Such is the case in the new partnership announced last week between the illustrious Guggenheim Museum and Youtube, called YouTube Play. According to the Washington Post article on the launch, the Guggenheim sees this collaboration as an opportunity to “raise the standards” of YouTube. The writer of that piece takes issue with this idea, arguing that the beauty of user generated and curated content is precisely the randomness of it, and that it’s “strange to introduced a juried sensibility to a relatively new, user generated world”.

I feel as though this is a conversation I’ve had with folks who find “curation” as an idea to be yet another way to limit the forms and bind the creativity of artists, media makers and their audiences who are freely discovering all the randomness of the video/film art frontier on the web. While I don’t think institutions like the Guggenheim are well-informed enough about what is really happening in the frontier they are seeking, I do think there ought to still be curatorial forces that engage in thoughtful considerations of what is happening now, AS it is happening. We don’t have to wait a decade to figure out what the movements in video art were in the first decade of the 21st century. Information is readily accessible but it has to be searched for, studied and considered, before any grand pronouncements can be made.

In the museum world, there has traditionally been a very small pipeline leading to the galleries and eventually museums, and in order to have access to it, an artist had to be somewhat “in the know”. So I wonder now whether an open call for artists to submit their work publicly via YouTube isn’t just taking opposite yet similarly limiting tactic – that is to say the fact of YouTube doesn’t make for a better considered curation, it only makes for more submissions. It isn’t terribly different from any kind of open call, even a blatantly populist one like American Idol.

I wonder if institutions like the Guggenheim wouldn’t do better to study the troves of video ALREADY out there, and curate something based on real discovery, wherein a serious study of emerging video art forms is undertaken, and the discovery of video artists who may or may not consider themselves artists, might actually occur. We live in a culture of over-abundant content, and that is why I support curation. In my estimation, there shouldn’t just be a choice between clueless high-art curator vs. engaged user-curated option. There are lots of interesting movements happening right under our noses, and we don’t need a competition to discover them. Alright, Guggenheim?

This is an amateur movie made by a member of the The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society in 1947. Strange, you may think, as it seemed to me when I first watched this one of several films created by members of this Society as a way to analyze their dreams.

Initially, The Lion Dream struck me as the tender, heartbreaking story of a son (possibly Jewish) who lost his parents in WW2 Germany and then as an adult in 1947, attempts to re-visit the fear he harbored as a child that something devastating was about to happen.

But that’s only part of the story.

I selected this film from the materials that comprise the project  “Dreamland: The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and Its Circle, 1926-1972” because I found it haunting. Who is Teddy Weisengrund? Did he really dream this story? Or did he simply imagine it as an exercise in Freudian psychoanalysis?

The artist Zoe Beloff seems to be asking that question and many more about this curious group that was active in Coney Island between 1926 and 1972. What is not immediately apparent but which I later learned, is that this film may or may not be the ACTUAL film Teddy Weisengrund created in 1947. And maybe there was a Teddy Weisengrund or perhaps there wasn’t…

I was introduced to Beloff’s work by Mike Monello, who showed me a delightfully rendered book “written by” members of the group. It seemed for all intents and purposes a “genuine” work. But upon further investigation into Beloff’s project, I discovered it was in fact deceptively simple. As Monello astutely pointed out, this project is an unidentified piece of Transmedia storytelling – a kind of creativity without media boundaries, filled with such enormous passion for these stories and characters that you almost don’t care if it is “real” or not.

Zoe Beloff is one of those wildly creative figures whose ambitious work lives in a space somewhere between filmmaking and installation art. Her multimedia exhibition that showed at the Coney Island Museum this past summer was a combination of objects, films, drawings and writings about this visually prolific group of amateur psycholanalysts whose interest in Freud led them into all manner of activity, including trying to resurrect DREAMLAND a razed Coney Island museum and fashion it into “the first amusement park ever devoted to the elucidation of dreams in accordance with the discoveries of Doctor Sigmund Freud M.D.”

According to the New York Times article on the exhibit, Beloff, who works with found footage and objects, accidentally discovered relics of this fascinating bunch of psychoanalysis enthusiasts, and began this project to reconstruct their world. The article discusses Beloff’s prior interest in the relationship between the real and fictional, noting that most of her work “incorporates film and video in multimedia projects and environments in which the boundaries between historical fact and creative interpretation — what really was and what might have been — tend to blur.”

For the project, Beloff set about reconstructing these films, made for dream analysis purposes and imagining how each member (fictional or real) might have created his/her film. It seems Beloff has combined found home video footage with some new images fashioned in the style of the time and of the individual authors who puportedly created the films, to complete the ideas that make up the Dream Films 1926-1972 .

Beloff’s work, as wild and bizarre as it sometimes seems, illustrates what can happen when storytelling is released from the bounds of specific media or the constraints of the fictional versus the real. To me, The Lion Dream is a beautiful, understated testament to the quiet terror of a child in a moment of uncertainty made even more poignant by the possibility that it was recreated by one person in memory of another, in honor of two others.