Typical new media artist: "Galleries just create artificial scarcity, cater to the rich, and perpetuate a materialistic culture, unlike me with my readily available, open source internet art, so why won't they pay attention to me?"
Reasons for art galleries 106: Some files are too big for the !!*#! internet and must be viewed on equipment that can display them. An example can be found in Kevin Bewersdorf's show at V&A gallery in Manhattan, which opened today. A mandala of about 1000 gif files downloaded from the internerd, with an image of the artist in the center in the lotus position with laptop on his lap, surfing. Within this cyber medieval Rose Window intricate arrangements of flipped, flopped, and symmetrically cloned eyeballs, Homer Simpsons, directional arrows, flames, firework explosions, and dancing babies jiggle and gyrate in an intricate mathematical ballet. And all of it as crisp as an image on a new laptop. One either has to go to the gallery to see this or read writers' descriptions. No internet-connected computer will do it justice.
Update: And with all of the above qualifications, here is a low res version of the piece. Guessing this will be much-delished and become the "definitive" version and only old cranks will talk about the "superior, gallery" model.
Update 2: Broken ink to Bewersdorf GIF fixed.
