general

A one-time commenter was dissing Michael Manning's paintings over at ArtFCity and Paddy was agreeing with him so the death-paddle had to come down. The fun started with Johnson's run-down of what was selling in the online auctions (yawn). A Manning sold, and the peanut gallery weighed in:

wiki minaj • 4 days ago

I don't think it's the lack of big names that made it hard, it was the overall quality. The pieces just weren't that good, cohesive, or well curated. The market responded as it ought to, minus a couple 'gaming for reputation' pieces.

I mean, if Michael Manning's lethargic finger wiggling is the highlight of your lot then you don't have much to present. Even the recognized names' pieces weren't particularly strong.

Only a few lots were worth looking at and the lack of visual documentation makes the first impression the ONLY impression. Zooming in on a picture only to be treated by a low resolution, bilinear blur set the tone immediately. This shit doesn't matter.

Paddy Johnson • 4 days ago

I totally agree that this was a big problem. I wonder if people are distrustful of the sales format? I mean, Phillips isn't a small name—it shouldn't have been a problem to get better work.

tom moody • 3 days ago

Michael Manning's finger wiggling is anything but lethargic, wiki minaj! His muscles are toned, and so powerful he has had to register his fingers as weapons. His studio floor is littered with broken phones from his enthusiastic jabs.

Kidding aside, Manning has yet to find a Harold Rosenberg to pen the definitive "American Action Painters" essay for phone and tablet painting, ultimately rendered as printed canvas, daubed with actual physical gel. So we are having to rely on the collector's nose for quality at this moment. The paintings are good in person -- have you seen them, or are you basing your dismissal on jpegs? There is a bit of a goofing quality to them but they also have a sense of freedom and openness, owing to the large scale. They don't read like "digital art" much at all, yet have an interesting artificiality. The viewer thinks about how -- and why -- they were made.

10 years ago you could hardly give away a digital painting, collectors were so nervous about them. Manning has broken the ice for more people working this way.
But who gives a tinker's damn about the money? Let's talk about the art.

Paddy Johnson • 2 days ago

I don't think it's a good idea to rely on collector noses for quality. A lot of the time that's the last thing they are interested in.

I haven't seen Michael Manning's paintings in the flesh. I'm a little skeptical of how much they could be transformed IRL, though your vouch for it does make me question that skepticism.

From the jpegs and videos, I can see that scale helps the work, but they still still feel a little hotel-y to me. What's so unique about them. Are they really staking out a position for themselves?

tom moody • a day ago

I've seen two shows of the work in person but I was already intrigued by the way Bill Brady presented it, just from the installation shot: http://www.billbradykc.com/mic...
I know of one feted new media painter (via hearsay) who was convinced by actually seeing the work.
Hotel-y is part of the story -- in quotation marks -- but in person you are vacillating between the skepticism you would have if this work had actually been made with paint and the digital aspect, which is all about simulation and physical modeling (at the most accessible level of "consumer" tech). It's a matter of scale -- these things tower over you -- but also of presence and presentation. The gel medium is smeared on as if it were painted, yet has little actual relationship to the underlying strokes. This is funny, but is also adding a weird kind of solidity to the work.
They are pretty but not merely pretty, and certainly not cloying, in person.
By the "nose of the collector" I only meant that plunking down money will have to do until someone actually provides the critical exegesis. By then the flippers will be on to something else. I don't see any of our established NY painting critics providing this exegesis. I think they will avoid this work because it's "digital" and they still don't know how to talk about that. (Of course I'd be interested in any articles I might have missed.)

Paddy Johnson • a day ago

Where did you see the work in NYC? (Or did you see it elsewhere?)

tom moody • 20 hours ago

These were the two I saw:
American Contemporary (East Village, NYC)
http://americancontemporary.bi...
Apr - June 2014
Retrospective gallery (Hudson, NY)
http://www.retrospectivegaller...
May - June 2014

A reason attempts to parody internet content will always fail is the superabundance of effectively self-parodying content. Case in point: "Experience Regina" [YouTube] (hat tip Rising Tensions)

From the irrepressible YouTube commentariat:

Alain Lemay via Google+ 1 year ago

Possibly the worst tourism video ever created. Complete with Seindfeldesk music riffs and an underage girl in a bikini. And what's with that no-uterus pic at 2:23?

ThaReal JmanV 7 months ago
It's supposed to be not vagina. Regina. Get it? I know hilarious, right?

"Elevator Mixtape" by IEJ [Vimeo]
Apparently people posting video footage of escalators on YouTube and elsewhere is a "thing." IEJ made a compilation. Update, from an email from IEJ: "As far as I can tell, the escalator recording community is a subset of the elevator recording community who have their own wikipedia. I linked to the page of dieselducy who took the video you can see in the preview freezeframe (mall in Roanoke VA) [in IEJ's mixtape]. He's big in that scene. ... Maybe they don't have the glamour of bridges and trains but elevators/escalators are ubiquitous anomalies themselves (they aren't everywhere - WY only has two and the riders of the first one in Kurdistan are happy and confused)." Tom here: Documenting escalators is interesting to me in an "all the buildings on the sunset strip" way, only crowdsourced. These are unobserved phenomena that take on an aesthetic dimension through mass recording.

"Wistle While You Twerk" by Ying Yang Twins [YouTube]
America woke up to twerking with Miley Cyrus, but this song, from the album Thug Walkin', released in 2000, shows that it's been around for 14 years, at least! Join Doc, Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, and the rest of the gang with this happy anthem.

Addendum: The German group Trio is considered a one-hit wonder of the '80s (for "Da Da Da - I Don't Love You - You Don't Love Me ") but they were a pretty good band, as seen in a collection of German TV performances assembled by Network Awesome. In fact most '80s one hit wonders are that way because of the music industry's insistence on hits.

cosmicsands has transcribed the text of Kevin Bewersdorf's Issue Project Room reading on Rap Genius, a site for crowdsourcing lyrics, poetry, etc. Based on this, the phrase "Taoist poetry about the internet" in the previous post is a bit confining. There is Eastern influence but also a tone of Walt Whitman-esque celebration, in poems such as "Who is using the internet?" (see below). A poem like this walks a line between being savvy enough to characterize an ocean of data, with ever-shifting codes of hipness and obscurity, while "opening its heart" to that data as if it were Whitman's democratic throngs. Missing is the even more delicate balance of some of the earlier work, before Bewersdorf's road-to-Damascus moment of deleting his website and (ostensibly) going offline, between understandable revulsion at phenomena such as dozens of stock photos of people praying and an attempt to write sincere praise in a tone that mimics both religious awe and corporate sales motivation.

"Who is using the Internet?"

Who is using the Internet?
In my eyes, the sun is.
Dragon dorks.
Shark dorks.
Los Angeles Latinas.
Mystical comedians.
Cable guys.
Credit card registrants.
Grown men in developing countries.
Dream weavers.
Translators.
Native peoples.
Inverse porn stars.
Someone typing randomly.
The descendants of Adam and Eve.
Adam Sandler, and his descendants.
Cranky flowershop owners.
Anyone who's seen the sun.
The employed.
The powerfully obsessed.
The politically ejaculating.
Those committing heinous crimes,
As well as the dying,
Their caregivers,
Your parents
And your lover.
Paleface, my heart goes out to you.

corrections to transcription can be added on Rap Genius

A critic, let's call him Eliot, questioned my criticism of Kevin Bewersdorf's "leaving the web as art," which seems to have become a canonical new media gesture.
The gesture itself had several components.
The artist had a body of work, just a couple of years in duration after he left school, consisting of Church of the Subgenius-like ironic scriptural writings (but on the whole, not as good) where the aims of religion were combined with corporate branding happy talk. This was augmented by art and video.
He was invited to participate in a performance event in connection with the New Museum's Younger Than Jesus show. From the stage, he announced that he was going to remove all his work from the web over a three year period. Gradually the website diminished, until all that remained was a tiny image of a flickering flame.
During this time period he was meditating, and also continued to be involved anonymously with the Spirit Surfers group blog.
This year he "re-emerged" as a sincere follower of the Tao, and now writes Taoist poetry about the internet, a reading of which Rhizome.org recently organized.

My criticism has several components:
There was confusion as to whether the artist's interest in "the spirit," pre-quitting, was ironic or sincere.
There is confusion about whether he really left -- is the art work about leaving the web or just erasing your "brand"?
Does it matter if the brand isn't sincere to begin with?
In response to canonizing quitting, I tossed off on twitter the statement that "the real heroes are the people who kept working while the seeker was off wandering in the wilderness."

Eliot pounced!
He asked if going offline couldn't also be working. And he said that comparing working and non-working was an apples/oranges scenario that he wasn't interested in.
This changed the frame of the discussion from "good vs bad gesture" to the virtues of work vs non-work.
If Eliot believes that Bewerdorf's gesture is good, he is making an evaluation, in the face of an argument to the contrary. But he doesn't have to debate it, he can ascend to the lofty plane of not wishing to weigh a Judeo-Christian or Taylorist notion of work against a Zen-like or Dadaist gesture of denial. That's just not instructive, you understand.

Update: cosmicsands has transcribed the text of Bewersdorf's Issue Project Room reading on Rap Genius, a site for crowdsourcing lyrics, poetry, etc. Based on this, the phrase "Taoist poetry about the internet" above is a bit confining. There is Eastern influence but also a tone of Walt Whitman-esque celebration, in poems such as "Who is using the internet?" Missing is some of the delicate balance of some of the earlier work, between understandable revulsion at phenomena such as dozens of stock photos of people praying and an attempt to write sincere praise in a tone that mimics both religious awe and corporate sales motivation.