models of celebrity culture & spin are ingrained in the lowest levels of artistic plebedom. E.g., self promotion thru publicity photos
for every young cindy sherman there are 100 bad britney spears publicists
paraphrasing germaine greer: we should aspire to be the faceless artisans who built the cathedrals
Will Neibergall and Frederick Heydt weigh in on trolling.
Heydt approaches it from a gaming/heavy internet user perspective and from what I know, is dubious about claims being made for trolling (or other forms of net activity) as art. His video essay describes trolling as a type of prank or acting-out (giving vent to aggressive impulses) for the sheer hell of it, but then reflects on the good or bad of the use of these impulses for promotion or self-promotion.
Neibergall acknowledges that some people are claiming an "art" layer for Heydt-like trolling but asks:
what distinct factors separate art (namely performance art) on the internet from trolling, outside of sites like rhizome and occasionally dump.fm where users are accustomed to looking at even the most normal social interactions as works of art?
We've been making sarcastic posts lately about trolling-as-art but there's actually not much valid theory on the subject. Academic-in-training Brad Troemel wrote an obnoxious essay about 4Chan activities as Relational Aesthetics in the wild, ascribing high purpose to bulletin boards that most of the board users would laugh at. Stefan Krappitz has written a book Troll Culture, and in a recent interview he refers to trolling as "an art" that "has potential" as opposed to capital-A art (with manifestos, theories, university departments, etc).
The performance and conceptual arts of the 1960s serve as a model for much so-called internet art. One announces a Situationist-style "action" on the web before or after the fact and provides documentation, which is collected or compiled by an "art and technology" website. Most of the trolling described by Heydt is done without that layer of self-conscious purpose and links to historical tradition. It's probably useful to compare these japes to art without actually making top-down, ex post facto claims for them. Useful in the sense of fun, interrogational, intellectually adventurous, and so on, not useful in adding more activities to the Canon that never asked to be there in the first place.
While the online art world ponders Trolling and Friending as Bullshit Relational Aesthetics and How Can We Monetize Them, news arrives from the world of soulless capitalism that Gawker has a new economic model based on sponsored comment threads controlled by the advertiser.
The way it works, as explained non-judgmentally by Felix Salmon:
So Gawker’s new commenting system is based around threads, with the default view being the main, most interesting thread. It’s possible to click through to other threads, and every thread — indeed, every comment — has its own unique URL; what’s more, the person who starts a thread has quite a lot of control over which comments in that thread will get featured.
What that means is that if an advertiser buys a sponsored post — and sponsored posts have been part of Gawker’s menu of offerings for some time now — then once the new commenting system is in place, the advertiser will have a reasonably large degree of control of the conversation that most people see in that post.
Denton’s vision for Gawker Media’s editorial product is very much moving towards comments and away from posts, and he reckons that advertisers will follow him in that direction if he blazes the trail. Expect Gawker’s blog posts to get shorter, in [the] future, and sometimes just be a headline, at least in the first instance, so that the conversation can get going before a pretty post can be put together. And if Denton’s scheme goes according to plan, when you follow a link to a Gawker website, it will often — or maybe even usually — be a link to a comment, rather than to an original post. Eventually, it’s possible to envisage a world where the distinction between the two is erased completely.
The Exiled blog describes this succinctly as "monetizing corporate trolling." Content dwindles to a provocative teaser headline that makes you want to click through to discussion. Is the discussion real or fake? You don't know. A good moderator keeps the selling agenda on the down low, nixing skeptical comments, and at some point goads you over to the company's website, where more "discussion" continues and you are fed disinformation about a product or service.
Here's how the model might work in practice. I'm going to use Paddy Johnson as an example because she's playing with sponsored post fire; HOWEVER, what follows is a work of fiction and she wouldn't actually do this.
Let's say you have software that balances gender considerations as you write text. "Did you use 'he' too many times? Here are some alternative constructions." You pay Paddy to host a post titled "Enough With The Dude-centric Net Art Shows." Everyone in "new media" has an opinion on that (219 comments at last count) - you don't even need an article. Paddy turns the thread over to you to moderate. A sock puppet says "You know, what curators need is a software that makes their computers beep when men outnumber women in the press release they are writing." A commenter says, "what is this, an ad?" You nuke the comment. Another commenter plants a link to another "lively thread" on your page which keeps plugging the Gender-Eaze (tm) software. Brad Troemel describes corporate trolling as an "unscrupulous form of DJ art" on his tumblr and links to Paddy's thread. Troll gasoline ignites and orders start coming in for your product.
Continuing to flesh out this theory based on the postulates that (i) social media has converted all art into performance and (ii) all performance online is ultimately about money. The troll economy is the dark side of the Facebook Liking Economy (it's certainly no more silly).
1. "what can i do to get you to stop trolling me?" "well, if you put it that way, nothing" #who_is_the_troll_in_this_situation
2. perceived personal criticism or proclaimed personal criticism (to avoid the actual topic)
3. somehow trolls devolved from a hideous form of human ringworm to "someone who said something I don't like"
4. high & low trolling: demarcating among 1. libels 2. smears 3. opinions about a person 4.opinions about a person's output 5. mere lulz 6. art
maxlabor added: "7. psy-ops"
Brian Droitcour's essay on Rhizome.org last year titled "It's Only Humanist" merits a belated cry of agony. Having noted numerous references to classical Greece in YIBA sites such as "Greek New Media Shit" and "Grinding on the Greeks" (YIBA = Young Internet Based Artist) Droitcour came up with a theory about them:
To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines
because
The art of the Greeks has been used in the past as a touchstone for artists who measure their own vision against an anthropocentric one.
We're talking here about a website with a foxy dancer rubbing her ass against a winged marble statue with a title that references a smutty name for anal sex (the "Greek Grind" in case you missed it). Oh yeah, the old world, sigh, where did we cyborgs go wrong.
In the comments to the essay several artists schooled Droitcour on why all the Greek columns and statues: because they're staples of 3D rendering programs the artists use all the time. In fact, they don't care much at all about the ancient Greeks or classical ideals, which should have been obvious from the websites' flippant titles.
Whoops, bad theory, except the problem with having a blog on a museum-hosted website is this isn't a trial balloon. These artists now have a resume-stuffer in the form of a serious academic-style essay linking their ephemeral art to classical traditions and high purpose. Some will even get outsized egos and speak in comment threads about the "recognition" they have had for their work.* Misrecognition, more like.
*Actually only know of one instance of this but it was a jaw-dropper.
