Day: November 20, 2010

(cue dramatic music)

Net art bloviator Brad Troemel has written an essay about the BYOB NY show, on the new blog of ex-AFC intern Karen Archey.
Duncan Alexander wrote a good reply that I wanted to give props to. Unfortunately Karen won't approve my comment. Here is a screenshot showing that the darn thing has been in moderation since early this morning, and many comments have been approved since.
Here's what I wrote:

Good reply, Duncan Alexander, and thanks to Rafaël Rozendaal for being willing to put together a group of artists who wouldn't have selected to show with each [other] in a million years (as is clear from the omissions in Troemel's essay). I avoided "critiquing" the show on my blog because I was one of the "beamers" but this didn't deter Troemel, who feigns objectivity in this essay but neglects to mention that he participated in the show under his faux crowdsourcing alias "Joyce Jordan." I actually liked the Jordan piece pretty much (if it was the ceiling piece I think it was) but can confirm that Brad stuck to his clique during the brief time I saw him in the space. It was a fun evening, with much great work but Troemel once again manages to suck all the joy out of the proceedings with his tired Marxist complaints about the gallery system.

Update: Exactly six minutes after I posted this whine my comment magically popped up on the Troemel thread accompanied by a prophylactic statement from Karen Archey ("Brad didn't critique BYOB," etc.--ri-i-ight). Archey has elsewhere questioned my not having comments turned on--it's interesting to see how she's using them now that she's in the fray herself. Is it better to have comments disabled or to have them on but manipulate the timeline of who posted when? Or to have a comment sit in a moderation queue until someone complains that it's being deep-sixed? One comment that (fortunately) seems to have gone through rather quickly is Paddy Johnson's: "Troemel has produced an essay responding to the gallery system with very little experience within it and it shows. This garbage about the two tiered system is a ridiculous simplification of the motivations of artists and anyone who’s been out of art school for more than a minute knows it. "

Some writing about dump.fm:

Lalblog on dump altars, a script that auto-curates all symmetrically arranged dump posts (repeated images configured ABA, AABAA, AABBCBBAA, etc)

Erik Stinson writing on the Thought Catalog website: "The Internet Art Community and Dump.fm."