User-generated content goes stellar, with Google’s YouTube collaborating with the Guggenheim on YouTube Play – the first biennial of creative video.

YouTube and Google – two of the world’s top 10 ‘Cool Brands’ – and Guggenheim are sector heavyweights, and YouTube Play represents collaboration at its very finest.  Creators from any location, with any level of expertise, equipment and budget are invited to ‘play’ and submit a video to the site.  The submissions are reviewed by an expert jury – which includes Takashi Murakami and Guggenheim’s Nancy Spector – and the final 20 videos will be displayed at all four of the foundation’s museums in October: the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York.  The website itself is borne from further collaboration – this time between Hewlett-Packard and Intel – and HP is also providing ‘video stations’ in all four Guggenheim museums to promote the project and the partnership.

Google is no stranger to working with the arts, and the relationship with Guggenheim is well established – last year the pairing announced an international design competition to celebrate the ideas & teachings of Frank Lloyd Wright (we wrote about it at the time here).  In the same year, Google famously showcased its Google Earth software through collaborating with the Museo Nacional del Prado, producing a virtual Prado gallery experience.  Google’s cultural collaborations always hit just the right mark between investing in the world’s rich cultural landscape, while still providing scope to rightly position themselves as world leaders in new technology and platforms.

Submissions for YouTube Play close on July 31^st.

Rose Enright