Alistair Hudson (formerly Dept. Director of Grizedale Arts) has moved to MIMA in Middleborough. Here’s a good link to a recent ‘Arts head’ interview he gave to the Guardian and in which he outlines some of his Museum 3.0 and Uses based approaches to art and reconfiguring institutions. As a longtime collaborator with Alistair, and an admirer of the work he and Adam Sutherland have undertook at Grizedale Arts, I’m personally looking forward to seeing what Alistair can achieve next.

The Van Abbemuseum’s second Exhibition for L’Internationale’s programme of research ‘The Uses of Art’ opens soon (22/11/14). The show’s title ‘Confessions of the Imperfect – 1848 – 1989 – Today’ borrows from Ruskin’s observation about the need to allow for human imperfection in art and craft, and will seek to build on the work already undertaken by Van Abbemuseum in reimagining a future role of the Museum. As co-director of Static I’m particularly looking forward to this show as we have a work in it – a further manifestation of the Noodle Bar project – which we’ll be discussion online in the near future. One of the key issues that will be under discussion over the next few year, aligned to the rubric of the ‘Uses of Art’ project and to my work/research will be the idea of the Museum 3.0. A really useful way of opening up this debate was, I think, provided by Steven ten Thije in his article ‘Hanging, Hanging Over Again and a Hangover’ which was published in the Van Abbemuseum’s Kitchen Blog, One of the potent metaphors that Steven uses is the idea that “Nowadays the importance of the representative function has declined and art has become more of a  skill which we sometimes use and sometimes don’t use, like a sort of idiosyncratic “app” on the smartphone of our citizenship.”