Over the weekend I was approached by my friend Mike Darnell, Jerusalem-based artist and entrepreneur [http://www.digitalartprintgallery.com/] to participate in an interview by Shani Rosenfelder for Mutual Art [http://www.mutualart.com/]. The “art blogosphere” is the general subject of the interview, and the questions broach a range of big issues pertaining to art, web and media. Below are my answers, followed by notes. - PJM
1. What does the art blogosphere have to offer that the mainstream media does not?
As far as I know, I was one of the first art writers to make the switch from print to digital format. In the late 90s I was writing reviews and critique for Nashville weekly In Review, and previews for a the Tennessean’s weekly calendar The Rage. At the time I was on a trajectory to become a contributor in the city’s “mainstream media.” I also hosted a radio show with artsies of note that essentially functioned as a scene survey. I migrated to Blogger in 2001 [still have the hoodie they gave premium subscribers when Google purchased Blogger]. Others, like the estimable Joseph Nechvatal were siting the discourse on an arguably more advanced professional stage through A-list affiliations. My migration was more attuned to art production issues and concerns about sustainable reach. I think that early bloggers like Joseph were arriving at the conclusion that the web medium was viable on the basis of comfortability with the technology, which had a certain premium value in the emerging digital output/tech-art genre for the market and more attentive institutions. It’s an interesting history that is only now being focused on in academic scholarship, which is putting its own branding on it.
Although now the two formats are comparable with regards media capability, this is only due to the print media acknowledging that they were being outperformed by web-based vehicles. By this I mean primarily the inclusion of embedded images, video and audio with the text. The major newspapers [and also other media, including TV news organizations, radio programs, magazines etc.] have hurried over the past few years to adapt technical strategies in an effort to improve appeal and garner market share/ad dollars.
Art blogging has become incredibly diverse in the meantime. The art blog is ubiquitous. Artists maintain them, as do museums, galleries, arts-related businesses of all kinds. In fact calling a blog an “art blog” really is only a function of self-determination, which is in some ways problematic. It really is impossible to discuss the “art blog” today or “mainstream media” without narrowing those terms to something meaningful. Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes is functional as a magazine covering a selected set of issues relevant across a spectrum of market and artist concerns. Art Forum’s Diary is an extension of the magazine’s interactive presence, in one way a document of AF’s potent access to the world’s elite art market and social life. Jerry Saltz and John Yau recently conducted a critic war of personalities and words primarily in blogs and social media sites. The NY Times and LA Times use blogs to post material that can’t make it into the print vehicle, probably due to space allotments. I could go on.
One of the unique aspects of this mash-up is the so far mediocre results attained by the existing media to re-install a star system online. This has not been successful. There is as a result a pertaining animus among “stars” like Charlie Finch [artnet] and the art writers in the “blogosphere” they perceive as competition. The dimensional aspects of the digital medium as it connects to “reality” are playing hell with established hierarchies and value schemes.
Finally, the near-complete consolidation of public discourse in the corporate media complex is still not on sure footing in the web environments. To put it succinctly artificial persons despise art and its natural qualities and using a potent set of tactics to destroy, re-define and re-contextualize free art into >> entertainment content creativity objects << that anyone can do, recognize or buy, especially in consumer portable packages. Or at the top end with millions or billions of dollars. The web is at the moment in large measure located in a state of reactivity, in relation to the appetites of "mainstream media," trying desperately to survive the onslaught.
2. Who are your favorite art bloggers and why? Can you provide examples of any traditional art writers, critics who have shifted – partially or fully - to the blogosphere?
I listed a few above. I recently have undertaken a scan of art blogs, which I linked on my Art for Humans Facebook site. I think perhaps more useful questions for me would are, “What is an artist, and what is art?” Depending on your answer to these questions, you as a wired end user are going to be able to find art blogs of interest. For me those questions are points of origination in dimensional analysis.
If you’re interested in my “favorites” or as Facebook now frames it, my “Likes,” I keep a public listing on Google Reader and Delicious [and Zotero]. I made a decision last year to not just “share” those personal web-maps, as a result of exploring Digital Humanities with Claremont Graduate University doctoral candidate Richard Ross. I felt that my own thesis projects using dimensional analysis required publishing the progressions I was threading into a formed argument and series of exhibits, in the interests of accessibility and transparency. I am still pretty old school that way, and at least at heart attain to Open Source.
…Which re-animates the issue raised in question one. Most blogs are not published on a proprietary basis; in the beginning, none were, which is why they became so popular. Unfortunately, corporate capitalism operates in the same consumer model of “addiction” or client “sustainability” as a drug pusher’s. One major problem - for the short-term profit-centric media - involves confronting “competition” with free “content” on an equal value basis. I find it just as pertinent to review what, for instance, the powerhouse web design agency VIVIKI is proposing to do to serve the interests of its impressive roster of clients, as I would the impressions a blogger communicates in response to a painting in a small gallery show in a regional US city of 200,000 souls. To sum up, my interests are research-based and evolving.
To answer the question, I would recommend the aforementioned Tyler Green’s blog roll as a worthy listing of notable art blogs. Or the reader can Google “best art blogs” and find a huge database from which to originate a scan of the field. I like the example of the Yau/Saltz dust-up above for its revelatory aspects, uncovering how the perception of art writer persona is being affected - and projected in new media.
3. What effect does the blogosphere have on the art world / market and vice versa?
At the moment there are some really amazing instances of the “blogosphere” pushing stronger accountability in the art world. The recent appointment of Jeffrey Deitch to MoCA is such a case. Another involves the hidden-market structure driving art commodities acquisition processes on a global platform [see Robins v. Zwirner]. To gauge the status quo response to (what establishment writers like Charlie Finch portray as superficial interloping by outsider bloggers) see “The Cowards of the Blogosphere” [http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/marlene-dumas-blacklist4-23-10.asp]. Another worthwhile instance of cause/effect to study is the discourse documented and responded to throughout the wired art scene, precipitated by an Intelligence Squared panel/summit held in the aftermath of the financial sector meltdown of 2007-8>. [”The Art Market Is Less Ethical than the Stock Market”]. I would also point to two other panels, conducted online [former NEA chairman Bill Ivey’s push for “Expressive Life” (Arts Journal) and the forum on the NEA and Federal arts policy hosted by WESTAF, on which I served as a panelist]. The blog or web-expanded policy discussion is decisively undermining status quo processes designed to insulate special [corporate/institutional/governmental] interests from interventions by those affected directly as a result of policy mandates. Unfortunately, the 1% elites and their policy instruments tend to respond not by expanding openness in debate, much less by inviting necessary regulation or legitimate inclusion in determining future development. Transparency and free discourse tend to radicalize the monopolizers of power, who have specific usages for “art” in social management.
4. Can you point to any recent trends, developments or anything other that is new and interesting in the art blogosphere?
The most obvious trend, and potentially most dynamic, is through Web 2.0 to “Cloud” computing praxis. Content Management Systems [CMS] are the intermediary step. Central to this sequence are the issues of privacy and individual value in the collective. For art, which is at root a studio-based craft, these considerations are of great import to the future valuation and definition of art as an essential element in the social fabric.
With regards to 3000 years of art management in dualistic systems, the struggle for primacy, between the epistemological and technical is in play to an unprecedented extent, due to the evolution of 4D perception. In the short term there are domains in flux. The critique is being displaced by the comment, on the fly. The onus is on the end user to insist on substance and art, as opposed to superficiality and artificial art. Clearly any free-minded citizen will be hard-put to maintain a real-world, craft-pertaining, traditional definition of art and artist in the existing environment, which is designed by very clever and accomplished (well-financed) professionals, to reformat our culture to grease the machine of corporate profit and the legitimize the “culture” enjoyed by its prime beneficiaries. An artist today is forced to choose whether to aspire to be a corporate or Superclass art start, or to cleave to a meaningful and difficult procedure towards personal excellence that has almost nothing to do with what one is pushed to believe constitutes legitimate excellence. The self-questions have not changed at all. Is this art work great? Could it be great? What is the next thing I must make or do as an artist to improve my skill, to become more attenuated to “inspiration” as Agnes Martin defines it? Who is this art for? Will it last long enough for he/she/them to experience it viscerally? Am I representing reality? What is my vision, and am I good enough to translate it to my community through art? And so on. One of the usages of art writing, now art blogs, is to support and encourage this set of values, to sustain the meaningful in art. Whether an art blog does so should be a relevant question to the reader/user.
©2010 Paul McLean, one-time permission to publish on Mutual Art granted, other usages reserved.
Notes:
1. What does the art blogosphere have to offer that the mainstream media does not?
PJM: First, “mainstream media” isn’t a useful phrase in reference to art writing. A discussion of corporate media or media monopoly is more realistic. It’s also not helpful in my estimation to reduce the state of art writing to a straw man meme of technological underdog versus “traditional” format for civil discourse. Ultimately both should be recognized as valuable for a healthy free speech arena focused on art, artists, the art market, and what is now coming to known as the arts ecology [an institutional management terminology]. Also, as someone who for many years now has been scanning art iterations throughout the web via dimensional analysis, I would argue that the digital framework is so complex and rich that the categories of production hardly apply. Art blogging after all is now not only a process of writing/posting, it is a process of sampling, linking, re-sampling and illuminating, through video, sound, photographs, compressed representations of actual artwork or installations. The job description of an “art writer” or “critic” (both problematic titles in the blogosphere) is escalating daily. Reviews are not all that useful if you’re reading a blogpost written about an exhibit that’s occurring tonight halfway round the world, for instance, and a YouTube video will never replace the actual opening, or social event associated with art exhibition. I wrote about these and other associated issues in the series Cursor, and demonstrated the axioms involved in projects like Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown. Without local press and journalism, public presentation of art is going to lose to movies and concerts and monster truck rallies and baseball games and other corporate or corporate-sponsored “entertainments.”
Art talk is really a tiny subsection of communication in media. Statistically, its probably barely significant, or not significant. Unfortunately, art is immensely valuable to the health of a civilization, and the de-valuation of art and art talk, its comprehensive marginalization, is (I have argued) consequential. When a society fails to prioritize art over, for instance, money (or to put it morally, greed) or achievement of power through force - well, we can look around us right now to view the consequences.
Art writing in print media is declining precipitously and has been since the emergence of major news organizations like Gannett, which has resulted in a dismantling of local-focus journalism in general, and art reporting specifically. It’s vital to understand this dynamic as a socio-economic phenomenon. On the economic side, the prime driver is corporate message management. Corporate marketeers love to appropriate [without compensation] the innovations of fine artists. On the other hand, where possible corporations will actively suppress art or artist activities or arts institutions that contradict corporate branding, image fabrication or consumer “shaping.” I am thinking of car commercials and tactical campaigns to displace art with fashion or almost any product to which “creativity” can be attached, even if it’s an obvious stretch. Another cause is the relentless push for cultural market share by multinational consumer portable “art” corporations like SONY, which have a massive interest in redefining “art” to apply prestige value to its properties, like a Lady Gaga or Shrek.
At the moment, art blogging represents art in its oral tradition form continuing on a subsistence basis. Essentially, art writing is migrating to the web to survive. The metaphor is the “artist community” migrating from one poor neighborhood to the next, improving each one in the sequence, only to be driven out by developers who follow. To answer the question directly, the art blog as a form derives initially from the open source web model - with the promise of free global communication. To answer the question with a question: what is free speech, and what do free speech and art have to do with each other?
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