Am in a show in Poland organized by Marcin Ramocki called "Made in Internet" (as part of ARTBOOM, an annual urban and public space festival in Krakow).
The artist list (links are to artist pages in Polish w/ embedded YouTubes):
0100101110101101.ORG
Banovich, Tamas
Bell-Smith, Michael
Cortright, Petra
Davis, Paul B.
Endlicher, Ursula
Eteam (Lamprecht Franziska and Moderegger Hajoe)
Holmberg, Joel
JODI
Lonergan Guthrie
Lucas, Kristin
McKay, Joe
Moody, Tom
MTAA
Murphy, Luke
Olson, Marisa
Slocum, Paul
Stead, Jessie
Van Den Dorpel, Harm
Yeh, Cj
Ramocki, Marcin
My contribution is an enlarged version of the above GIF - retitled "Rotating Smile with Frame Removed" - that loops continuously for a minute. ("Militant, pointless redundancy..." Omigod magazine)
"Made In Internet" is described as follows:
...a showcase of short video forms created by web artists. This selection reflects the trends and concepts of contemporary new media in the last 5 years, which revolve around blogs, streaming video and social media: the late, consumer-oriented Web 2.0. In this new artistic universe appropriation is taken for granted, the attention span is short and the reward often takes the form of a conceptual charade. The works in the show stem from the web: they either have been created from found internet material or produced specifically for that platform.
Ramocki is giving a talk, "Assumed Mobility: Thoughts on Experiencing Time Online," and the PDF outline is here.
A few days ago Google ran a full-bleed image of a Jeff Koons installation shot as one if its joky seasonal page styles. Or so it seemed--more likely it was to plug its new customizable home page but a few seconds' googling to confirm this is time too precious to waste. At any rate, immediate catcalls, hoo-hawing, and wtfs from the socialmediasphere possibly caused the image's rather sudden disappearance. Again, pure speculation and a more commercially responsible blogger would check. Mentioned it here but had not thought to save the image, assuming it would be up for the rest of the day rather than a few hours. Hat tip to John Transue for finding the above and posting it to dump.fm.
As noted in the earlier post, Koons is looking more and more like blown-glass artist Dale Chihuly these days. Chihuly is schlock thinking it's art as opposed to Koons' art thinking about schlock but what happens when you can barely tell the difference? Made this mock-up to show the comparison, and offer another possible search page "theme":
For the record, Koons did interesting work up to about the first flower puppy, a sculpture that was made in Germany in a year he was not included in Documenta as a kind of petulant, salon-des-how-dare-you-refuse-me gesture. His peak was probably the "banalities" show of the late '80s, when he hired italian woodcarver/polychromers to make large-scale sculptures of pure commercial kitsch (Michael Jackson with chimp, Pink Panther with babe, Popples-brand teddy bear with bird, etc). Since then he has been cranking out metallic balloon-animal sculptures as "plop art" (to be plopped into public plazas--get it?), which are passably compelling, as well as pseudo-Rosenquist collage paintings that are impossible to look at, and not in a good way.
Update: Have been told Google has Chihuly search page templates so I didn't have to make a crapp(ier) one. OK, duly noted.
Update 2: Jeez, did not say Google had "permanently taken down" the Koons - none of the seasonal crap lasts more than a day but it's usually up more than a few hours. Must everything be spelled out in a blog post? And why am I on twitter, please? (OK, many of the @s are great and informative - still feeling commenterphobic I guess. Should be more tolerant of argumentative ignorati.)
Update 3: Need to "work through" this blogger tantrum. The post above says: (i) the Koons page was taken down by Google more quickly than its usual Thanksgiving turkey-style joke page; (ii) many socialmediasphere commenters thought the page was crap; and (iii) i did no research to find out if the two were connected but assumed they were for purposes of getting in some gratuitous digs at all parties. Honestly, I don't really care about Google or its attempts to build buzz for its new roll-out. Am interested, however, in how the art world and tech world rub against each other (usually with bad results). Although I don't have comments turned on, people sought me out through other soc-med channels (dump.fm and twitter) to tell me that the Chihuly and the Koons pages were readily available if you want a crap search page (OK, they didn't say the last part.) One of the commenters had previously sung the praises to me, in Paddy Johnson's blog comments, of Google's "similar image" function, which I think is dorky. It's hard to know if everyone in the world is working for Sergey Brin (a la pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or if they just love him so darn much.
GIF pair by Illalli
From Naked Capitalism:
But this is a vastly bigger leak, and most important, the Gulf is not Alaska. The visibility is vastly higher, more people are affected, as are more governors, senators, and representatives. And Obama appears to be laying the groundwork to demand that BP pay not just cleanup costs, but the full cost of the damage wrought. From an economic standpoint, this is sound: the problem with “externalities” or costs of a product that are foisted on innocent bystanders is that the people who suffer seldom can recover their losses. So the parties to the product sale get an artificial subsidy (the product is provided for a cost lower than its true, fully loaded cost to society) which they somehow divide up between them.
[...]
I wouldn’t be optimistic; Team Obama has yet to rough up anyone. But this particular set of circumstances – a monstrous disaster that is not going to be resolved anytime soon and a rich, unpopular, and relatively isolated target – will show whether Obama’s survival instincts will overcome his deep seated deference to corporate chieftans.
Recently artist Marina Abramović did a performance piece at the Museum of Modern Art where museumgoers lined up to sit in a chair and stare at her for an undetermined length of time (as long as they wanted or, from what friends say who followed it closely, until they upstaged the artist with aberrant behavior and were hustled away by museum guards).
A writer for the Antiwar.com blog has a slightly different take on Marina Abramović than that of the typical jaded art person in New York. While the latter might see her as the owner of two handsome dwellings feted in the New York Times home-and-garden section, thrower of fab Soho parties and orchestrator of new media three-ring entertainments, the former takes at face value that she is a shamanic martyr figure, and roots the pain-and-endurance aspect of her work in her earlier life experience as a Serb and refugee from Communism:
The artist’s influences are chiefly the air of Yugoslav nationalism in the postwar years — both parents were popular WWII figures; her great uncle was the patriarch of the Serbian Church — and the stark and dreary oppression of Tito’s communist regime. Abramović came of age under this anti-individualist orthodoxy; might this lead one to experiment further with self-denial, self-imposed stress positions — a popular tool in the torturer’s repertoire — and self-inflicted pain?
This rhetorical question presented in the interests of fairness and balance.
