general

Paddy Johnson is caught in an impossible predicament trying to both praise and excoriate the Frieze Art Fair.
What is the purpose of this fair? It's wa-a-ay off the beaten path, on Randall's Island (not to be confused with North Brother Island, final resting place of Typhoid Mary).
Presumably it's so some London galleries can get within sucking distance of New York art collectors but it's "intellectual" because Frieze, the magazine, frequently cribs from the Frankfurt School.
And surprise, it's anti-union, anti-protestor, and its director thinks artists get their ideas of life from Bravo (the TV channel).
The Friezesters pack enough influence to convene a panel of 3/4 of NYC's top museum directors, who mainly want to talk about their pricy buildings and are stunned speechless when some rabble get in and ask about the unions and so forth. They probably thought the 40 dollar ticket and ferry ride would be sufficient screening.
Fairs as a whole suck, the art always looks bad, and trust me, you don't really want to hobnob with dealers whose eyes are constantly scanning around the room for someone more important to schmooze.
Paddy's beat is galleries so she's more professionally obligated to cover this nonsense than say, moi. For me it's good enough to be in NY where there are year-round galleries and I don't have to take a boat to a tent to see art.

Bruce Sterling and the "art & technology" websites have gone gaga over James Bridle's theory of a new aesthetic called -- ready? -- "The New Aesthetic." I watched an excruciating video (hat tip Paddy) where the fast-talkin' Bridle puts it all together for us and made some notes:

I've been blogging this kind of stuff for over 10 years - but I promise I will never force anyone to watch all of it in a 50 minute lecture.

Bridle's thesis: pixelation, polygon skins, facile XYZ data visualizations (such as the techno-sculpture in a public square that supposedly tracks movements of a Pacific buoy in real time) is a "new aesthetic."

I've taken stabs at this kind of "digital by-product" theorizing over the years (see Wireframe Aesthetics) but have tried to avoid spinning a grand narrative about it.

Bridle is essentially an advertising pitch-man here, employing persuasive rhetoric that never stops to question its own fervor.

He "aggregates" 120 images from art, ads, satellite imagery and constructs a bold new vision narrative around them.

He rarely distinguishes between a "way of seeing" (his favorite phrase - hello, John Berger) and a style choice by highly savvy design and advertising folk (or slick artists who are 90% designers).

Bridle equates pervasive pixel imagery with nostalgia for games but also "insistent futurism." How is it the latter?

He says little about pixelation/glitch as decay, breakdown, failure. This stuff has real world consequences, it's not just a look.

"Pixel art" as a pop or folk genre has been around for years (on sites like Deviantart.com).

Bridle also seems to have just discovered CAD architecture.

Billboard of Facebook "like" symbol "makes us question what happens when we like or poke someone" - no, it doesn't.

"Making The Cloud visible" and beautiful through data center building design - this is just a pitch.

Gerhard Richter has been painting color sample charts since the '70s, at least. Why bring him into this?

Google map pixelation - Olia Lialina covered this. (I sound like Bridle in that post but I was being bitterly ironic.)

Face recognition is "adding an extra layer of vision." OK, but so much of it doesn't work yet. Such statements fellate tech industries prematurely rolling out products.

Recognition programs aren't failed, racist: they're a "different way of seeing" - cool!

"Computers are increasingly evolving on their own." No, they're not.

"Vagaries of the GPS system" is a nice way of saying iPhone tracking is flawed.

Using a pic that wasn't "meant" to be part of a before-and-after satellite view isn't new to the digital era. Such techniques are a well-known tool of astronomy. See Precovery.

The "Hawkeye" in sports (crowd watches computer replay) is no different from a crowd watching an arena rock band on a giant vid screen instead of the tiny figures onstage, a phenom has been around since the '70s. This is "new"? "Digital"?

Evan Roth finger-paintings of touchscreen gestures recycles the "mouse gesture as AbEx art" trope - rather old and overdone at this point.

Bridle keeps talking about "bleed-throughs" in "ways of seeing." We know there are bleed-throughs, what we need is understanding of them. Mass data dumps like this lecture don't help.

Conclusion: "We want this [world of ghosts and fake people]"

"Willingness, friendliness to engage with technology" - Ted Kaczynski squirms in his prison cell.

An art & technology project (?) called a Descriptive Camera uses Amazon Mechanical Turk to generate, instead of photos, small slips of paper with descriptions of the object or scene viewed through the lens. The webpage summary got me thinking of the ethics of this type of endeavor, after I stopped crying over the people in trailers and hovels putting honest effort, for micro-pittances, into this sophisticated student project. The camera may not be art but it provoked an art-like emotional reaction and that reaction was Weltschmerz.

Usually with Wikipedia articles I go straight to the "Criticism" section; the Mechanical Turk article's is suprisingly small. The article footnotes led to these resources, however (all from 2010):

How Mechanical Turk is Broken. From an economics standpoint, "the site will continue to function primarily as an object lesson in the ways that poorly constructed markets fail."

Work and the Internet. Some considerations of whether Turk skirts minimum wage laws. (I'd say yes.)

Mechanical Turk: Now With 40.92% Spam. This one is truly perverse: it used Turk workers to classify Turk projects as spam or not.

No conclusions yet; this post is a listicle of other thoughts on the subject. Probably we should be thinking about this. Just because a tech service doesn't work doesn't mean it won't eventually become the new labor pool model for all jobs.

(hat tip Alessandra)

Joshua Kopstein has a good article in The Verge about the problem of making a buck off of art meant to be consumed via the internet. He considers the success or failure of the micropayments model, through the snake-eating-tail conundrum of 0-Day Art (dedicated to keeping art online) being included in an Art Micro Patronage show (which limits access to work by non-patrons, after a show has ended).

He mentions Lauren Cornell's GIF-selling gaffe at the Armory (as we are now going to describe it, for want of a real explanation). Cornell continues to insist the artist made her take the GIF offline so the collector could have it locally (which isn't how the artist has described her methodology) and even got an awkward disclaimer attached to the end of Kopstein's article!

From Paddy Johnson's "dude-centric net art" thread:

sstage
forced political correctness kills creativity.

sally
I'm on a creative roll here, let's see... I want to curate a show of internet art...who shall I put in it? Don't stifle me now! I want to come up with the best possible idea for a show! What? Women? Augh! ...creativity....stifled....

sstage
I don't really know how to express myself the best way here... I've typed and deleted a few paragraphs that used analogies because I saw that each one could be easily misconstrued.
But yes - an outside demand of quotas on something that should be put together with ONLY the art produced in mind (and please note that the art is genderless, ageless, and raceless) and not things like "not enough women ratio in this microcosm" makes the creativity and passion of the organizers do a nose dive.
some of my favourite net art is created by women... but NOT because they are women and NOT because someone says I should like it because my personal tastes should be ratioed in a gender balanced way.

sally
The internet fosters a lot of unreflective self-expression, and that's truly a wonderful thing, but having to think about how your show might come across to other people besides yourself, in a context outside your immediate circles, is not exactly a big set back for most curators - for a lot of people it's actually kind of the whole entire point of curating. Being accountable for what you put out into the public sphere is challenging, and it should be.

Documentary filmmaker John Grierson said "Art is not a mirror -- it is a hammer." This a shorter, even more radical assertion than the well-known Brecht quote "Art is not a mirror to hold up to society but a hammer with which to shape it." Radical because the "mirror" now refers to any mimetic function and the hammer now smashes without being justified by any social "shaping."

The ultimate logical, scientific extension of thinking "about how your show might come across to other people besides yourself" is focus-grouping. We know how well that works from Hollywood movies: you get happy endings and endless stories about self-actualization in the face of adversity.

A viewpoint free of quotas, averaging, and taking the audience's temperature is not necessarily "unreflective self-expression." Art is one place where you can say "deal with it." If a critic can only talk about your quotas, you've either failed to communicate or your critic is attempting to deflect attention away from the point you are making.