general

Glenn Greenwald is talking about Wired vs him but this statement has universal application to criticism:

The party whose conduct is in question attacks the critic in order to create the impression that it's all just some sort of screeching personality feud devoid of substance. That, in turn, causes some bystanders to cheer for whichever side they already like and boo the side they already dislike, as though it's some sort of entertaining wrestling match, while everyone else dismisses it all as some sort of trivial Internet catfight not worth sorting out.

Wrote this email to a writer who had seen my name referenced on the Brad Troemel "minor league" thread. The writer took the subject of Troemel's article to be how emerging artists are employing the internet (social media and blogs) to self-promote, a theme the writer had recently covered in an article.

Hi, _________,
Thanks for emailing. I am little outside the circles of promotion you describe in your article. I started blogging in '01 (after a longish gallery and print career) and it took the artworld 6 years to get online en masse (with the advent of Facebook). In those six years I mostly met and hung out with new media people, who were already online.
Troemel's essay is aimed mostly at new media people. Because a few of them showed at Spencer Brownstone gallery, for a one night only event, he drew the rather facile and incorrect conclusion that new media was a "minor league" feeding artists into the gallery system. As Paddy suggested in her comment, the essay shows that he is fresh out of school and doesn't know anything about the gallery system or artist motivations. If you gleaned anything else from the essay I'm happy to hear it!
Best, Tom

Was asked to explain the reference to Judy Chicago in discussing dump.fm's top 10 nod.

Short Judy Chicago synopsis:
Artist working in late '60s California paints with airbrush, combines late color field abstraction with biker, hippie, tattoo motifs.
In the large scale installation The Dinner Party (on permanent view at the Brooklyn Museum), that painting sensibility collides with early-'70s anti-painting trends: an interest in craft, history, narrative, process.
The Dinner Party is a collective work made by a large group of women who came together at a particular time and place to do the various elements of the installation: sewing, needlepoint, ceramics, writing, and historical research into significant past women from Susan B. Anthony to Gertrude Stein.
Chicago's "hippy abstractions," ranging from delicate mandala patterns to raging mutant vagina forms, are on plates at each historical figure's place setting.
The piece is an interesting, anomalous clash of sensibilities. Some have called it "feminist kitsch" but that's too easy. It is ultimately a fairly austere, minimal work for being so crammed with information.
In any case, there was later a bunch of fighting about who authored the piece: many of the women who worked on the craft and narrative aspects of it felt burned that it was going into the art history books as a "work by Judy Chicago." They felt it was a violation and betrayal that this work of feminist "anti-form," "anti-authorship" suddenly had a solo auteur with relatively anonymous subcontractors.

It'd be going too far to call dump.fm, with its screens full of dicks, feminist. It does, however, have an interesting gender balance of users, making it completely different from the cesspit of toxic masculinity, oh, pardon me, relational aesthetics bulletin board, that it is often compared to.

a computer should be a stumbling block on the way to creativity (unless you built it yourself); people who "love" theirs need help

the art world keeps reconstituting itself with the rise of each new networking software while its reasons to be cohesive keep dropping away

feeling like Bruce Dern in Silent Running explaining why a canteloupe is good

reading about art doctrinal disputes in the 19th century is more fun than participating in them in the 21st

"if you missed the social factors that shaped my work as an artist then you aren't paying attention to an important part of art"

interior colonization - measuring the success of your hatred of art world insiders by whether they pay attention to you

all art made for the internet is doomed - everyone always says this but I'm starting to believe it

re: twitter's simplicity - someone realized the essence of the web isn't "rich media" crapola - and it's working - until someone wrecks it

isolated examples of work cause anxiety and lack the cohesion necessary to make a judgment as to their value

was arguing with a writer tonight who believed all outsiders can ultimately be co-opted; I disagreed, citing people with repugnant views

artist at opening tonight: "I hope you find someone to argue with"

i want to make sculptures but I do not want a house full of sculpture

reading old journals. I'm happier than I used to be but thought I was happy at the time

hat tips to dream_froth2 and dream_froth3

"Dump.fm - IRL" at 319 Scholes is included in Paddy Johnson's 10 Best Exhibitions of 2010 list for the L Magazine.

The collective picture formed was that of a unique community of makers, each using a lexicon of stock images, internet slang and animated gifs. This is the new art we've been waiting to see for the last 30 years.

Congratulations to curator Lindsay Howard and all the other dumpers. It's important to note that although people were invited by the curator to be in the "IRL" show, anyone can sign up for dump.fm. That great work emerges without a single cult of personality (are Ryder, Scottbot and TimB the new Judy Chicago?) or institutional involvement of any kind is indeed something rather new. That it's an amorphous sort of electronic, sign-manipulating art requiring presence and participation--almost like a game but with a surfeit of hard-to-evaluate creative work product rather than a score* as a result--will make it very hard to co-opt.

*fav hustlers notwithstanding