net art shows and prom ballots

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Was intrigued by these Will Neibergall comments to yesterday's Paddy Johnson post about "dude-centric" net art shows. Neibergall hails from Tempe AZ, where a straight male high school student, River Flanary, recently made news by attempting to run for prom queen on a write-in ballot. Flanary said he did it "to give courage" to LGBT students daunted by the ballot, which required students to write in names of girls for queen and names of boys for king. Flanary got the most votes but was disqualified by the school. Neibergall argues along somewhat similar lines that male/female quotas in art reinforce a "heteronormative man/woman structure."

Will Neibergall:
Obviously you don't take the art very seriously if you find yourself standing in the middle of a show making calculations as to the gender makeup of the participants...

Also, I sincerely hope you realize that you are "queerizing" and making some repugnant assumptions about gender lines simply by demanding an expanded female presence in netart. You are saying "People feel, live and act differently if they have vaginas so they are just as important to new media art as men," but this is assuming that A) recognizing that "vagina barrier" is something we have to tackle before we can enjoy new media art for being what it is, and B) transsexual/transgendered/gender neutral people are too "exotic"/queer to demand as readily as women, and the "best we can do" is to get the relatively heteronormative man/woman structure in art. The thing is, we can't demand ANY person to diversify a field with their presence (especially something as spontaneous and voluntary as new media art) so what about we go back to the drawing board and just decide GOOD ART IS GOOD ART NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF CLOTHES SOMEONE LIKES TO WEAR AND WHAT THEY HAVE UNDER THEM

reeraw:
i'm sry, but you lost me at "vagina barrier".

Will Neibergall:
i'm sry, but u lost me at being condescending for no reason

derp:
sowwy, u lost me at 'im 15'

Will Neibergall:
lol.

Putting Art Back Online so the Public Can Have It Globally, Year Two

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The NY Observer's GalleristNY blog covered in more detail the lecture by 0-Day Art (Jeremiah Johnson and Don Miller) at Eyebeam, which I mentioned last week. Readers may remember the impetus for 0-Day Art was Rhizome.org Director Lauren Cornell's risible plan last year to sell an animated GIF by "taking it offline so the collector can have it locally." Rhizome's position* seems to be that the poor turn of phrase originated with artist Sara Ludy but of course Ludy said nothing of the kind. "0-Day" refers to the amount of time data should be kept offline for the sake of commerce.

Here's the NY Observer:

“Is it okay to take digital art ‘offline’ to give it value,” asked Mr. Johnson rhetorically. “No. It’s not okay. That’s a ridiculous way to monetize net art.”

Mr. Johnson and Mr. Miller were referring to a video that first piqued their interest in exploring the valuation of net-based work. They saw the video** “How Do You Sell an Animated GIF,” which showed Rhizome executive director Lauren Cornell talking about selling the quirky computer animations that could be taken “offline” and enjoyed “locally” by collectors. While the conversation about limiting access to digital artwork or imposing restrictions on their display and transfer was not new, it forced people to have an opinion about the issue one way or another, including Mr. Johnson and Mr. Miller.

“We’re resistant to attempts to create value or applying a paradigm that exists for physical objects,” said Mr. Johnson who was seated next to Mr. Miller behind a table and partially hidden by an open laptop. Behind them was a large screen which displayed bright green vintage-like computer graphics. “In treating digital works as a physical work, you’re neutering the power of those works.”

Also, this amusing exchange:

[0-Day Art] also passed around a flash drive and encouraged anyone with a computer to download all of the work that 0-Day has ever released.

“This might seem disrespectful,” said Mr. Johnson. “We have ultimate respect for the artists’ intentions.”

“I can’t reconcile your saying you’re trying to be respectful,” said a young man in the audience later, “when what you’re doing is not respectful.”

“If you’re anyone and you’re putting anything online,” said Mr. Johnson in response, “and you expect to control it, you’re delusional. I don’t see how holding a mirror up to someone’s delusions is disrespectful.”

*from what I'm hearing secondhand -- I haven't asked Rhizome for a statement -- maybe someone else wants to take the career risk
**actually not a video but a blog post by Hyperallergic

Update: A Verge article by Joshua Kopstein, also covering 0-Day Art, now has this disclaimer at the end:

Lauren Cornell reached out to us saying that Sara Ludy's work was taken offline at the request of the artist, and that it does not reflect Rhizome policy. Cornell further pointed out that it is Rhizome's goal to preserve digital work, as the group later outlined in a paper entitled Keeping It Online.

There's advocacy for you: at the first sign of controversy Rhizome blames the artist for requesting a business model that is now said to go against the organization's own policy (oddly, that wasn't mentioned at the time of the Hyperallergic interview).

e-book insanity

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Charles Stross on what he thinks Amazon's e-book strategy is. Essentially a combination of monopoly on the consumer side and monopsony on the publisher side, all having to do with using the Kindle as a bottleneck. Frak that, I will consume landfill paperbacks for my few remaining years on earth but the statistic is chilling that e-books have gone from 1% to 40% of the market in five years. So here's Stross' prognostication on what the big six publishers are going to have to accept:

DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)

It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM.

If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town.

I like Stross' characterization of Bezos:

...I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he's ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about "disruption" and "innovation" what they usually mean is "opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be." Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)