The Best Surprise Is No Surprise
Dear readers, hi, we hope you are well,
We would like to invite you to take part in a new book being published by JRP|Ringier Kunstverlag AG, called The Best Surprise Is No Surprise.
As you probably have noticed, over the past several years, electronic communications have had a transformative effect on the public discourse on contemporary art by removing temporal and geographical barriers to the flow of this information and, for the first time, putting local exhibition makers and institutions in a direct contact with an international art public. Furthermore, it has been mentioned of late, that art criticism in itself is undergoing a crises as it is slowly but surely being supplanted by the curatorial and organizational activity, and that exhibition making in itself is emerging as the more influential mode of criticism (for better or worse). The Best Surprise Is No Surprise will attempt to address these important shifts by charting significant recent developments in the dissemination of art-related press releases and how these changes are reflected in the documents themselves, covering the 6-year period of e-fluxs existence beginning in 1999.
The Best Surprise Is No Surprise will be comprised of selections from the e-flux archive made both by invited international artists, writers and curators, and by you – our readers around the world. We therefore invite you to participate in the creation of the book by browsing through our online archive www.e-flux.com and selecting 5 announcements from the online archive you deem most important to be re-published in full in this book.
Given the volume of response to this open call, and the limited number of pages we can print, we plan to operate on a democratic basis, with the most popular announcements being published.
We sincerely hope that you will take part in this important project, and should you decide to do so – here is how to proceed:
To make your selections, please go to www.e-flux.com which contains an archive of several thousand of announcement we distributed over the past years. Please choose a month and year from the pull down menu – that will take you to our archive with the list of announcements for that month. (Note that you must select both a month and a date for the archive to display properly.) Alternatively, you can also search by name or institution in the browser to the right if you know who/what you are looking for.
Once you have chosen your announcement, please send it to us, at liz@e-flux.com, in an email with the full URL pasted into the subject line. The body of the email should have your name as you would like to see it appear in print, and then the date, title, and sponsoring institution of the announcement. For example, if we were to go to the archive and search in January, of 2005, and then choose the announcement on the 30th by the Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, the email would
look like this:
TO:
liz@e-flux.com
SUBJECT:
www.e-flux.com/displayshow.php?file=message_1107114527.txt
MESSAGE:
My name is Mohammed Abu Bakr and here is my choice:
January 30th, 2005
Christian Boltanski
Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC
We would love to receive your selections by Saturday, August 5th.
Again, many thanks for all your support and entusiasm over the years. We hope that this book will highlight the diverse interests and experiences of our online community.
All the best,
from all of us at e-flux.
