Elsewhere on the Net:
1. Anonymous academic-style essay embraces soccer hooligans and the smashing of small shopkeeper storefronts; calls these activities "relational aesthetics." (no link) Update, 2013: The anonymous essay, published on Paddy Johnson's blog, was later claimed by Brad Troemel on his CV - that's not very anonymous. I was being arch in not wanting to describe his topic but essentially it was a bulletin board that at the time had very damaging trolling activities going on, such as harassing the family of an 11-year old who the trolls thought was too mouthy.
2. Paddy Johnson describes a panel discussion in a Manhattan art gallery on the subject of artists' use of the Internet. It wasn't very substantive. As I noted in her comments (off the top of my head), here were a few subjects not covered:
The differences between so called social media art of the present day and net art of the type collected by museums in the late ’90s; the embrace of Facebook by traditional artists, despite having one of the most restrictive image handling systems of any platform; dump.fm and the ways it has revolutionized the tumblr model; Gene McHugh’s post on “digital painting” and whether the paintfx.biz site is actually doing that right or whether the pixel/animated GIF school deserves equal consideration as a form of “painting”; the mediation of the Marina Abramovic show through the spread of internet photography and memes; the effect of net neutrality ending after the Google/Verizon collusion; etc etc.
One of the panelists, responding to this in the comments suggested the panel could have been "saved" if I had:
--walked up to the podium at the beginning of the evening, yanked the microphone out of the moderator's hand, and insisted that these were the right questions to ask, or
--arranged to have the moderator kidnapped, stolen his mailing list and mailed out these topics in advance of the event.
This would have been untoward, though, so I asked a handful of questions of a panelist who was working in the tumblr environment. Thought I was being modest but apparently was depriving the group of leadership, and I'm sorry. Next time. Update, 2013: Again, I'm being too arch for my own good. In this post I was obliquely responding to panelist Lance Wakeling's rude comment to me: "Tom is pigeonholing three different projects and concluding that they have nothing to say concerning 'immaterial dispersal.' It's great to suggest these topics after the fact. But where were you when we all needed you, Tom? You could have saved the panel!"
