tom moody

Regarding that Ryder Ripps art piece where he hired Craiglist sensual masseuses to make drawings on paper in a NY hotel that was underpaying him to be an artist-in-residence. It's certainly not any more "offensive" than the Andrew Norman Wilson piece where he collaborated remotely with a mechanical turk-style worker in Bangalore to make an artwork. Both involve A-list white dude artists exposing civilians-just-trying-to-get-by to the glories of conceptual art. The Ripps work had more of a sleazy sexual dimension, but then, so do hotels.
Wilson got away with it -- as far as I know, his reputation is untouched. Ripps didn't, at least with his erstwhile promoters Art F City and Rhizome. Both repudiated him and hoisted him onto the pillory of politically correct sanctimony. The righteousness of these dismissals was off the charts. Real Cotton Mather stuff, except Mather didn't use mealy-mouthed phrases like "ethically unsound." This is an artist, not a politician, he's not held to the same standards of public trust and you don't talk about his work in the same disgraced tones you would if a Congressman sent dick pics to a girlfriend.
It's especially ripe that the two organizations in question "made" Ripps with fawning coverage, in happier times. Rhizome flattered him by offering his Facebook downloads as an "art" giveaway to subscribers and nominated him for a "Prix Net Art", while AFC's Paddy Johnson praised his honesty and candor in an adoring profile, among other plugs.
Message to artists: "One work of art that slightly embarrasses us and you're a dead person."

Art F City surveys the wreckage of the former art blogosphere to see who's working, who quit, and who became a magazine.

The lists are useful. Similar surveys should now be done for the music blogosphere, the film blogosphere, the tech blogosphere, and the science fiction blogosphere.

The RSS list I'm always going on about (my personal feed list, not the list of readers) includes very little in the way of "art" stuff. It's more a collection of trustworthy sources for politics, finance, and science -- an alternative to something less trustworthy such as the New York Times front page.

In an earlier post, Art F City lamented the decline of self-published voices to (i) clickbait, pseudo-news sources heavily regurgitating press releases and (ii) various chat and messaging services.
Less a matter of decline, perhaps, than getting lost in the noise and having reader attention diverted elsewhere. My take on it:

In the '00s we had the "blogosphere" and there was a fair amount of mutual support among early adopters who were attempting something different than the "mainstream media." That support has fractured as authors have either joined social media platforms, with their readymade communities of friends and followers, or returned to the old path of building a brand by writing for better-promoted media outlets. I think of the blogger Digby, who is now writing regularly for Salon as "Heather Digby Parton."

Digby still has her own blog but obviously doesn't feel it's "enough." You could say this is a matter of economics but to me the point of blogosphere was (i) labors of love and/or (ii) people who were sick of the propaganda. It wasn't about making a living. It costs almost nothing to publish on the internet.

Continuing to update this RSS Reader list.

RSS is a relic of the sort-of-free, mostly-unregimented Web, which existed prior to the period when critic Ed Halter began shifting his attention to social media corrals, bingeing on serial TV, and playing with his toybox of apps (he used the first person plural in making this confession).

RSS allows you to stay informed via a host of unconventional sources without having Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin looking over your shoulder, sucking off your energy. It would be the province of old net hippies except it also has its uses for business types who trade in up-to-date information. RSS gives you full-text posts, which is superior to, say, twitter's little snippets, and RSS feeds don't come larded with the "suggestions" and sponsored posts that clog the chutes of those social media corrals.

An example of the business side of RSS is what happened to Bloglines, my reader of choice from the mid-'00s. Something called Merchant Circle acquired it, and then Merchant Circle "partnered" with something called Netvibes. Users had their emailed logins transferred to Netvibes, and for a time the Netvibes "dashboard intelligence" software continued to include our lists of Bloglines feed URLs. Last week those stopped working, but it was possible to manually import those feed URLs (I had the same list on Feedly) and continue as a Netvibes "free" user. For now.

A French company, Dassault Systèmes, in turn owns Netvibes. According to the Netvibes CEO, his company "combine[s] with Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform [to] provide customers with real-time information critical to their innovation process. The time between consumer reaction and business action is the key to providing the best experience possible."