general

Paddy Johnson quotes Ryder Ripps:

“Art lives within society, and society by definition is social,” he says. “So if you’re not making an impact on many people, you’re not going to be a known artist. There’s the folk model, the Henry Dargers of the world who get discovered after the fact, but to me that’s really bleak and not glamorous at all.”

If the choice is between (a) schmoozer, attention junkie, and starter-of-a-million-projects and (b) Henry Darger, I'll take "(b)," minus the sexual kinks and closet serial killer accusations, if possible. Darger created a world to escape into because he could barely function in "(a)" mode--that's not depressing, it's kind of beautiful.

As for Ripps' work, his GIFs are great and co-creating a website (dump.fm) where they could be part of a common pictorial language is enough to earn him canonical status, whatever the value of all the later bonding and site creation might be. Even outsiders could "shut up and dump."

Computer art pioneer Manfred Mohr has a show up at Bitforms in NYC. Haven't seen it but I did talk about his work a couple of times when he showed there in '04.

Mohr himself commented on the first post (speaking of fighting in comments). Am a little embarrassed for going nuclear on a canonical figure, but he was correcting something that doesn't matter much: who was the first artist to do "variations of incomplete open cubes"? The drift of the post was that, as Rosalind Krauss explained in her essay "LeWitt in Progress," such supposedly ratiocinative extrapolations as working through dozens or hundreds of variations of a geometric form are more about filling an existential vacuum a la Samuel Beckett that limning the "look of thought" (a phrase Donald Kuspit had applied to Sol LeWitt in the early '70s). Science and logic exist to avoid redundancy, not to celebrate it, she explained in that essay.

I was sort of complimenting Mohr for (i) having the good sense to do his exhaustive variations with a machine rather than by hand and (ii) admitting his aim was "visual invention" rather than conceptual pedantry. To quibble over whether he or LeWitt "did it first," then, seemed to rather miss the point.

edits for clarity, tone

Thanks to Paddy Johnson for the linkage but this wasn't what I said:

Tom Moody laments the disappearance of ranting on the blogosphere and in the comment sections of blogs. We still see plenty of rants here, but the totally crazy shit (Moody says isn’t really a rant anyway) has subsided with the push away from anonymity on the web.

I was lamenting the disappearance of ranting in the blogosphere because of the comment sections of blogs. In a post you can be a fiery orator but then in the comments you are supposed to make nice and listen to what people are saying. The "new AOLs" (Facebook, G+) are all about comments (what the disconnected Mark Zuckerberg calls "connection") and being sociable, hence "social media."

The decline of rants doesn't begin with the loss of anonymity--I knew who most of my favorite mid-'00s bloggers were--but rather to "likes," "fav counts," "friends" and all the rest of that sophomoric BS. In this world of enforced happy talk, anyone who says anything too discouraging can be written off as a troll or congenitally unpleasant person. Sure, you can have fights breaking out in comments. Two trolls going at it provide a lot of entertainment for the well-adjusted.

minor edits for finer-tuned ranting

Speaking of the GIF zeitgeist: despite Google's supposed embrace of the file format designers love to hate, animated GIFs don't look so good on the company's new AOL/Facebook wannabe, Google+. The GIFs need more space around them and the avatars compete with them. Yet everything on the page seems miniaturized, to enforce a uniform layout.
On dump.fm, avatars are segregated into a chatroom "userlist"--that's better. A chat room isn't the same as a blog, but even on the dump "log" pages each post fills almost the entire width of the screen. Hats off again to Ryder, Scott, Tim and Stefan for "getting it" and offering an artistic (but not arty) alternative to the commercial blog-mills' graphic environments. Many of the derogatory statements made in AFC comments and elsewhere about MySpace as a GIF ghetto are basically also true of G+.

The use of the word "rant" in the previous post raises a topic: the decline of the rant in the age of social media.
In the print zine era rants were prized and savored. People subscribed to and anxiously awaited their xeroxed, stapled magazines in which a lone angry person railed in an honest, uncensored way you never saw in the mainstream media.
Ranting is intelligent. Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews aren't ranters, they're shouters, completely approved by the system as a faux-outlet for mass frustration.
Ranting is stimulating. Andy Rooney isn't a ranter, he's a bore, with conventional opinions rooted in some imagined, non-existent past.
The early blogosphere was a place for zine-style ranting. The late Steve Gilliard and The Rude Pundit became stars without any assistance from a paid PR firm--just search engines.
Blog comments, however, require a different skill set than mere eloquent monologuizing (monology?). One must appear to be polite, and to take others' opinions into account. In the comment world if you are too blunt or honest you are marked as a troll.
In the corporate blog-mills that have arisen post-blogosphere (since 2007 or so) comments and interconnection are more important than the posts that initiate them. Bloggers write anticipating comments and how they will respond to them. A kind of TV-like happy talk becomes the norm. ("Super!" "Loved it!")