Artists on Art: A New Web Series From the Met

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John Baldessari in "The Artist Project."Credit The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just released all 20 episodes of the first season of “The Artist Project,” a web series in which 100 contemporary artists respond to the museum’s vast collection, using video voice-overs of about three minutes each.

In each episode, an artist selects a gallery, artist or work in the museum and reflects on its significance to his or her oeuvre. Accompanying the voice-over is a slideshow of photographs that zoom in on the works and show the artist engaging with his or her selection (in one case even touching the works in the Drawings and Prints Study Room, an activity available to qualified visitors).

The first season’s artists, 16 of whom are based in New York, include Conceptual artist Cory Arcangel, who chose the harpsichord, found in the Musical Instruments Room displayed alongside forte pianos. His artistic inspiration comes from an instrument that became “obsolete musical technology” after the innovation of the forte piano.

“For my purposes as an artist, it’s finding things that haven’t been preserved yet and declaring them artwork, and convincing people that it’s artwork, and then sneaking them into a museum,” he said. “And that’s when I have won the game.”

Kehinde Wiley, currently the subject of a large-scale survey at the Brooklyn museum, selected the American painter John Singer Sargent, whose works, like Wiley’s, reference the style of the old masters. Mr. Wiley analyzed how Sargent “paints the performance” of his upper-class sitters, for whom a portrait was a social opportunity to showcase their wealth.

“Many of the people who are in my paintings can’t afford my paintings,” he said, reflecting on his deliberate choice of subjects with brown skin who are not accustomed to luxury. “I enjoy painting the powerless much more than the powerful.”

The online series offers a first-person view from contemporary artists on historic works. While contemporary artists discuss their relationships with historical works in the Frieze Masters talks, the video footage is taken from an interview inside an auditorium at the fair in London’s Regent Park. The “Artist Project” explicitly focuses on one artist per episode, in which the artists’ voice and selection alone provides an intimate reflection.

John Baldessari, one of the most recognizable artists in the first season, spoke candidly of his early interest in Philip Guston, whose work he would cut out from the pages of Life magazine as a child. He found inspiration from Guston’s modest style.

“I think it’s brilliant, making art look like it’s not about skill,” he said, reflecting on the meanings of life and death behind the technically simple, “seemingly clumsy” yet brave “Stationary Figure,” a cigarette-smoking man constrained, as if in bondage, by his bed clothes and trapped by time. “I identify with his courage. It’s one of the things I always emphasize: don’t be a virtuoso and don’t be a show-off.”

The series will run for four more seasons beginning on June 22, Sept. 14, and Dec. 7, 2015; and Feb. 29, 2016.