Day: May 4, 2008

Although this blog is sometimes called an art blog and/or lumped in with other art blogs about 90% of my bandwidth is for music. (The other 10% is the Iron Man GIF I stupidly remixed.) This is because I've been posting original songs as mp3 files and robots sniff out the file extension in the endless quest to offer "free mp3s" to the public. At first my biggest traffic went to songs with the words beat or hiphop or blues in the title (the last presumably because folks were searching for "moody blues"--a popular '60s group). But lately some of the songs with more fanciful or arbitrary titles are the biggest bandwidth scoops. They are actually some of my better songs from about two years ago, IMHO. Probably the lag time is for the songs to be catalogued by the robots and "discovered" by listeners. I'm happy if they're being heard for the right reasons but wondering when I should put a stop to all the flagrant generosity. It's not like the bandwidth is expensive at all, but still...

Mentioning this because of "Net Art 2.0" and Seth Price's "Dispersion" concept. He asks rhetorically what it would mean for an artist to communicate to another (non-art world) public in another medium, specifically citing music. His conclusion, if I understand the essay, is it is effectively meaningless, and artists need to instead redouble their efforts to speak to the usual art world gatekeepers (possibly with a well-articulated theory about, say, dispersion) if their work is to be properly read. I'm not sure I agree. I'm rather enjoying getting my work out to people who like quirky techno music and Iron Man GIFs, even if they hold no place in the Price firmament.