The Guggenheim: New York is one of my favorite museums in terms of layout and space. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the gallery winds its way up the sides of an inverted cone which is open in the center. Its even more impressive to see that space transformed through installation. Such was the case with the Nam June Paik retrospective in 2000. Paik is often considered the founder of video art, and is well known for his multichannel exhibits and unique arrangements of video monitors.



One of my favorite pieces from that show was called Real Fish/Live Fish in which Paik placed a camera in front of a fishtank with a live feed to a video monitor right next to the tank. In an interesting conceptual shift, the viewer has to think about which are the real fish and which are the live fish.