general

One of dump.fm's prominent chatters, a film student, frequently complains about "net artists," as in "I don't like it when net artists..."
What does he think a net artist is, exactly?
Here are some possibilities for what a net artist might be:

1. Someone with a BFA or MFA in net art (future nonexistent degrees)
2. Someone who self-consciously makes art involving web-based technology or protocols
3. Someone with a degree in studio art who posts self-identified artwork that can be found/indexed by search engines
4. Someone with no art degree who posts self-identified artwork etc
5. Someone with or without an art degree who posts any kind of visual expression, leaving it for others to identify it as art
6. Someone with/without an art degree who uses the internet for performance or agitprop, either self-identified or other-identified as art
7. Someone with/without an art degree who posts any kind of visual expression or does anything performative online, without caring whether it is called art or not
8. A shamanic presence who is doing something disturbing and art-like on the internet
9. Someone who has had online expression covered by a prominent "art and technology" website
10. Someone who works primarily offline, e.g. a painter showing in galleries, who creates a digital presence through exhaustive documentation
11. Someone who spends 20 hours a day in the social media blog-mills and believes this is a new kind of art
12. Someone in the social media blog-mills who finds collective or group validation of an art-like activity that may or may not be institutionally identified as art
13. A film or video student whose own personal greatness has yet to be recognized by any "art and technology" website

Art blogger Hrag Vartanian seemed surprised this year to discover someone selling a GIF at the Armory Art Fair. Since no one can be expected to dig through my old blog archives, I fished up this photo by Paddy Johnson, depicting Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects gallery selling an animated GIF (mine) at the DIVA art fair in Miami in 2006. DIVA's web page of the event is still up, as well. Is a DVD of a GIF still a GIF? Many might say no--you'd have to see it and judge.

In an ARTINFO column about digital art and $$$, Kyle Chayka ponders, among other things, the sales practice of "taking a GIF offline so the collector can have it locally" (which we did not do at DIVA--what was offered was an authenticated copy of the art, not the rights to the image) in light of a recent Frieze essay about the supposed differences between digital and gallery style art: "broadly speaking, the art world is vertical (escalating levels of privilege and exclusivity) whereas the web is horizontal (based on free access, open sharing, unchecked distribution, an economy of attention)." That the same person uttered both phrases is a mystery no one, including Chayka, can solve, but let's move on.

Limiting edition sizes, or selling the rights to one person, could both be means of creating what the Frieze essay calls "scarcity" and Chayka calls "artificial scarcity" that presumably enhances monetary value but is contrary to the spirit of open sharing and unchecked distribution. Which method you use is mostly a matter of optics: "having the GIF locally" provokes hoots and hollers because of the mental image of some plutocrat in his den cackling over "his" GIF while the thing circulates uncontrollably out in the real world.

Whereas an editioned DVD or data disc, authenticated by the artist, isn't so extreme and has ample precedent in the art world. But let's get back to that idea of "scarcity." Is that really what this is about? Art economics aren't classical economics. Even in the most ruthless Chelsea shops, sales aren't just about exchange value affected by laws of supply and demand. There are elements of generosity, patronage and support for artists (as well as status, ego, and loss leader financing) that don't factor into the typical capitalist dog-eat-dog scenario. Certainly rarity impacts value but limited editions are also a way of helping artists get paid when they mostly don't. Talk of "scarcity" and "escalating levels of privilege" is the art world in faux-Marxist, self flagellation mode, justifying consumption while supposedly critiquing it.

Also, contrary to Frieze, there are reasons for making art gallery-friendly besides creating a "saleable object." When a web artifact is shown in physical space, the viewer's relationship to it changes--you can walk around it, or walk through it if it is projected, and you can discuss it with other people rather than having a solitary passive encounter with it on a web page. Believe it or not, some artists are interested in these transformations for their own sake, not as an after-the-fact justification of their desperation for money.

Have previously mentioned the hard club stylings of rapper Glass Popcorn. The man himself was in New York a couple of days ago, performing at MOMA PS1, and an edgy video outfit called CBS News was on the scene to record it. Watch here as Popcorn performs the immortal "Ed Hardy." (Unfortunately you may have to view some propaganda about "our energy future" but media doesn't just pay for itself.)

Year by year the formerly minimal Twitter comes to resemble every other social media site, offering users "options." Lately it has a "Recent Images" feature. Please note that if you haven't uploaded any images, the twitter team will take care of that for you. Let's visualize the discussion that led to this:

"So we have this great upload feature and we want all twitterers to use it. Some folks don't want graphics on their pages though. What do we do?"
"If they ever linked to something on Flickr, we could pull that image up automatically, call it their 'Recent Image.'"
"Hmmm, is that really honest?"
"Uh, last I heard, twitter is free. These people have no rights. And it is technically a 'recent image,' even if they didn't upload it."
"Hmmm, OK, damn good idea."
"But what if the twitterer is an artist or a photographer, doesn't this look like they're posting someone else's work to represent themselves? Maybe there's some copyright issues."
"We'll get Legal to look at that, if it's not covered in the terms of service we'll just slip it in there. None of these freeloaders will sue us, though, it's too expensive."
"Cool."

revised for accuracy - "recent images" isn't quite as egregious as I thought but it's still pretty bad

Good, non-curmudgeonly essay by Robin Peckham on how, among other things, the contemporary art world was already catering to shortened attention spans before online media came along and made us dumb and dumberer. Let's let him tell it (excerpt):

Although the notion that our present contemporary art belongs to a peculiarly YouTube sensibility is a facile one, the standard curatorial approach, which almost ironically presents itself as an a priori intellectual strategy, has insisted for too long that art explain itself conceptually, quickly, and on demand. Our exhibitions demand a purpose, preferably one that fits if not into the 140 characters of a Tweet then at least into the similarly-scaled sentence that has defined the English language for centuries. Interviews, similarly, assume that the artist will be able to answer the curator succinctly and eloquently, prepared to move on or modulate meaning in the next round of questions and answers. As a result, our art now speaks often and loudly, but it is over all too soon. Modernism, despite its preoccupations and overarching projects, abhorred a one-liner, and post-modernism reveled in the production of mazes and mirror images that could immerse viewers for hours. Now art work merely announces itself: I-am-abstraction; I-am-about-architecture; I-have-a-sense-of-humor; I-am-sound.