit our exhibitions concerned with these topics, to look after, like, Who do you want to these, this data to be seen?

Matthew Dols 22:27
Yeah, I mean, because you’re, you’re basically creating anything you do or put online. But no matter what format it is, is defining this thing is going to, for lack of better word, haunt you for the rest of your life, because it cannot be erased, it will always be able to be found in some way. So like, anything you put online is sort of almost etched in stone like this is going to define the rest of your life. Like me, I was a drug addict. I was all kinds of crazy things. Like if I had been raised in the age of social media, I would never have gotten the jobs that I’d gotten, I would never have the qualifications that I have, because like people would have looked at me like, Oh, yeah, okay, you did that. No, we can’t hire you. You hung out with these people can’t hire you. I mean, like, I’m quite scared for the future in that way. Because like, I would never, I don’t get me wrong. I had a great time being a drug addict. It was so much fun. But times past and like so. And I’ve distanced myself from it. And most people don’t know about it until they listen to this podcast. Now they all know about it, but they don’t know about it, you know? And, and I can sort of expand past that. And

Marlies Wirth 23:42
that’s fine. We can choose who to tell, basically. And nowadays, I am not ashamed of things. You can choose who to tell because it’s already online.

Matthew Dols 23:50
That’s really That’s what I’m saying. Yeah, like, I mean, yeah. I mean, like, I’m choosing to say I’m been clean of Medtronic for 19 years now. It’s fine. I don’t care if you know about it anymore. There are no laws that will affect me at this point. So it’s okay. And in other countries anyways, but But yeah, they mean, the whole issue of like, online presence and existence and this big data, like, I mean, it’s, I don’t I honestly don’t want to know just how much I mean, like London, I was watching something about London and the amount of surveillance cameras that exist in that city and, and how they’re using it with the facial recognitions, and all this kind of stuff. And then the GPS that’s in our pockets everywhere we go. I mean, literally, like, all these companies, they know our movements, they know where we go every day, because we all keep this data literally in our pockets, and it’s like oh my god, that’s so scary. And it’s also used to define

Marlies Wirth 24:48
and progress consumer habits. That’s this idea of this surveillance capitalism is also to maybe not see if you’re a good fighter if it comes to war, but they also See, when are you online? Which websites? Are you scrolling through? What did you order on Amazon? Did you order something on Amazon?

Matthew Dols 25:08
You use Amazon here too. Okay. I just got here to Vienna and I got here and I got off the train and I got onto a bus. And literally 30 seconds after getting onto a bus, it said, I got a little pop up saying. So is there a lot of passengers on your bus with you? And I’m like, how did you even know I was on a bus your my phone for jobs?

Marlies Wirth 25:32
on Google Maps? I’m sure right?

Matthew Dols 25:34
I did. Exactly. But then they asked me like, so is your bus crowded? What?

Marlies Wirth 25:41
Fantastic talking point, my friend. Because this came with the recent iOS update. I also had that on a bus recently, when I just finished that update, and I was like, What the fuck Exactly. And thing is, we are doing unpaid invisible labor, every time you use face recognition to open up your phone, which you should. I don’t have that. But most people do right now. You train facial recognition algorithms, obviously, because now you can also look at it from a different angle, because before it you had to hold it.

Matthew Dols 26:16
And I wear glasses. So it’s like what am i glasses are on or off, it’s still

Marlies Wirth 26:21
or the selfie filters, the beloved ones on Instagram, I also try those obviously. But of course, you must be aware you are training facial recognition software with it.

Matthew Dols 26:30
You’re enabling you to do like little carriers with

Marlies Wirth 26:35
robots with AIDS. Anyways, so you do that kind of artificial labor, every website you access where you have to prove that you’re human or prove that you’re not a robot and click on parts of traffic science, you are doing invisible labor to improve machine learning systems who cannot yet solve these. So this is kind of also something we tend not to talk about the way we are becoming increasingly tools for this giant system that we helped ourselves to build. So we built it brick by brick, but with our freewill. And now we stand within these walls, and we are like Oh shit, it’s it’s moving on to us now. Now I’m getting uncomfortable. Now I have to tear down the walls. But how do we do that now that we are part of Oh, we don’t have our data. You can’t undo. I know it sounds also like a conspiracy theory does buddy

Matthew Dols 27:33
bout to give you another conspiracy here act

Marlies Wirth 27:35
basically,

Matthew Dols 27:36
I’ll give you my conspiracy theory as absurd as this is. And I know it’s really crazy. I remember when what Apple created the thumbprint, right? We have the thumbprint on

Marlies Wirth 27:45
smart.

Matthew Dols 27:46
I was sat there and I’m like, Oh my God, if there is some person at Apple that doesn’t like me, right? Like, as a person, they don’t like me, they now have my thumbprint. Well, they can take that thumbprint. And they can like manifest it on a crime scene. And all of a sudden, I can be accused of killing somebody because my thumbprint showed up at some crime scene because I gave it to them.

Marlies Wirth 28:09
Well, what? Why would make a great movie plot. But here I would say rather unlikely, because who has time for that.

Matthew Dols 28:20
But somebody who really doesn’t like me, you very likable

Marlies Wirth 28:23
persons. I hope so. But of course, you’ve convenient enough, the thumb prints of millions of people are stored in one database. And everybody has access

Matthew Dols 28:36
to it, even though they say

Marlies Wirth 28:39
things are valuable. So the idea is if for example, someone it might be you is searched for because a crime has been committed where fingerprints have been found, the company could be asked to make an exception from their actual terms and regulations. Because the nation is in danger because of that criminal, maybe even a terrorist we use terrorists four

Matthew Dols 29:03
times over. So

Marlies Wirth 29:04
they would be obliged to give out a sample of fingerprints reduced to the group of suspects, or let’s say male, between 30 and 40.

Matthew Dols 29:15
How can you tell?

Marlies Wirth 29:18
I don’t know. Just saying so, depends you have to use the data also. And you face the numbers. Anyways, but of course, this whole data sets have been sold. And we know that from the Cambridge analytical thing, and it can happen all the time. Things can be sold or can be leaked. They can even be stolen by hackers. I mean, it’s not like that, that the company is always other bad guys who give it out for free. So it can be in different ways. So the question is, what do we get out of this amount of data, and invisible unpaid labor we perform Is there a way To to own it back. You know,

Matthew Dols 30:03
you’re making me even more paranoid than I already was.

Marlies Wirth 30:07
So sorry,

Matthew Dols 30:08
I tried to stay away from this stuff because it scares the shit. I try

Marlies Wirth 30:11
to wait. I try to stay away from conspiracy theories, but some of the actual facts that I know the other theories and

Matthew Dols 30:21
theories that’s the thing they’re, they become a conspiracy fact and citizen conspiracy theory but ah, alright, let’s, let’s shift off.

Marlies Wirth 30:30
Let’s see. Absolutely.

Matthew Dols 30:33
I’m getting a bit sore like, don’t you? Alright?

Marlies Wirth 30:36
Don’t commit crimes what

Matthew Dols 30:38
somebody else gets anyways. Alright, so your role here at the museum, let’s get back to the arts because that’s really what my interest is. As much as I love conspiracy theories. I try not to tell them too much to the world because they’re just all in my mind. I’m sure. So, in the arts, so you So okay, one question I have. So you’re talking about like digital works and things like that is your specialty question I’ve always had, how do museums acquire non object based works like do do you like? Like, because I think back to like Sol lewitt paintings where he basically just faxed in instructions, like how do you buy that?

Marlies Wirth 31:24
For example, the first digital work we bought we bought it with Bitcoin, clearly, back in 2015, from the artist harm funding topple from the platform coin temporary, which was or his online gallery run by two Austrian artists.

Matthew Dols 31:43
I’ve never heard of this, okay.

Marlies Wirth 31:44
And they sold artworks from artists, friends, also physical ones. Just for one day, they were online and you could buy it for the Bitcoin course of that day. You couldn’t speculate It was also an art market critical project.

Matthew Dols 31:59
I was gonna say yeah,

Marlies Wirth 32:00
rather you buy today or never. And you can’t wait till the Bitcoin euro ratio is better or worse for you. You just have to if you want it, do it. Anyway. So the digital artwork report wire, that platform is a screensaver. Actually. It’s a screensaver for an old iOS system. still running. I have it on my laptop that I use privately all the time. So it’s a screensaver it came in. In addition, we bought the first 20 of it. And we can do whatever you want with it. So we own it. It’s also inscribed in the blockchain, because we bought it by Bitcoin. And yeah, we can show it we had in the exhibition that I curated, it was called 24. Seven, the human condition. It was about our times of being 24. Seven busy and actually at work. And it was presented on a desktop screen just being the screensaver it is, it’s really interesting work because it’s with algorithmic drawings, but with a poem, or poetic statement by the artist, Tom from the novel stating how he behaves in social societies, social contexts, and deals with social anxiety. So it’s a very interesting work, you can look at it on his website. And yeah, that’s the first thing we did

Matthew Dols 33:19
sorry. Yeah, the the, the sort of a deer in headlights expression that’s on my face right now. Is is actually more about like the nature of the an established museum purchased artwork via Bitcoin. That’s the part I’m sort of like, wow,

Marlies Wirth 33:36
it’s just a currency. You know, we also purchased artworks in US dollars, or British pounds. So

Matthew Dols 33:42
if you’re someone that’s more legitimate, I don’t know why no different totally my biased obviously. So yeah,

Marlies Wirth 33:48
it’s no different at all. So it’s just you have the value and you paid.

Matthew Dols 33:55
So when, when your museum because I’m we’re talking about your experiences in your life kind of thing. When you all choose to acquire a piece of art, what kind of system Do you all have for acquisitions? Because I mean, there’s on the one end, there’s a curator with a discretionary budget that they can just go out and buy because they love something or on the other end, there’s like extreme committees and an insane people, by groups deciding on things like so what’s your museums sort of take on how to acquire

Marlies Wirth 34:33
we are still a little bit lucky, I think compared to us American Museum museums who have these large committees.

Matthew Dols 34:42
Oh, no, actually was Tate Modern was one that was given to me.

Marlies Wirth 34:45
Yeah. Tastes like Yeah, do you case none. none the wiser. But yeah, I hear it. I can’t. I’m just thinking if it’s all the state museums, art museum, let’s talk about the Mac. We have this policy of we can make suggestions to curators of their respective collection can make a suggestion of things to be acquired. And it will then be discussed with your immediate boss, with the director of exhibitions and collections, and our director, the actual director of the museum, it will then be discussed, sometimes we discuss it also with a larger part of other colleagues if it’s more concerned, like more collections, right, and let’s say, as an example, we just we did the Mac Design Lab, and we had some smaller design objects. I can also name prices around 200 euros, for example. So in the design lab, we also purchased design objects were in with the value of 200 euros, of course, we discuss it with the director and get it approved. But this is easier. What is harder is acquisitions of larger artworks or ensembles of works. So there’s two different systems also. One is the it’s called gallery funding. Something it it’s a state pool.

Matthew Dols 36:08
Right, actually, let’s take a step back. This museum is privately funded state funding. Public means 100% state funded or is or sponsorships, corporate sponsors. So majority state funded with some others or corporate sponsors and things like this, okay, I just make that clear lecture. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I mean, if it’s privately funded, then of course, the process would be very different. Yeah. Okay. All right. So state funded. Director approved is basically the final,

Marlies Wirth 36:42
final approval is always curator director of exhibitions and collections, and the director of discuss, shall we or shall we not. And then depending on the height of the acquisition price, there are different models of how we can come to acquire that either we asked private fund sponsors, like you said, collectors or donors to help us acquire that. Or it is also state funded model of the gallery funding systems where you can acquire artwork from local galleries, Austrian artists, you can get some support in doing that.

Matthew Dols 37:19
I’ve heard about this Something about like you buy it, and the state will get back like 50% of the purchase price. Yeah. Okay. That’s very interesting. That’s very nice. I mean, that’s a quite a luxurious,

Marlies Wirth 37:32
unique model. Yeah, sure how long it will still be around. But it has been, it’s an Austrian thing. And yeah, it works well, for the also smaller, younger galleries, obviously. And then there’s the loot weak Foundation, which is also part of the mumok Museum of Modern Art in Vienna collection. The family Ludovic, the collectors gave their collection to this museum. And there’s also this foundation, which also has a system of with a jury with a committee deciding to acquire works for the major museums in Vienna, which then belong to joint collection. Okay, so it’s the works that then kept in the respective museum that asked for the for its acquisition, right.

Matthew Dols 38:19
Could be loaned around base actually

Marlies Wirth 38:21
in a in a kind of overarching state state connection. Okay. And there, it’s there are larger amounts of money in the circle, so you can apply for acquiring larger, more prominent works.

Matthew Dols 38:41
So we talked a little bit about how to how the process of acquiring something is, how do the decisions come about, though? And that’s something that always interests me. Okay? Keep in mind, I’m an artist. And I’m professor. So on one hand, I’m being selfish. And I want to know, how do museums acquire artwork a, but B, how do they like? How can what are the ways that I could live sort of tailor my career to get it so that I can get into these kinds of things? And I’m also doing this sort of as a proxy for people listening to the podcast that are artists going, I want to get some works into an institution like how does that happen? Basically, how do artists get on your radar in the first place?

Marlies Wirth 39:28
When they do quality solid work? Sorry, guys. There’s no other way. And what okay,

Matthew Dols 39:35
but somebody can make amazing work. But then how does it get to you? Like so they

Marlies Wirth 39:43
always write me an email. Like seriously, of course, don’t write her. Of course, you have to try and be in different exhibitions that are meaningful context for your work. Not only solo shows at your gallery, too. Sell, which is obviously important. But also be part of the magic group shows by great curators, there are, again,

Matthew Dols 40:09
areas of the game

Marlies Wirth 40:12
that you feel comfortable with where you think this kind of institution does a program that I can relate to, in my artistic process. And I feel maybe at some point, my work could be part of that collection, because they have been showing and collecting works that go in that direction, or in that medium or are concerned with this. And that theme. So focus on that, because the only thing that I might criticize about some fellow artists out there who just randomly write to every curator in every institution, the same email, let’s say it’s an oil painter, and they write to the Museum of Modern Art makes sense to have painting collection, Museum, Mac, Vienna, now, you know, not gonna happen. So this is kind of, you

Matthew Dols 41:02
have no oil paintings, like non

Marlies Wirth 41:06
few minutes long, to be honest. But it’s not a focus of our collection. And it’s really easy to find out the focus the thematic focus of a Museum’s mission or collection, by just engaging more with them, just like visit the website, is this do your research, do your research. Exactly. But other than there’s no really recipe, a recipe.

Matthew Dols 41:31
But maybe I want a recipe, give me a recipe,

Marlies Wirth 41:34
take your steps in your career, he wisely like think about is it necessary to be in the cert art fair? Or should you more focus on getting contacts into to institutional people and be have meaningful conversations studio visits have texts written about your work that can then be published somewhere? So you get you build up more of a structure of getting known?

Matthew Dols 42:01
Do you still go out and do studio visits?

Marlies Wirth 42:03
If my times allows? Yes, I would love to do that more actually,

Matthew Dols 42:08
when you find an artist that you think is in the work is interesting. As a curator at an institution, what is your opinion on the balance of the aesthetics of the work to the text, the artist statement or the whatever that acts that explains the concept behind it? I come to this because I do portfolio reviews for people and constantly I get either stunning artwork with crappy statements or amazing statements with crappy art work. And so I’m interested from, from your perspective, like, what’s that balance, what’s more important, less important, etc, etc.

Marlies Wirth 42:56
I would say both is important. I think it’s great that I increasingly know people who say of themselves, such as you do, they weave portfolio reviewers, that’s a new line of jobs that I think is really important, because I’m quite open here. So if someone makes great work, but is incapable of writing about their own work, that’s a pity. But then you can seek help with someone who can help you with writing that way. Okay, is that portfolio? What?

Matthew Dols 43:25
And that’s a question I have too. Growing up in America being taught in America, my, my professors told me that he I must write my own artist statement. But now it seems to have become acceptable to have either ghost writer or a curator or somebody else. Write your artist statement on your behalf.

Marlies Wirth 43:45
Yes, Ghost Rider. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t condemn it. But you can just do it openly. And ask someone who can help you with that must not be that someone writes the text for you, but maybe reviews it together with you and helps you improve it. Because you will also need it to address verbally what your work is about. It’s not only in your portfolio, so you will be asked time and again to explain it. So you you’d rather do it yourself than have a ghostwriter do it. But on the other hand, yeah, of course, people use ghost writers also, it’s fine as long as they can convey what it’s about.

Matthew Dols 44:23
When I say ghost writer, I just mean like, a professional writer who doesn’t they wouldn’t put their name to it basically. Yes, just

Marlies Wirth 44:31
as important to be able to express that. But I think now it’s more that we have become more open about that. So not everyone can have the same talents. So if someone is also not an avid public speaker, you won’t condemn the person if the concepts are great. You know

Matthew Dols 44:47
what I mean? And that sort of thing is is like a lot of creative people get into the creative arts bit less a visual Creative Arts, because they can’t write. They can’t express themselves very eloquently through words or tech. Whatever. So the idea that, like, we have now been sort of the industry has moved, we are obligated to have some text that theoretically enhances the appreciation of the work, but oftentimes doesn’t. Yeah. So it’s sad. I like I really, really would love to just pay somebody else to write my text for me. Because I mean, I can, I can tell another person, my what I what I’m working on, but to try and put it together into some eloquent way that really enhances and stuff. I feel like sometimes an outsider, non artists would have a better ability to contextualize the work and, and but but to see it in a more objective way, instead of the very subjective way that a lot of artists do like it because we’re all attached to it. We have emotions we have we have you decades of experiences that were like, Oh, my God, it’s about everything. It’s about my whole life, you know? And like it’s not, it’s, it’s just a thing you made about something that some maybe somebody else might have a more succinct way of explaining?

Marlies Wirth 46:10
Absolutely. So I think everyone should handle that how they can and want. But of course, it helps to have a good text, because as you said, sometimes as amazing work, but super crappy explanation, or, which annoys me even more, actually, is if there is a text promising the world, yeah, work does not sustain.

Matthew Dols 46:33
Yeah, I know, I see it all the time I do I do these reviews, I do a lot of reviews, I do these online reviews for lensculture. For so it’s all photography. And I look through 1000s and 1000s. of portfolios. And there’s so much it’s that mix, like there’s either like great ideas that don’t deliver visually, or really beautiful things that don’t make sense once I read some text and it but it seems like a contemporary thing, this need for this combination of quality images, quality text, like this wasn’t around 3040 years ago, there wasn’t this necessity. Was there.

Marlies Wirth 47:09
I wouldn’t know.

Matthew Dols 47:12
You’re an art historian.

Marlies Wirth 47:14
No. But from the practical field, I really can’t answer the question. If 40 years ago, if someone sent a portfolio to MoMA, if it was necessary to have

Matthew Dols 47:26
great images and a good text, I need to do research, all

Marlies Wirth 47:29
you have to do. But I can only think about assume make assumptions, that it has become more important because also it has become more important, as you mentioned earlier, to have your career together to know at least one good curator, one collector to have a good gallery. And by the time of 23, you should have your portfolio reviewed and have a great text and higher glossy images made by a professional photographer. That’s like no, I’m not demanding that this should happen. But it seems to me like this is increasingly what people and students of art think they have to have.

Matthew Dols 48:09
Okay, oh my god, like I’m double that age. At

Marlies Wirth 48:13
some point, it is good that the new generation is more eager to, to do stuff faster or more efficiently than maybe some past decades of artists generations who were like, okay, let’s just hang out and wait for the call. You know, as a that’s, that’s a healthy thing. But on the other hand, it gets too much pressure too much professionalized very early on, you should be able to experiment more. And I think it’s not that strict. And I could imagine that 40 years ago, it was not the case that you have to have that because also, if we take the online representation, now also very young, at a very young age artists do have their own website filled with professional photography and exhibition reviews and reviews. And this is something that was not possible 40 years ago, or rarely, with some exceptions, you know,

Matthew Dols 49:09
it’s true. Last two questions. It’s a very vague, open interpretive question, but basically, it’s a so you’re a curator at a very prestigious museum here in Vienna and and some advice for curator potential curators that would like to achieve such a position in their careers. advice, this can be things to stay away from like don’t do like stead do don’t make the same mistake I made kind of, or some advice to try and like build their careers and make it so that they can be more successful in their endeavors. Because there’s a lot of independent curators which seem to be again, a new industry that seems to have popped up in past 2030 years that they all want to be with an institution but there just aren’t a lot Have institutional jobs, and generally the people who have them stay with them for decades, such as yourself, and so they don’t come up very often. So it’s like, how can they get themselves in the right position in their own careers to be able to be ready for something like this?

Marlies Wirth 50:17
I guess as an independent curator, if you choose to procure a career in an institution, you would have to focus on doing shows that are really professionally made, in terms of also the surroundings, like loans transports the way the venue is presented as not necessarily the works, per se, it can be really experimental, and however, but it should show that you can handle institutional kind of obligations. With a very different set up sometimes artists we work with are very astonished by the set of rules and prohibitions and things that we all have to deal with that you don’t if you make exhibitions in a free, independent space, which are always also sometimes do outside of my institutional practice. So I’m well aware that things can be done differently, or maybe faster, or you can write your press release three days before the opening, because easy here is at least four months prior to the opening. And it has to be a copy edited, it has to be translated. So you have you’d have to think about a lot of bureaucratic structures. How long does an exhibition take to from planning from from like, initial idea to actual physical? That really depends on the kind of exhibition but roughly between one and two years, or even two and three years? If it’s more in the larger context of collections or loans?

Matthew Dols 51:43
Yeah, there’s a lot of it’s just like coordinating from other schools.

Marlies Wirth 51:47
It is more old school exhibitions that we do take a long time in preparation to to secure the loans. And for example, the last show, I did uncanny values with contemporary artists, it took about one and a half years to conceive it and then make it well, that’s pretty fast, is absolutely some people were like, Whoa, okay, but we have research before on the topic. So it was rather okay to do it. But for the hell robot exhibition that we did in 2017. That is still an international traveling show. It took over two years to compile it because it’s also traveling for four years. So you have different ways of contracts and logistics, the

Matthew Dols 52:32
shipping the boy just the building of the crates to move things. Yeah,

Marlies Wirth 52:39
absurd, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that’s Yeah, think about how an institution would review your CV if you had.

Matthew Dols 52:50
Yeah, so beyond just like putting on quality exhibitions, getting good reviews, things like this, you need to show an expertise in actually institutional working collaborations and things like this. Okay, it’s good. Last question. It’s a little bit elaborate. So bear with me, let me get through this. Because I’m created this podcast to try and learn how the art industry works. Now, because I have fallen into lack of knowledge. I created a quantifiable outcome that I’m going to try and achieve because whatever it is, you’re about to answer to me, I will do and I will keep people involved through the podcast, the results of whatever it is you’re about to tell me to do. What I’m trying to do is I’m trying to show that I have learned how the art industry functions well enough to get a piece of my artwork on exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Marlies Wirth 53:47
Cool,

Matthew Dols 53:47
how do I do that?

Marlies Wirth 53:50
Maybe wait for the next reinstallation. They’re doing because there’s just we haven’t legally legitimately through the industry like so that so

Matthew Dols 54:00
I mean, the idea the idea is not like, give me Jeffrey sauces, phone number. The idea is, is I want to know, I’m trying to learn from the people in the industry. What are the ways that creative people can put their career tracks sort of in the right direction for success and I created this arbitrary short term goal of an exhibition museum. I mean, it could be any form of

Marlies Wirth 54:28
you want an exhibition or you want

Matthew Dols 54:30
to work I am I’m putting my bar low of one piece.

Marlies Wirth 54:37
Okay, so which kind of work are you doing?

Matthew Dols 54:40
Currently, I do photographic based that I then paint and collage on. That’s my current work.

Marlies Wirth 54:49
And you have certain themes that you’re considered figurative,

Matthew Dols 54:52
but it’s it’s very personal. It’s about scars and layers and emotion. Or impact of life experiences and things like that. So like, a lot of layering of effects of life experiences kind of like, does is this making sense or not? is making sense?

Marlies Wirth 55:15
Okay. So you could then wait for a thematic group. So coming up and write to the curator in charge with your portfolio and suggest you might she might be she or he might be interested in reviewing your work. Okay, well, I

Matthew Dols 55:31
love that great idea. I love it. But my thing, my thing is, like, let’s take the museum monarch, it could be Tate Modern, whatever. But this is the museum. I as a public person, as an artist, as a practicing artist, I don’t hear about these exhibitions or the planning of the exhibitions until they’re already planned.

Marlies Wirth 55:52
Okay, that then you have to start by expanding your network and sources.

Matthew Dols 55:58
So that yeah, I mean, that’s things like so how do artists potentially hear about or have the ability to approach a curator at a museum so that we can go back to you in this case? Like, how would they hear about an exhibition that you’re planning in the future to because they may, sometimes

Marlies Wirth 56:15
it’s announced, it depends on the museum and on the kind of exhibition, but sometimes you talk about it with colleagues with other artists, or even the institution itself makes the public aware of the plan to have in three years and exhibition about whatnot. So it is possible,

Matthew Dols 56:35
okay. I mean, that’s doable, because, but that’s something that I could do as a stepping stone, again, towards MOBOTIX career path kind of thing, or IE, any of the listeners that I’m doing this as a proxy for that they could do is basically like, try to find some institution that does offer this sort of a where we are planning this thing in the future, do a little bit of research, see if you can fit with it, to try and get yourself into a larger regional institution that might then theoretically be seen by or feed to the bigger corporate bigger curators and the bigger museums. Okay. I like that. That’s good. Okay. That’s just a lot of research.

Marlies Wirth 57:15
And all right, nothing’s comes like

Matthew Dols 57:18
eBay does nothing come easy. I want some easy can give me somebody give me some easy, seriously.

Marlies Wirth 57:26
Not a night.

Matthew Dols 57:29
All right, fine. Well, thank you very much for your time. Thank

Marlies Wirth 57:31
you, Matthew.

The Wise Fool is produced by Fifty14. I am your host Matthew Dols – www.matthewdols.com

All information is available in the show notes or on our website www.wisefoolpod.com