The Art Of Technology Jostles For Position In Venues Both New And Historic The Art Newspaper International Art News And Events

A new institution devoted to moving image works is preparing to open in one of Manhattan's most closely watched downtown neighborhoods. Canyon will launch this autumn at 200 Broome Street on the Lower East Side, taking over 40,000 square feet of reworked commercial office space. Founded by entrepreneur and video collector Robert Rosenkranz, the institution is being shaped around art forms that resist the habits of the conventional museum.

Its scope includes moving image works, sound, performance, and related time-based practices. That breadth reflects a larger shift in contemporary art, where the categories used to describe such work have multiplied over the past century, from experimental film and video art to new media, screen-based work, durational work, and digital art. The lineage reaches back to artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Dziga Vertov, whose experiments helped establish the camera as a serious artistic tool rather than a mere recording device.

For museums, the challenge is practical as much as conceptual. These works can require specialized equipment, careful documentation, and long-term conservation strategies that differ sharply from those used for painting or sculpture. Yet their relevance has only grown. Cass Fino-Radin, Canyon's vice president for art and technology, said that artists such as Nam June Paik are increasingly understood as inseparable from contemporary art itself, not as a separate digital category.

Canyon is also responding to a structural problem in New York: major museums often need years to mount ambitious exhibitions, especially those involving large media installations. Joe Thompson, the institution's director and the founding director of Mass Moca, said Canyon aims to work on an 18-to-24-month timeline. He described the model as intentionally flexible, with an emphasis on bringing a sense of domestic comfort and hospitality into a public setting.

The institution will not begin as a collecting museum, and it may not have a traditional curatorial department. Even so, conservation is central to its mission. Fino-Radin is leading the Canyon Media Arts Conservation Center after a 2022 field study found a strong need across US museums for an independent nonprofit lab dedicated to this work.

The timing is notable. In Los Angeles, the Berlin-based Julia Stoschek Foundation recently presented its first major US exhibition at the Variety Arts Theater, with works by Marina Abramović and Douglas Gordon. Julia Stoschek founded her namesake foundation in 2017 to make the collection accessible and to support conservation and research, underscoring how seriously collectors are now treating time-based media.

A parallel example emerged in Lyon, where the Musée d'Art Contemporain (Mac) received a spring 2025 bequest of 170 video works from Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître. Valued at several million euros, the gift reportedly fit mostly on two large hard drives. Their first acquisition was Gillian Wearing's“Boytime” (1996), a reminder that the history of video art is now being written not only in galleries and museums, but in the archives and storage systems that keep it visible.

Canyon enters that conversation at a moment when the field is no longer peripheral. The question is no longer whether museums should take moving image art seriously, but how they can build the infrastructure to live with it over time.

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