SMAAK#

The public record of what Mike and Karlie find interesting now

Position#

MOOI NIET. does not have a theory that can identify the right work in advance. Taste begins with what Mike and Karlie find interesting in a particular moment, informed and constrained by the tenets in this corpus.

SMAAK makes that judgment inspectable without pretending to turn it into fair, neutral, or reusable selection criteria. It is a record of situated choices, attractions, refusals, disagreements, and revisions—not an oracle, admissions rubric, or promise that a similar work will be selected later.

Authority#

Mike and Karlie hold curatorial authority. MOOI NIET. is their Goose Group experiment. There is no external panel, community vote, popularity signal, or automated score standing behind their choices.

When they disagree, the disagreement can remain visible. It is evidence of two people looking, not a defect that needs to be laundered into one institutional voice. The eventual decision remains theirs.

A taste entry#

A public entry should be small and concrete. Depending on the material, it may record:

• the date and authorship of the judgment;
• the artist, work, body of work, encounter, or reference being considered;
• what attracted, resisted, amused, irritated, or remained unresolved;
• which relation, placement, material decision, or comparison made it legible;
• a nearby work or direction that was compelling but refused, and why;
• which existing tenet affected the decision;
• whether the judgment is current, revised, contradicted, or superseded;
• the source and permission for anything shown or attributed.

An entry does not need to answer every field. It needs enough specificity to show a real decision rather than retroactively manufacture a house style.

For people and agents#

People and software agents are both audiences for this record. They should encounter the same underlying material, not a persuasive human story and a different machine-facing taxonomy.

Discovery should be supported through stable URLs, semantic headings, explicit authorship and status, source links, cross-references, and a machine-readable corpus index. Technology may help retrieve, compare, and follow changes across entries. It must not infer artist intention, calculate fit, rank work, predict selection, or turn repeated qualities into an admissions model.

The public corpus index is available at /corpus.json.

Project record and edition packages#

SMAAK is the project-level record of Mike and Karlie's situated curatorial judgment. It is not the only form encoded taste may take inside MOOI NIET.

A particular collection or work may publish a narrower taste package as enrichment: an inspectable lens composed from philosophy, constraints, examples, behavior, refusals, and revision. That package may carry an artist's lens, MOOI NIET.'s lens, or a declared composition of both. People and software agents can use it to examine the work or compare their own observations without treating the package as a correct interpretation.

These edition packages are creative materials. They do not update SMAAK merely by existing, calculate agreement, infer a viewer profile, or become an automated selection model.

Relation to the anti-proxy test#

The anti-proxy test is not a claim that MOOI NIET. is fair. The gallery is subjective and exclusionary because Mike and Karlie choose what interests them. The test has a narrower purpose: popularity, pedigree, polish, solvency, property, and cultural fluency should not quietly become the reason a person or work receives money, time, circulation, or standing.

Keeping the test in the corpus puts it upstream of individual choices. A taste entry can show what the gallery responded to without disguising advantage as artistic importance or presenting the choice as universal judgment.

Current state#

No individual taste entries have been published yet. The first entries should come from actual encounters, selections, and refusals. MOOI NIET. should not invent examples to make this surface appear complete.