general

...and the trend of Western contempo artists hiring painters from mainland China who will render any image you send them as an "original oil." This has been going on since at least the early '00s--Ludwig Schwarz did it and also an artist from Munich who's name I'm forgetting.

Of course in some cases these paintings are supposed to be bad but not everyone thinks that way. In a recent studio visit in Dallas I met an artist who had stacks of paintings that had just come from China. He was in three shows and was using the artisans for cheap studio assistants. He was emailing back and forth with them on what kind of painting surfaces to use and they were sending him back proof prints as they were working. This might get a pass if the paintings were good but their appeal had more to do with the digital collages he was making--he should have just shown those.

If you merely needed "painting fodder" to put in an installation (say, where you were digitally inserting a painting into a TV show where the characters were talking about a painting) this might be a plausible reason to "cheap out" but ultimately, if it's on display people are going to have to look at the thing. Possibly it could be a semiotic investigation into cross-cultural misunderstanding: how artists hand-render an image that they have no emotional investment in or cultural attachment to. But if the point is to have a sellable object to place oneself in the Western commodity-based discourse then you are just injecting the art equivalent of grey goo into the system. Like we need more of that.

some of the above is salvage from an earlier, deleted post

Atlantic blogger Rebecca Greenfield has just discovered "highbrow" animated GIFs - of a supermodel with hair blowing in the breeze!

Thanks for the shoutout from pdsc in the comments:

Haha, this article is such a joke. Head to Dump.fm, computersclub.org, Tommoody.us, or Rhizome.org to see what is actually happening with the animated gif as an 'artistic' file format. As @Wakest mentioned, the animated gif has been used for many years now in netart, and before being recognized as 'high brow' was a form of folk art. Jamie Beck's work is way too close to limited motion video loops to really be 'groundbreaking' in the art world.

"Animated photography" using GIF loops has the smell of novelty, a la the "solid photography" of yesteryear (sculptures based on photos taken from multiple angles), holograms, or even stereograms that aspire to classical (that is, ordinary) beauty. The point of freezing the fleeting perfection of the human form is rather blown when a part of the icon wiggles.

Not to say a good artist couldn't make something of this, but Jamie Beck's work is unintentionally funny, like a lenticular Jesus nodding at his Last Supper compatriots as you move a postcard back and forth.

Update: DS notes that the tumblr post of fashion model Coca Rocha announcing these "artistic" GIFs has over 10,000 "notes." Let's add that and the Atlantic post to the list of recent mass media "discoveries" of GIFs. We seem to be at a tipping point now where people who are concerned with "art" or "net art" have to deal with the fact that GIFs have broken through, despite never actually having gone away. What has been for the last few years an uphill battle to educate will change tack to a slightly apologetic, "yeah, well, heh, I use them in a slightly different way."

Article by Frances Colpitt discussing work by David Szafranski, John Pomara, Jeff Elrod, yours truly and others, published just before I moved to NY from Texas and mentioned in Gene McHugh's essay about my work. This article was once available in text form through a service called Findarticles, which was cataloguing print magazine content in the early days of the Web before being subsequently acquired and reacquired by various corporate entities. Eventually the text disappeared so I made this poor man's PDF.

Update, 2020: Nine years later I finally made an actual PDF of this.

Many thanks to Gene McHugh for a thorough and thoughtful essay on my artwork in his Post Internet blog. Many threads are pulled together over the course of a few decades that might not seem to be part of any overall pattern. It's only half-clear to me since I'm still in the middle of it.

I like the way the essay keeps coming back to the theme of getting down into the structure of things. McHugh's description of photorealism is terrific--better than I've articulated about what's going on in the paintings I did in that style--the idea that painting reveals something about photography by isolating its conventions in another medium. And he traces that same kind of thought process through several phases of working that don't seem connected at all: the sub-canvas (paper) investigation in the abstract paintings; the cybermedia-about-printmedia in the MSPaintbrush portraits; right up to GIFs and other ostensibly outmoded programs and filetypes. The connections to cyberpunk lit are also much appreciated; I'm constantly thinking about what the movement got right and what it got wrong.

An earlier post on the 2011 relaunch of Rhizome.org contains a list of links to the site from my Digital Media Tree blog that are still broken, as well as a few that were fixed. The broken links are listed below. The first URL of these pairs is a dead link found on my old blog that doesn't redirect to a new page; the second is its current location, tracked down searching words or phrases on the Rhizome search page. Revisiting/revising these old posts serves as research for my eventual book The Lost Years: Art on the Internet Between The Dot Com Crash and the Rise of Facebook, as well as boring personal recordkeeping. In upcoming posts will do a similar compilation of dead links to Rhizome from my current blog. Much of the writing doesn't make sense if these links don't work, so I am correcting them in the posts via updates.

These links aren't just about my work; have been covering the scene for a while now so it's a diverse collection.

http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=3860 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/jul/14/interview-with-silicious/

http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=26212 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/jun/15/rhizome-2007-08-commissions-announcement/ (Rhizome 2007-2008 Commissions announced - please note these are elsewhere called the 2008-2009 Commissions)

http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=3616 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2007/may/9/sketch-monochrome-gradient/ (Lauren Cornell reblogged this GIF frame of mine - still much appreciated, but now I am no longer mentioned in the post)

http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=24996&page=1#47095 is now http://rhizome.org/announce/events/47095/ (Baudrillard event on World of Warcraft)

http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz/?id=2463 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/aug/12/p-lansky-club-vs-academic-electronic-music/ (again, appreciate the reblogging of my post but the reblogging now gives authorship credit to Marisa Olson)

http://www.rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=1853 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2006/apr/29/gifs-galore-and-more/ (Net Art News on The GIF Show)

http://www.rhizome.com/fp.rhiz?id=1416 is now http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/20235/ (Sal Randolph report on the 2006 Net Aesthetics 2.0 panel - scroll down to Randolph's comment)

http://rhizome.org/fp.rhiz?id=898 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/nov/26/the-arcane-art-of-tracking-vs-the-amen-break/

http://www.rhizome.com/fp.rhiz?id=666 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/oct/31/tom-moody-chats-w-cory-arcangel/ (the link to the interview in the post is dead)

http://www.newmuseum.org/now_cur_RhizomeArtBase101.htm is now http://archive.rhizome.org:8080/exhibition/artbase101/

http://rhizome.org/netartnews/story.rhiz/?×tamp=20050518 is now http://rhizome.org/editorial/2005/may/18/how-to-succeed-in-the-arts-by-really-trying/ (an old "Net Art News" item assigned to "editorial"--needs a content tag)

Update, July 2011: The links listed above have all been fixed by Rhizome (thanks!) with the exception of the one New Museum link.