general

Garrison Keillor's bitter old fart lament for the days of elitist book publishing, When Everyone's a Writer, No One Is:

Back in the day, we became writers through the laying on of hands. Some teacher who we worshipped touched our shoulder, and this benediction saw us through a hundred defeats. And then an editor smiled on us and wrote us a check, and our babies got shoes. But in the New Era, writers will be self-anointed. No passing of the torch. Just sit down and write the book. And The New York Times, the great brand name of publishing, whose imprimatur you covet for your book (“brilliantly lyrical, edgy, suffused with light” — NY Times) will vanish (Poof!). And editors will vanish... The upside of self-publishing is that you can write whatever you wish, utter freedom, and that also is the downside. You can write whatever you wish, and everyone in the world can exercise their right to read the first three sentences and delete the rest.

So sad, but here's what actually also happens under that capitalistic model he sentimentalizes (this is something I wrote a few years ago in a hopeful moment for the internet):

Take science fiction books, just as an example. (Or CDs, clothes, art sold in galleries...) Every year there is a crop of "new, hot" titles. Publicists tout the authors as geniuses, young turks who rock our world like it's never been rocked. Yet a book has one shot at prime rack space. If it doesn't sell, it's yanked and becomes landfill, and the hot author joins the thousands of has-beens who had their moment and failed. But what if the book had a crappy cover? What if an idea that didn't resonate this year rang like a gong the next? Too bad, the system must have winners and losers.

Am having a series of friendly-but-not-so-friendly discussions elsewhere with a "print writer" (a critic) who is interested enough in online discourse to participate in it but seems unable to conceive a world after print publications and art galleries. Any mention of the possibilities of mutating or morphing expression in an age of mass-sharing is called "waving the flag for the internet" or "hoping teh interwebs will save us." Threatened much? Or is it just that his habits of thought have ossified around the old models and he can't judge value in the cyber-realm? Possibly both.

Garrison Keillor assumes every reader will only read the first three sentences of something. Well, perhaps of something he wrote... It may be new kinds of writers emerge who attract large readerships despite the glut of material out there. Writers who craft dynamic lead sentences and their own killer headlines. Concise writers. Writers who mix it up with readers in comment threads and don't sound like asses in the process. Writing won't die, but writers who lack certain skill sets may die. But even they will have a better shot at finding an audience than the brilliant "remaindered" authors of yesteryear.

By the same token, visual artists who "speak internet" well may have different talents from the practitioners waiting for the Keilloresque "touch on the shoulder." But that's another post.

Dipping more extensively into Beau Sievers' computer art syllabus.
The music by Stuart Argabright for this "vintage CGI" video is heavenly. [YouTube]
The animation is pretty good, too. The exploding rubbery porcelain is pure Bretonian surrealism. If only CGI could have been arrested at this experimental level.
Am trying to remember what I remember about Argabright. His biggest claim to fame seems to be the 1984 club hit "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" [YouTube]. Would love to hear more music in the vein of the CGI demo.

From AFC's post on dump.fm, where I put up a couple of paras from a Boris Groys essay:

Tom, why the love for Groys? This article of his is rife with silly contradictions, like the oxymoron of a professional de-professionalized "avant garde." And Malevich erasing? Rauchenberg erased, Malevich consumed. come on, you can do better.
Suggest “lazy” as used by programmers as a better thought environment. (credit: Beau Sievers http://beausievers.com/bhqfu/computer_art/)
Amos Satterlee // 27 May 2010, 4:50 pm

Read some chapters of the book Art Power. Groys is one of the most advanced thinkers in art in the world.
Samson White // 27 May 2010, 5:37 pm

Samson: will do, but if Weak Universalism is any indication, then art thinking is in a real world of hurt.
Amos Satterlee // 27 May 2010, 6:02 pm

There is a category on the Sievers syllabus called Amateur and Sub-Amateur. That was Ed Halter’s phrase, as I recall. I would call that a professional de-professionalization. Someone has to put the moron in oxymoron.
tom moody // 28 May 2010, 12:51 am

Boris Groys, The Weak Universalism. See earlier notes and discussion (and more discussion).

Although shrouded in layers of irony this will do for a manifesto: a weak, low-visibility version of what critic Howard Halle calls "waving the flag for the internet." Better that than the world Halle inhabits (or to be kinder, laments), of cynical frustration over the machinations of the wealthy and powerful regarding collectible objects. Halle asks for a revolution in values but won't recognize the one happening in front of him. Instead he distorts, simplifies, and name-calls: web-fanciers are living on Planet Unreality; the drift to the internet is "foreclosing anything that doesn’t involve technological innovation"; belief that the "internet will save us" is naive because Obama turned out to be a corporatist.

There is no techno-boosterism in Groys' essay, or insistence that the Internet is the only place for what he calls "weak repetitive gestures" meant to "transcend," that is, survive, a milieu of constant, forced change.
It's the opposite of boosterism, he's saying the drive for innovation (new gear replacing old gear, new hot theories replacing old hot theories) is part of what gets us to our present condition.

It's not meant to be a manifesto for working artists; it's a description of where we are. But it has special appeal for those working collectively and/or anonymously outside the gladiatorial contest (lottery?) of being picked to show at a Chelsea gallery, celebrated in the glossies, and then "remaindered" the next year. One can of course operate in that strange system and resist what Groys calls "the strong images of change, the ideology of progress, and promises of economic growth." But homesteading on the web has a lower entry cost.

Groys' argument can't be easily compressed or sound-bitten: you should read the essay and draw your own conclusions. I find it more amusing and refreshing than Ben Davis's dreary screed about the state of postmodernism, which seems more interested in political theory than what artists are doing.

Continuation at AFC of the discussion of Ben Davis's unfrozen caveman essay about the politics of the institutional art world (edited for length):

...So Tom, if you feel that Davis’s political read is outdated, perhaps you could offer us a more current one. Just don’t rely on the old “teh interwebs elected Obama” thing, because as we’ve seen in the last year and half, the President’s abilities to act, while not completely unsuccessful, have certainly been hemmed in by the entrenched power structure as it exist on that patch of Planet Reality called Washington, D.C. And this despite the web-enabled tidal wave that sent him to the White House...
Howard Halle // 23 May 2010, 10:39 am

A while back Paddy, I, and various commenters hashed over a lecture by Boris Groys at SVA called “Everyone is an Artist.” The title annoyed me but it turned out to be something I really liked. I present this as my own possible misreading of Groys. Rome, city-states, etc don’t fall because armies storm the barricades, they fall because people get interested in other things and drift away from the permanent siege of the city gates. The most interesting thing happening at the NewMu isn’t the latest Gavin Brown offering to curators incapable of doing their own homework, it’s Rhizome.org, the homely stepchild no one at the museum knows what to do with. And not just Rhizome per se, but the hundreds of artists and sites and projects they link to and discuss. There is a hardy band of commenters at Rhizome who still struggle to fold their work into the “discourse” that Ben Davis describes in such detail and that has as its apex Urs Fischer. Many, more have walked away from the whole schmear because it’s rigged, incomprehensible, boring, and slow. As an artist and recovering critic, I have had a much better time investigating the 1s and 0s realm and the problems of how it might be represented in public space (including gallery space) than I was having writing for the slicks covering the New York scene in the ’90s. In the Amy Sillman discussion I noted that you opposed painting to Skin Fruit rather than a NewMu show with a cyber/internet/media component such as Unmonumental or YTJ–-the latter would require the hard work of finding points of comparison between what are really completely different ways of thinking and working. Easier to just say “the net’s not there yet” and put it out of mind. Meanwhile artists drift away from the gladiatorial contest that you are professionally forced to cover.
tom moody // 23 May 2010, 12:20 pm

Davis’ article is excellent in how it reassesses a particular brand of theory, and how the failings of this brand are due largely to how postmodernist strategies to re(con)figure politics/power-structures have been co-opted by those systems. Or, the revolutionary idealism of postmodernist thought has always been just another symptom (an academic side-effect)of the very systems it intended to critique in the first place.
Ultimately, Davis is proposing the need for a new operational logic (operating system?). Again, for him to not refer to the internet at all (though the manner in which he discusses Josephine Meckseper becomes a conversation about net artists, if you squint a little) reads as a telling omission, particularly given the forum/format his article appears under. Davis’ blind spot – intentional or otherwise – does reflect the trend for prominent (arts) print writers to give far more credence to the “schmear” than to other, new, and potentially more vital practices (like those occurring on “teh interwebs”). And to meaningfully engage with these migratory “energies” requires more than just a cursory glance into their thresholds. New-media artists/writers should be held to that same challenge, too, rather than just abandoning any obligation of engaging with a “gladiatorial contest” that they’ve deemed irrelevant.
Jesse P. Martin // 23 May 2010, 4:13 pm

I don’t doubt what you say about there being artists who’ve checked out of the game as it’s currently played, and that some of them are concentrating their efforts on the web. But in waving the flag for the internet, and being so quick to dismiss Davis’s analysis, I believe you’re choosing the trees over the forest.
What I’d like to see, personally, is a revolution in cultural values, not a decanting of old wine into new bottles. Furthermore, to the extent that it’s possible, I don’t see why old-media artists couldn’t be as effective in addressing that change as new-media acolytes. For every cyber-artist drifting away from the siege, there’s probably a painter or some such doing likewise. But as the whole discussion over Sillman suggests, you seem to foreclose anything that doesn’t involve technological innovation. I’d say the whole emphasis on means as opposed to ends is what’s gotten us into the place we’re in.
Heron of Alexandria created a steam engine in the First Century, but it went nowhere because slavery was still accepted as the norm; manpower was cheap and widely available. Rome itself wouldn’t fall for another 300 years, and Heron’s innovation wouldn’t take root until the end of the 18th century, after a period during which the empirical method supplanted the teachings of the Church. Values have to change before technology can do its work. That goes for today.
As far as covering the gladitorial contest, as you put it, yeah that’s right; it’s how I make a living. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get the bigger picture.
Howard Halle // 23 May 2010, 4:42 pm

Somehow my statement on the Amy Sillman threads– “you’d think there would be more curiosity about the new tools, content, and problems-to-solve presented by omnipresent technology”–keeps getting translated into “You seem to foreclose anything that doesn’t involve technological innovation.” The statement I’ve had accompanying my blog since 2001 reads: “I’m amused by the lingering rhetoric of futurism–-the Buck Rogers, ‘machines-will-change-our-lives’ spieling–-that continues to surround digital production in our society. The computer is a tool, not magic, and possesses its own tragicomic limitations as well as offering new means of expression and communication…” It would be nice if someone would check out my writing before calling me a techno-booster.
tom moody // 23 May 2010, 10:57 pm