“The ‘GuggenTube’ Phenomenon: Breaking the Boundaries of a Digital Museum Space.”

Museum International. 2018. No. 70 (1-2). P. 166–175.

Grincheva N.

This article explores the ‘GuggenTube’ phenomenon, which resulted
from a collaboration between Google and the Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation to celebrate the five-year anniversary of the YouTube channel.
A world-recognised museum of modern art, Guggenheim is known
as the first museum franchise network, which comprises a main museum
in New York (1939), and active branches in Venice (1951) and
Bilbao (1997), as well as a structure in Abu Dhabi, forthcoming in 2019.
Guggenheim is also famous for its numerous collaborations with transnational
corporations, such as BMW, Hugo Boss, UBS Wealth Management, Delta
Airlines to name but a few.1
In this article, I will look closely at one such collaboration: the YouTube Play project,
developed in partnership with the world’s largest transnational media company,
Google. YouTube Play brought popular video culture to the museum space and
stirred the interest of museum critics and audiences around the world. I will describe
the (overwhelmingly positive) reception of the YouTube Play project, only to delve
deeper into the content of online conversations, which shows that users were, in fact,
challenging the Guggenheim’s authority to represent contemporary digital art. It is
interesting to note that this, in turn, led to a more philosophical reflection on the
nature and purpose of art. All in all, I will argue that the GuggenTube phenomenon
was the first initiative of its kind to successfully engage audiences on an international
scale, but, perhaps even more significantly, contributed to expanding the museum’s
space beyond traditional artistic and geographical boundaries.

Keywords: YouTube, social media, digital museum, new museology